My Trouble With Superheroes

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This afternoon I was asked by a teacher what I was planning to do for my ECP (stands for Extended Creative Project, the equivalent of a dissertation, which is the UK version of a thesis). He said it was going to be big, something I hand in in March or April of next year, so the idea should be something big, too. Something I was passionate about.

Well…

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I write, and I write about superheroes. When I started writing novels, my first was a superhero story. So was my second. I’m now nearly finished my third. Last semester we studied gothic literature in Textual Intervention 1 and I just couldn’t get into it. So to make myself more passionate about the subject, I chose to make my final piece a superhero graphic novel adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. It was a risk, and I haven’t gotten it back yet, so we’ll see if it pays off.

This semester for Scriptwriting for Mainstream Television, I was grouped with two of my friends for our final project. We were brainstorming ideas for the TV show we would pitch at the end of the semester, and I swear, I swear all I said was “Usually when I don’t know what to write, I just make it a superhero story.” My group mates got really excited at that idea, and then we started coming up with a plot and characters. Now we’re in too deep and I’m not complaining at all because I personally love what we’ve done.

Also in this semester I have Fiction for Children. This covers ages 6 to 26, so it’s not really ‘for children’ but that’s okay. I usually write for 14+ just because, but as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I recently read How To Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell for this class. I loved it. Moreover, I wanted to take on the challenge of writing for a younger age group. My ten-year-old brother—while knowing a lot about what I write from when I talk about it with my sister—has never read my writing and so I decided I would write him his own superhero story: Mighty Marvin.

So when my teacher said my ECP should be the one thing I would write if I could only write one thing ever in my entire life, I knew right away what that thing was for me.

I refuse to do it.

I’ve typecast myself, in a way. Still, I have more non-superhero stories than otherwise, and it’s all spread out, too. One children’s standalone novel, one YA series, one TV show, and one comic book.

It should be a no-brainer, but I won’t—I can’t write my ECP on superheroes. Absolutely not. No way. Nope. Not happening.