Something Called Echo
Mindless rantings of an author.
It started off simply enough.
The inspiration for it? As with the vast majority of stories on this website, it was a song. A song our school’s band played for the graduating seniors. Our band teacher read us a short paragraph describing the reason behind its creation and the topic was dropped.
The title, also simple. the echo never fades, no caps or anything. A line from a poem written by a boy who died long before his time. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Those four words held meaning for me because they could suggest so much. Naturally, though, the first thing that came to mind was music.
The second was a band. At the time, MCR was my obsession. I hadn’t known them for very long, though I had already written several stories about them. I had only been on Mibba for just over three months, and I could tell the group was insanely popular. Obviously, people were dependent on the band, and though I could understand their reasoning, I was skeptical. The whole idea of relying on a group of people you didn’t even know to save your life sounded…ridiculous, to be honest.
So I asked myself what would happen if someone died.
Not just anyone, though.
The hero. The savior. The one they needed the most.
Gerard.
I always thought his name sounded funny. The kind of word my Spanish teacher would pronounce wrong because there are two ‘r’s in it, the kind of outdated name that someone would only have if their parents were those weird people who don’t care if their kids suffer for the sake of creativity. A special word for a special person.
It fits him well.
From the second I started writing, I knew what the last line would be. Building up to it was easy enough. I knew I had little experience with writing murder scenes, so I kept it quick and simple with just enough detail to make things interesting. The hardest thing was having it all make sense, and as I read through it again months later, I realized I had gotten nowhere near accomplishing that. So many sentences were out of place that sometimes I wondered how I had ever gotten away with posting it. I think the descriptions saved me, honestly. I created this whole theater setting in my mind and decided to toss the characters inside under strange circumstances.
Once I put it up, I didn’t expect much. My previous work had been ignored by the vast majority of the site, and many times I wondered if it was even worth writing because I was just another inexperienced writer among the greats. I’d heard of Druscilla, Fish Camp, The Way, and others like them, but I never thought I’d reach that kind of status.
My first review was…nice. Short and sweet, but just nice. I replied to it on the thread (yes, I used to do that, and so did all of you) and continued waiting. The second was more typical of comments on this site, and the third was from a girl who’s now one of my favorite coauthors.
The fourth was from a girl named Isa.
To this day, that’s probably the best comment anyone’s ever given me. I didn’t realize the magnitude of it until I learned more about her and read some of her work. Eventually, my brain understood that I made one of the greatest authors on Mibba cry.
It didn’t end there. She kept coming back and leaving more comments, which eventually inspired me to write more chapters. I still wonder if I should’ve done that, because it really worked well as a standalone, but at the same time I didn’t want it to feel so…unfinished. Plus, I didn’t like playing favorites. Everyone had to have a turn to talk.
While this wasn’t the first time I had killed someone in MCR, it was the real start of my sad/deathfic writings. The next story I wrote let three of them die, and though I took a break from this genre for a while, eventually I went back to MCRtragedy (as Isa so kindly put it).
It’s not perfect. The songs don’t match up right with the text. The guys act out-of-character for what I would expect, and I got a lot of facts wrong. But one thing I do know is that this story started it all. It showed me what I was good at and what I needed to work on, and it helped me get some of the attention I felt I missed out on with my CSI fics.
Sometimes it’s the smallest things that surprise you the most.
Echo.
The inspiration for it? As with the vast majority of stories on this website, it was a song. A song our school’s band played for the graduating seniors. Our band teacher read us a short paragraph describing the reason behind its creation and the topic was dropped.
The title, also simple. the echo never fades, no caps or anything. A line from a poem written by a boy who died long before his time. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Those four words held meaning for me because they could suggest so much. Naturally, though, the first thing that came to mind was music.
The second was a band. At the time, MCR was my obsession. I hadn’t known them for very long, though I had already written several stories about them. I had only been on Mibba for just over three months, and I could tell the group was insanely popular. Obviously, people were dependent on the band, and though I could understand their reasoning, I was skeptical. The whole idea of relying on a group of people you didn’t even know to save your life sounded…ridiculous, to be honest.
So I asked myself what would happen if someone died.
Not just anyone, though.
The hero. The savior. The one they needed the most.
Gerard.
I always thought his name sounded funny. The kind of word my Spanish teacher would pronounce wrong because there are two ‘r’s in it, the kind of outdated name that someone would only have if their parents were those weird people who don’t care if their kids suffer for the sake of creativity. A special word for a special person.
It fits him well.
From the second I started writing, I knew what the last line would be. Building up to it was easy enough. I knew I had little experience with writing murder scenes, so I kept it quick and simple with just enough detail to make things interesting. The hardest thing was having it all make sense, and as I read through it again months later, I realized I had gotten nowhere near accomplishing that. So many sentences were out of place that sometimes I wondered how I had ever gotten away with posting it. I think the descriptions saved me, honestly. I created this whole theater setting in my mind and decided to toss the characters inside under strange circumstances.
Once I put it up, I didn’t expect much. My previous work had been ignored by the vast majority of the site, and many times I wondered if it was even worth writing because I was just another inexperienced writer among the greats. I’d heard of Druscilla, Fish Camp, The Way, and others like them, but I never thought I’d reach that kind of status.
My first review was…nice. Short and sweet, but just nice. I replied to it on the thread (yes, I used to do that, and so did all of you) and continued waiting. The second was more typical of comments on this site, and the third was from a girl who’s now one of my favorite coauthors.
The fourth was from a girl named Isa.
To this day, that’s probably the best comment anyone’s ever given me. I didn’t realize the magnitude of it until I learned more about her and read some of her work. Eventually, my brain understood that I made one of the greatest authors on Mibba cry.
It didn’t end there. She kept coming back and leaving more comments, which eventually inspired me to write more chapters. I still wonder if I should’ve done that, because it really worked well as a standalone, but at the same time I didn’t want it to feel so…unfinished. Plus, I didn’t like playing favorites. Everyone had to have a turn to talk.
While this wasn’t the first time I had killed someone in MCR, it was the real start of my sad/deathfic writings. The next story I wrote let three of them die, and though I took a break from this genre for a while, eventually I went back to MCRtragedy (as Isa so kindly put it).
It’s not perfect. The songs don’t match up right with the text. The guys act out-of-character for what I would expect, and I got a lot of facts wrong. But one thing I do know is that this story started it all. It showed me what I was good at and what I needed to work on, and it helped me get some of the attention I felt I missed out on with my CSI fics.
Sometimes it’s the smallest things that surprise you the most.
Echo.