Turned out, Gamble had been pecking away at \u201cDragons Suck\u201d since his senior year in high school and using what he learned over four years at Furman to refine and edit his text. But Gamble wasn\u2019t ready to share the news of his project until he was absolutely sure it would come to fruition.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/news.furman.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/20190514_BenGamble_DragonsSuck-7.jpg\")
“Dragons Suck” is the first novel written by Ben Gamble ’19.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cI kept it under wraps just because it\u2019s something I have worked for for a very long time, and I was hesitant (to talk about it) just in case something fell through,\u201d Gamble said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I had the contract in my hand that I was like, \u2018Hey, this is really going to happen.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDragons Suck,\u201d published by Permuted Press, is a tongue-in-cheek story that imagines what would happen if a modern teenager were thrust into the hero role of a fantasy adventure. Harkness, the protagonist, is \u201ca medieval peasant with a millennial\u2019s mindset\u201d whose \u201ccalculated laziness is interrupted when the gods send an ancient and terrible scourge-by-dragonfire upon his village.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harkness is cynical, sarcastic and not at all interested in saving the day, which to Gamble is a much more realistic depiction of himself and his friends at that age.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to poke a little fun at the traditional young adult,\u201d Gamble said. \u201cI love Harry Potter and all those kinds of stories \u2026 but I remember in high school thinking, ‘Man, none of my friends would do that. I wouldn\u2019t do that.’ I thought, \u2018What would it look like if you took a self-entitled, lazy, cowardly millennial and just dropped him in the middle of a very by-the-books fantasy story?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Gamble says he\u2019s always wanted to be a writer, but he double-majored in history and Spanish at Furman\u00a0\u2014 history because the courses \u201cresonated\u201d the most with him, and Spanish because a quest to hold his nose and become more proficient in the language resulted in at some point realizing, \u201cDang it, I\u2019m actually enjoying this.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe writer part of me was thinking one thing I struggle with is world-building and fleshing out this detailed fictional world,\u201d he said. \u201cI think history helped me with that because we were studying cultures and how our own history works, which I think makes you better at establishing a fictional one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gamble did take two classes taught by Morris, however, and ran Paladin Ink<\/a>, Furman\u2019s creative writing club. He was also on the editorial board of \u201cThe Echo<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFurman equipped me well to be able to write it and to be able to add a lot more of my experiences and thoughts to it,\u201d he said. \u201cDr. Morris is a great teacher. She\u2019s no-nonsense. If something is bad, she\u2019ll just straight-up tell you.\u201d<\/p>\n