The Hero's Fire

A personal reflection on the creative spark

For a large part of my life, I was pretty good at imagining. I had large worlds in my head from a very young age, just waiting to be created, to be real. These worlds were heavily influenced by video games, fantasy books, and Greek and Roman mythos. The sidewalks of my neighborhood were enormous trade ways, the rocks were mountains, the trees were forests. I slew the monsters inhabiting my world with a convoy of friends, bristling with weapons and clad in iron armor. We were heroes. I was a hero. 

The canal banks running through our backyards served as our bases. We piled up sticks, crudely hammered nails into the trees to create shelves, made seats out of detritus we found laying around. We had to conceal ourselves from the evil taking over the rest of the world. We would live on forever in our fortresses, swords at our hips ready to draw blood at any moment. The passersby stared through the gaps in the sticks to watch us battle, only taking a moment to appreciate the work we were doing for them. The world was safe, thanks to us.

Time wore on. I started through middle and high school, as any growing boy is supposed to do. I didn't want to. The administration wouldn't allow me to be a hero anymore. The teachers handed out assignments, and I was constrained to do what they told me. I couldn't go any farther than that. "Creative Writing" was just being forced to write short stories about whatever the teacher had decided for you. A waiter reminiscing on past love, written in the third person. My film class, one that I was almost sure that I could be incredibly imaginative in, was the same. End your story about drinking and driving on a cliffhanger.

Don't step out of their instructions. Don't bend the rules.

My friends moved away, and the ones that stayed grew apart. Our armies dissipated, going back to menial tasks at their forges and stables. I walked through the decrepit remains of our castles once in a while, pushing my way past the overgrown branches covering the doorways. The shelves were sagging, with the various treasures that had once lived on their surfaces strewn about the ground, broken and dirty. The sticks had lost all semblance of a fort, fallen from their previous glory after years of disuse. 

I had to stop admitting that I liked the things that I did. The fables in my memory began to fade away. I started losing a part of who I felt I was. The Legend of Zelda? The series that had stirred the creative spirit in me, almost nothing more than a game now. The legends and myths that had once filled my mind constantly? Just stories from a time when no one knew better. They had done it. They had made the hero fall. Instead of the chosen one, instead of being the one to save the world, I was replaced with a tall, lanky teenager with nothing better to do than to write what the teachers assigned him to. 

I was stuck in a mindless loop of being fed information and vomiting it out onto a page. I stopped being the person I wanted to be, and started to become the student that the teachers wanted. I stopped trying to make my writing fun, and started writing to show the teachers that I understood what they were telling me. I didn't do things with parts of myself thrown in. I only did them because I was instructed to, and that was it. 

I sank continually into this state. I still loved the games, but I had to pretend that I didn't care for them as much. I couldn't get a girlfriend if I admitted to staying in the basement all weekend, right? I couldn't be accepted by the rest of the high school populous if I told them that I wanted nothing more than to ride over green hills on a horse, sword at the ready as I rode to my destiny. I didn't have a destiny anymore.

I didn't have the creative output to turn the worlds in my head "real". I couldn't draw too well, or make awe inspiring films. I didn't have the means to learn how to do either well enough to satisfy me. I had tried writing a story before, but when I read it again, I couldn't believe that my mind was the one who had spawned it. I had created this hideous monster, biting at me, hurting with every single word I read. I threw it away. Nothing was good enough. The hero had been toppled some time ago, but now he was dying. Fading away.

I fell, lower and lower. The spirit in me dwindled, burning only as a match instead of the roaring inferno it had once been. Was this what growing up was like? Was I becoming mature? Was this all there was? I couldn't talk to anyone about this. I had to make sure that no one knew that I wanted to be something else. I had to fit in to the norm, and the norm didn't allow for creating for the sake of creating.

The final blow was dealt when I was put into a state film contest for my video production class. Our film didn't get any awards, not even an honorable mention, the absolute lowest possible recognition. I had always thought that nothing I did was any good, but it turned out that everyone felt the same way. I couldn't pretend that I had a direction anymore. I wanted to be the one, the hero who was fated to fix the world, rid it of evil. I wanted to be Link. He always had somewhere to go. He always knew what his destiny was, and the world depended on him for safety. What was my destiny?

I pondered that question for a long time after graduation. What was I going to do? I worked for a year, without going to school. I was stagnant. I didn't do anything. My dreams had shattered. I finally understood the difference between fantasy and reality. It was a lesson that hurt to learn, it hurt every moment that I thought of it. The rocks were rocks. The sidewalks were sidewalks. I could get arrested. Dragons didn't exist. My heroes weren't real. The people I had looked up to for so long were nothing more than electric pulses in my brain. 

I started following content creators and their companies very closely. Shigeru Miyamoto, Eiji Aonuma, Satoru Iwata. These adults maintained the spirit of children in an adult world. How? What did they do differently than me? Zac Gorman, Koei, Nintendo, Hayao Miyazaki. These were companies and people who managed to create things that mattered to others in the adult realm. Their imaginations stayed against all the opposition. How?

I struggled understanding for a long time. They created stuff that mattered. Some of them had created things that shaped not only my life, but several millions of lives around me. I was jealous of them. What had they done? What allowed them to become what they were? 

One day, I found a cache of quotes from Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario and Legend of Zelda series.

"An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals, that's all."

"What if everything that you see, is more than what you see? The person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it or accept that there is more to the world than you think. Perhaps it is really a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things."

"I think that inside every adult is the heart of a child. We just gradually convince ourselves that we have to act more like adults."

I was shocked. There wasn't anything special about him. He was one of the legends, but there was nothing inside of him that was different than me. He had found a medium that he could play around in, create like a child, but in an adult way. He understood how I felt, but instead of just worrying about how to do it in an acceptable manner, he went with his favorite thing. He found his passion.

It all sort of clicked at the same time. There was absolutely no reason for me to hide who I wanted to be anymore. I loved fantasy, I loved gaming, and that was okay. I loved the people who made my world. I was becoming an adult, sure, but I never had to give up the hero. I looked up to these actual people, these real, living, sentient beings who had created worlds just for me. I could be one of these people. My direction changed entirely. I stopped caring about what I could do to regain my imagination. It had stayed with me the whole time, waiting for me to utilize it once again. I stopped worrying about making worlds for myself, and I started thinking about making worlds for others.

Those beings that I had been so grateful for for never losing their sense of wonder, I could be that. I could be that for someone else. I could create. I could make someone's world, I could make someone's life, just like those people had made mine. I had to pass on the fire of the hero to a new generation. I could let someone else live in my world, only to have them continue to create their own. 

Admittedly, I'm only in the beginning steps of passing on this fire. In the coming years, I'm going to try to become what I need to, to learn the skills that will allow me to create these worlds. If one creation doesn't work, if one outlet fails, I have to find something else. I can't let this slip by. It's going to be a hard couple of years. But the fire of the hero, the fire of myself, hasn't burned this brightly in years.