By: Alex Zams
Finishing a 184-page novel is a long project for anyone, and Bright Bankole did it at the young age of 10. Ask him how, and his answer is practical. Nothing mysterious there. He was, and is, an avid reader. And when he reads, he notices how the books he read were put together, and he did not wait for a perfect plan before he started typing.
Bright was 10 and in sixth grade when he released his debut novel, Adventure in Magicland, the first book in a planned fantasy series called “Realms.” It is the story of a reluctant hero, a portal, and a war between light and shadow, written around themes of faith and courage. What makes it worth a closer look is how it was built. Bright plays soccer and American football, likes working with technology, and counts reading class among his favorite parts of the school day. His mother, Dola, says he began writing the book at 8, and that around age 10 he came to her and said he was typing a book and wanted it published.
His method starts with a habit most writers would recognize. Bright does not outline. He might already be drafting on paper, he says, when midway through the first chapter a whole new idea shows up.
“And then I rush to my computer and start typing,” he says. “And then more ideas just come as I’m writing.” When the ideas slow down, he goes back to reading, sometimes his own pages and sometimes other people’s books, and “ideas just come rushing back.”
Reading is also where he learned how a story is built.
“In every book I’ve read, there’s gonna be at least one problem for the main character,” he says.
Some of those books were about middle school, he explains, and others were about families that moved. A fantasy from Priscilla Shirer’s “Prince Warriors” series showed him another model. As Bright describes it, a group of kids travels to another world to defeat a villain who wants to take over the real one. That convinced him his own story needed a main villain and someone to help the hero.
The borrowing is easy to spot in the opening chapters. Chris, the book’s hero, loves soccer and has already moved once. His parents announce a month-long trip to California, and he wants to know what will happen to his team and to his best friend, Jake. Within a chapter, the trip turns out to be a permanent move, and Chris storms off to his room and locks the door. Bright says he worked in some of the “moving challenges from the books I read.”
Then the fantasy begins. Chris walks into the woods behind the mountain cabin where his family is staying, angry and unsure, and asks God to “show up.” A portal opens. He lands first in Hell, where demons chase him, and then in Magicland, where a fairy named Alastor tells him he has been chosen as the Lightbringer. Chris objects that he is just a kid who plays soccer. “God does not choose the perfect,” Alastor answers. “He chooses the willing.” With Alastor and an elf named Valtor beside him, Chris travels through a series of realms, among them the Realm of Courage, on his way to face the Shadow King. The book has the main villain and the helpers Bright describes, and when the first demons arrive, Alastor quotes Ephesians 6, the passage Shirer’s series is built on.
The scale of the world was not part of the first plan. Bright meant to send Chris through five realms in a single book. Then he decided, “Why not just make a series?” and gave each realm a book of its own.
His mother’s role, by her account, was to support the project while he made the creative decisions. Dola says she has published books on parenting, and that Bright told her that her writing was part of what motivated him.
“Bright edited the whole thing by himself,” she says.
She found a publisher by searching online and helped with production. When it came to the illustrations, she recalls, Bright had his own idea of what the pictures should be, and the two talked it through until they agreed.
Faith is central to the book, and Bright says where that comes from. In the author’s note, he describes a dream from around age 8, in which a shining cross seemed to call him. He stepped through it and saw gold streets and a gate. The dream, he writes, made him want to write a story about faith and courage. Those themes also appear in small details. Chris keeps a Psalm 23 poster that his grandmother taped to his wall years ago, not because he is especially religious, the narration says, but because it reminds him of her.
Asked what he would tell other young people who have story ideas but have not started writing them, Bright talked about time rather than talent.
“If you know you can complete something in one day, don’t procrastinate to wait till the other day to finish the thing,” he says. School fills people’s days, he explains, and a book that keeps getting postponed ends up forgotten.
The moving problem from the first chapter does not stay behind in the real world. In the Realm of Courage, Chris must cross a bridge of light and mist alone. Shadows in the mist take the shape of his parents arguing, Jake walking away, and his little sister, Ava, crying. “I am scared,” he says. “But I’m still walking.”
The book ends with Chris back in his bedroom, twenty minutes after he left, the house quiet and the world outside unchanged. After a war that spans several realms, the story returns to the small, ordinary place where it began.
It is a fitting place for a first book to end. It suggests a writer who knows where his stories come from: the ordinary problems of a boy’s life, taken seriously and given room to grow. Bright is still near the start of that work. He has one finished novel and a series to continue. If he keeps reading widely, following new ideas as they arrive and finishing what he starts, readers may well have a good deal more from him to look forward to.
