Dream Weaver
Inspired by otherwordly tales, one young Member is getting an early start on a career in writing.
Lincoln Zhang knows all about fantastic beasts and where to find them. It was, after all, monsters and anomalies that inspired the young Member to begin writing his own stories.
Zhang was just 8 when he first began tapping out tales on his iPad keyboard. Initially, he wrote short stories about the efforts of the fictional SCP Foundation, the organization at the center of an online collaborative writing project that started in 2007, five years before he was born. SCP’s mission is to prevent creatures and objects from falling into the wrong hands. He also penned accounts of D-Day in which he recounted the World War II invasion of Normandy from the perspective of different soldiers.
Now 12, Zhang is busy at work on a longer story about something we all hope will remain fiction: a zombie apocalypse.
“At school, we have this thing called a biweekly, where we have to write a page of a story every second week,” he explains. “One of my classmates was writing about a virus apocalypse, and someone else was doing an insect apocalypse. I really liked the idea of an apocalypse, so I chose zombies.”
With years of writing now under his belt, Zhang has built his own processes for crafting stories. But he says he is still learning, and the challenges he cites will be familiar to any writer. “It’s definitely coming up with the characters, and thinking of an entire story plot is probably the most difficult part for me.”
He overcomes these hurdles by drawing inspiration from his friends.
“The characters are all my friends,” he reveals. “I decided to use my friends because they’re all unique. I usually switch up their names, but sometimes they ask me to use their actual names. They want to be included in the story.”
The zombies in his apocalypse? Those are his friends, too.
Feedback from teachers has also been instrumental in Zhang’s growth as a writer. They’ve encouraged him to add more descriptive details and to maintain a consistent perspective in his narratives. “I often forget to describe what new characters look like or provide enough detail about settings,” he admits. “I’ve been rereading and fixing my writing a lot.”
Zhang says he loves writing because it is a chance to create another world, and he enjoys sharing his ideas. “When I share a story with someone and they tell me how they like this and that part, it makes me feel better on the inside.”
Zhang puts messages in every story that he hopes readers will find helpful. “It could be a really important lesson like don’t do this, trust your friends or face your fears, don’t hide from them,” he says. “And sometimes it’s just something goofy that I find funny, but which still teaches something.”
For other young writers, Zhang offers this advice: “Don’t overthink it. Just sit down and write. Don’t check for grammar or spelling mistakes. Once you have everything down, then you can organize and fix it.”
Kids’ Write-a-Script Workshop
July 13: 2–3pm; July 20: 2–3:30pm
Words: C Bryan Jones
Image of Lincoln Zhang: Kayo Yamawaki
