Julian Ribushofski is trying something new. When I sat down with him this week to learn about his Senior Design Studio project, I didn’t know what to expect. I know him pretty well, having worked with him before in a few Innovation Lab projects, during which I learned that he knows his way around a hockey court, loves his sitcoms, and is quite the funny guy. I’m not sure why, but I’d never really thought of him as the literary type. I was proven wrong, however, when I learned that his project is a story of indeterminate length. Even though this is his first experience with creative writing, he hesitates to describe it as a short story, as he has bigger goals than that. From the way he described his vision, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it exceed thirty pages; after all, he wrote five in one sitting, and enjoys the act of writing. “I don’t know, I just keep writing,” he said while describing his technique–a technique that seems to work for him.
While this is his first attempt at creating a story of his own, he’s loved them for a long time. He discovered his first love, Harry Potter, because his parents had the DVDs when he was little, and he devoured every one of them. Then he made the transition to the books, and realized how much better they were, devouring all 870 pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in just over a week. All of his favorite movies and books are franchises, which is part of the reason why he’s tackling such an ambitious project.
Julian described to me his distaste for short stories, particularly those entirely contained in one scene. For him, the most important, humanizing part of a story is seeing how those characters grow and change through their experiences. “I like to see characters develop and have relationships instead of just being thrown into something where it’s, like, ‘Oh, these people are best friends.’ You gotta see it!” This prolonged character development is also the reason why he’s such a lover of sitcoms; the example he gave me was Jim and Pam from The Office and the four years that it took for their relationship to become established. Julian’s goal for this project is to capture this type of character development over an extended period.
The currently untitled story seems so far like an excellent opportunity for character development: at the end of summer, a group of teenagers decides to go camping, where one of them reveals a dark secret. While Julian initially didn’t want to spoil this secret, I got a journalist’s insider scoop: one of the friends is not human, and his race is dying. I look forward to seeing what he does with such a fascinating topic, one that diverges so heavily from his original idea. It really will be a slow burn; in the five pages he’s written so far, the camping trip has yet to begin. He believes his status as a teenager will help make his characters more realistic and “very relatable,” specifically to other teenagers, like myself. When I asked him how long he thought it would end up being, I found that he wasn’t sure, and would stop when he felt he’d told his story. He’s excited to see what he can do with the concept, and would definitely consider pursuing creative writing again in the future, perhaps professionally, or in college. For now, he has to finish this project, hopefully the first successful entry into a catalog of success.
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