Lower Lake >> High School juniors have a lot of pressing issues on their minds: grades, college and SATs, just to name a few. But for Lower Lake High School student Rikki Wills-Markgraf, nothing can distract her from writing. The 17-year-old is in the middle of writing her sixth book. She’s authored 100 page stories, a children’s book and a book of poetry.
Though all of her books fall into the fiction category, she’s been unable to stick to one specific genre. “They all have a touch of romance in them, but I do have horror and gore,” Wills-Markgraf said. “[Some] don’t really have a genre because it’s a mix of everything.”
Wills-Markgraf simply goes where her mind takes her. The first book, which she wrote at the age of 13, is about a girl who moves from Alaska to California. At her California school, she makes one friend, but that friend plans on transferring to a school in Japan. “The story was about her reuniting with her cousin in Alaska and them traveling to Japan to go to college,” Wills-Markgraf explained.
The story she’s working on now, about YouTubers during World War III, is a far cry from her first book. The idea came to Wills-Markgraf when a friend asked her for some music videos. She thought a story about YouTubers could be interesting, but they couldn’t be ordinary people making videos in their bedrooms. That would be boring, she reasoned. So instead, her characters became World War III fugitives. “They escape and move to somewhere across the world and change their identities and start a YouTube channel,” she said.
Equipped with a highly active imagination, Wills-Markgraf began writing to combat the mundane. “I grew up playing imagination games and LARPing [Live Action Role Play],” she said, explaining that she started penning her own stories when she had to face the reality that she would never actually fly. “I was able to write in the character and the character was able to fly … I’ve been able to explore how far I can push the boundaries.”
It’s no surprise that Wills-Markgraf’s stories mirror her own experiences. “Usually what I feel like writing is like what’s going on in my life at the time,” she said. “If I’m having a hard time then I’ll write dark stories and if I’m having a really great time in my life I’ll have all these cutesy gross moments.”
When asked about her inspirations, one name flew off her tongue: Darren Shan. Shan is the author of the horror trilogy “Vampire Blood,” otherwise known as the Cirque Du Freak trilogy. “He says it’s nonfiction but you can tell it’s fiction,” Wills-Markgraf said. “He writes vampire books and stuff like that. It’s first person. It’s not the average vampire book with romance. It’s all the deep dark stuff that you usually don’t hear about.”
The amount of time it takes Wills-Markgraf to complete one book varies. “It really depends on the story and how much I get into it,” she said. “I had one book that I finished in eight days and then I had another that I finished in three and I had another that took me a year and a half and I’m almost done with another one and I’ve been working on it a month and a half right now.”
How does Wills-Markgraf spend so much time writing on top of her school responsibilities? She said she gets to write during school hours, thanks to some very accommodating instructors. “Most of my teachers are pretty good at letting me write during the class because I keep up on most of my schoolwork,” she said.
So Wills-Markgraf must be a pretty good student if teachers are letting her work on stories during class. “I try to be,” she said, laughing a little.
Wills-Markgraf can’t write all the time though and that’s when she listens to the best piece of advice she’s received: “Don’t force yourself to write if you’re not in the mood.” But even taking this into consideration, she still puts her pen to paper two or three times daily.
When it comes to a writing process, Wills-Markgraf’s is pretty simple. “I usually just sit down and write and go with the flow,” she said. “If I get stuck in a corner I’m kinda screwed.”
Without any kind of a formal editor, Wills-Markgraf turns to her peers for help if she ever needs feedback. “I do have my friends that read my stories online and write comments on them,” she said. “If I have a friend that’s completely caught up … they’ll help me out.”
Wills-Markgraf often runs into a wall when she has to tackle fast-paced sequences. “I have problems with action scenes so when I get to that part writing slows down significantly,” she said. “Probably because it’s the only thing I haven’t really practiced yet. That’s why I’m trying to practice it by forcing myself to write action stories but I keep failing.”
But if it’s imagery she’s working at, Wills-Markgraf can really flex her muscles. “I’m good at descriptions,” she said. “I can fly through it if I’ve got the idea in my head.”
Due to her strengths and weaknesses as a writer, one day will be more challenging than the next. “Just it really depends on the genre,” she explained. “It really depends on the idea and the day and how you feel at the time.”
Aside from the action, the biggest difficulty Wills-Markgraf faces is one of the teenage variety: interruptions from her parents. “It’s like, I’ll sit there, I’ll write and my parent’s ask me to come out and do the dishes and I’m like, ‘But the story!’”
Though she doesn’t have any publishing plans yet, Wills-Markgraf is holding tightly onto her books. “Right now it’s for fun, but in the future I do want to get some of them published,” she said. “But my all-time dream is to get a book published and then turned into a movie.”
With five finished books to her name, Wills-Markgraf has some advice for any aspiring authors. “It’s probably overplayed but don’t give up,” she said. “I’ve scrapped 70, 80 different ideas because I couldn’t get past the first 10 pages. And the ideas are really good and I give them to other people and they can just kind of go with it … You just don’t give up.”
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
