A Little About Yes it Does
Yes it Does is a character concept I created when I was in middle school. It was one of those epiphany moments where you think "hey that's a really interesting/silly/dumb idea," and I thought I might have been the first person to create a lead character who could only say the same words over and over again. In my case, the character was saying the words in his name and his name was decidedly unconventional. Of course, similar characters have appeared in other realms of fiction. AVclub.com put this list together of characters in TV and movies who also only say the same things over and over. All of them are pretty much done for comedic effect.
The Marvel comics character Groot, for instance, says only the line "I am Groot" (with one notable exception) in Guardians of the Galaxy, but he is apparently speaking his own Flora Colossi language (thanks wikipedia...). Likewise with the Groot character, while we cannot understand exactly what Yes it Does is saying, there are other characters in the stories who can understand him and they reply accordingly.
I began writing my Yes it Does stories when I was in 8th grade and continued straight through to my senior year, graduating in the summer of 2001. During that time, I would frequently read before a small group of people during our ridiculously brief lunch period and I would sometimes incorporate my friends as characters in them. There was enough interest in hearing these stories from my friends during those lunch periods that I felt properly motivated to keep writing them over the course of about five years. By the end of my high school experience, I had written 237 Yes it Does stories. All of them written on the backs of class handouts and old homework papers.
When I entered college, I put Yes it Does aside to focus more on schoolwork. Aside from a creative writing class, I did very little writing during this time. In my down time, I focused on other interests, especially in the areas of American history and famous centenarians; interests which I shared with my cousin. In fact, you can see his continuing work that he produces on his blog where he researches American political-types with the common theme that they all have bizarre names.
Once I was off living on my own and started working a regular nine-to-five job, I found myself pining for a creative outlet. It wasn't long before Yes it Does reentered my brain, as I had had such fun exerting my own brand of delicious silliness and I decided to work on them again. I decided to post all 237 of the old stories onto a LiveJournal feed and then pick up where I left off. For two years, from January 2006 to December 2007, I wrote another 28 stories and posted them on LiveJournal. While this is a rather small number compared to the quantity I produced during even a single year in high school, the stories were far longer than they had been and I tried being more thoughtful for those writings than I felt I may have been for the ones written in high school. By the end of 2007, I was feeling burned out and I chose to step away from the stories even though I had already begun writing a "series-within-a-series," where several of the Yes it Does characters were undertaking a quest.
Eventually, I will post 23 of those 28 stories on this website as well, and depending on how I feel once all of those stories have been posted here, I may post the last five too with the assumption that I would pick up where I had left off. Even if I don't, you will ultimately find 26o Yes it Does stories to relish and revisit over and over again. You will share them with your children and read them to your classmates. You will also visit supermarkets from time to time and read them over the intercom so that strangers can be confused.
During my time away from Yes it Does, I also took on other ventures. I wrote a book (only $1.99!) which, among other stories, includes Yes it Does-themed blog entries that I think you will find amusing. I've also been pondering a Yes it Does book trilogy for the past few years. It hasn't gotten very far, but I may one day bring it to fruition. Also, given the age of some of those early handwritten Yes it Does stories (the earliest ones written in 1997 I believe), I underwent a minor preservation project so that those tattered-looking pages might survive longer. I placed them into plastic sleeves and stored them in a very large binder.
This is what it looks like. Just thought you should know.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that many of the stories written during my high school years were sloppy, random, and did not follow much (if any) of a plot. When I posted them on LiveJournal, I left them as is; meaning that every bit of randomness and immaturity was left alone for the reader to endure. That was done in part so that I could get them out of the way to post new stories. For the most part, however, I considered those stories finished and I didn't want to touch them, except for some punctuational and spelling issues. Since then I have had a change of heart. I want this website to be a showcase for my creative writing and to serve as something of a resume for whomever might be interested in seeing what sort of work I can produce. If I am relying on juvenile, high school writings for that then I think that is a problem. I've taken it upon myself to revisit and revise my old stories, going only so far as to spruce up the places that I feel need it and leave the rest alone. It is still important to the series as a whole that there is some progression in my writing ability from beginning to end since that sometimes plays a part in ideas that I write about in later stories. Having said that, I've already rewritten a few stories in their entirety and in doing so I strongly believe that they have been improved.
It has also been brought to my attention that focusing too much on old work will keep me from devoting time to new material. That is fine for now since it will probably take the better part of two years before I get all 260 stories posted here since I've only been posting one every few days. That allows me to fill in the rest of my time working on new ideas and writing essays for this blog.
Thanks for reading! I hope you keep coming back to read more. I will be posting Yes it Does stories on a regular basis (right here! In this location!), and since there aren't many up yet you will have no problem starting at the beginning.
- Chris