This one has some backstory to it. And… some confessions.
This is a short story I wrote for one of my junior year creative writing classes at college – I believe this was a class that focused on dialogue. For this particular assignment, we were each told to share a song that we liked. From that pool, our professor marked down three songs for each of us. We had to write something using all three of those songs – but not in a literal way, such as by having a character listening to them.
Shamefully, I procrastinated on this project. I think, looking back, I forgot that it was due at midnight. And I ended up writing the entire thing in less than 20 minutes. I think I spent more time frantically Googling “fantasy girl names” than writing the story itself.
Luckily, before I put pen to paper – or, rather, cursor to Google Docs – I’d listened to all of the songs thoroughly. I developed a vague idea of what I wanted to write.
The first song was Viva La Vida by Coldplay. This was the only song of the bunch I’d heard before – it’s one of my all-time favorites. I can’t remember the second one I was given – it was a party rap song that wasn’t quite to my taste. But it, paired with Viva La Vida, let me lay out a plan for my story. I decided to write about the aftermath of a party, with the teenage host cleaning up the mess left behind. One of her former friends would show up, comment on how she used to be different, and then leave. It was a simple, underdeveloped concept, but I thought it’d use the rap music and the theme of Viva La Vida – having it all and then losing it.
Then I listened to the third song – I See Fire by Zyrah Rose.
And all my plans changed.
(Keep in mind, it was about 11:30 pm at this point.)
This is a song that was originally written and performed by Ed Sheeran for the second Hobbit movie in 2013. I was assigned a cover of it. At this point in time, I hadn’t seen any of the Hobbit films yet. But I absolutely adored Zyrah Rose’s voice, her inflection, the beautiful music and thundering fantasy feel…
And I knew that I had to write a fantasy story.
This was the point where my Googling gave me the names Winter and Andromeda. Perfect, I could use those. And so I proceeded to throw together a three-and-a-half-page-long story about a doomed royal romance.
I used the atmosphere of I See Fire to create an oversimplified fantasy world with two opposing kingdoms. The first line, “I hope that you remember me,” is from that song. I included wild party scenes to utilize the rap music. And the theme of Viva La Vida seeped into the story. It’s about two girls who once had the world facing the possibility of losing everything. At one point, I used the line “Who would want to be a king?”, which is nearly from the song itself. (The actual line is “Who would ever want to be king.”)
I received an A on this assignment. It wasn’t overly complicated from the start, but I’m still a bit proud that I was able to shove out a cohesive, non-typoed story so quickly. I definitely could’ve done better if I’d spent more time on this, but I’m fond of what I created.
Loosely titled “I See Fire,” here’s my writing!
