My Life as a (So-Called) Writer
Part 1
I wrote my first short story when I was 7 years old.
Do you remember Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? The books with the bleak, surreal, black and white drawings that were more far more nightmarish than the stories themselves? Well, what I did, essentially, was take a Scary Story called “The Barking Ghost” and re-write it in a notebook with sloppy second-grade handwriting and sloppy second-grade grammar. I was at that blissful age where I had never heard of copyright laws and knew nothing of “writing for an audience” or even the basic concept of generating your own story ideas. The end result was pretty awful, but at the time I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever done.
I had created a piece of literature.
Granted, my mother (and possibly my grandmother) were the only people who read this creation of my genius, and their reactions were probably less than ecstatic. I didn’t see my dad on the day I wrote it (and I had probably forgotten about it by the day after), and my big sister Cindy was probably busy poking me or hoarding all the good toys or otherwise antagonizing me, as was her wont at the time. So my work had an extremely narrow readership.
Later that same year my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Bartley, announced that we would be writing stories in class. Judging by my memory, this involved not only writing our own stories but coloring our own book covers and binding then with two pieces of yarn.
I don't remember how much time we devoted to the project, but the end result for me was a 9 or so -paged story capped at both ends with a teddy bear-shaped piece of laminated paper. I seem to remember that Mrs. Bartley only wanted the stories to be about 5 pages, but I of course couldn't tell my story - about a little girl who gets a wonderful teddy bear and then, in a climactic plot twist, loses it - in only 5 pages, especially when you consider how big my handwriting was. This tendency to write way more than I was expected to would follow me for a long, long time.
I again felt that I had created a masterpiece, and although I'm sure I still have that little book somewhere, I do not recall what kind of reception it got from my small reader base.
A little over a year later my readership expanded considerably. I don’t recall having any great penchant for writing in the intervening time, but I recall the Young Authors competition as my first foray into legitimate writing. I still had no concept of originality, taking my character names from Lisa Frank and various cartoons I was enamored with and focusing on a simple plotline that any child could identify with. This was also in the heyday of my obsession with drawing, however, and I got to illustrate the book myself and, with the help of my teachers, turn it into an actual bound work of art. I received a blue ribbon for Best Story, a really pretty multi-colored one for Best Illustrations, a plaque (which I still have), and a trip to Lorain County Community College (where I would later attend school but which at the time felt like another planet) to see a speaker (or speakers). I can’t remember who the speaker(s?) was (were?). All I remember is that he (one of them?) was a man who told a story about a dog that is running a race and gets chopped in half (don’t ask me why), and his owner sews him together with two legs under him and two legs sticking out of his back. The dog wins the race by using his legs in twos, so that when one pair got tired the other pair could take over. The speaker used the first two fingers on each hand to illustrate this.
What a bizarre memory. Anyway, my point is that I got recognition for writing from someone other than my mom. And that was pretty neat.
I have an assortment of random memories from this period of drawing a LOT. I filled page after page of a notebook or two or three with pictures. Tons of pictures. I drew all the time, and so did Cindy. Mostly I drew animals, and most of those animals were doing people things, like grocery shopping or trying on clothes or going to school. I didn’t write a lot, but one could argue that these pictures were stories in themselves; often there were speech bubbles to let you know exactly what my animals were thinking or saying. Perhaps there was something there that suggested a longing to create new creatures that only exist on paper, complete with personalities and lives and friends and emotions and all that. But this idea is only just coming to me as I write this. Perhaps I was just a kid that liked to draw.
This love of drawing led me definitively into what could be my most important, and possibly most embarrassing, writing effort to date. Like a lot of people my age, I became obsessed with The Lion King as soon as I saw it in theaters back in ‘94. By 4th grade I could recite the entire movie by heart and had almost destroyed the soundtrack cassette by overplaying it. I love the characters, the artwork, the music, and the story. A great deal of my in-class artwork became focused on acacia trees and African savannahs, and my personal drawing time was spent on recreating the characters from the movie. I believe at the end of this era my Lion King folder boasted roughly 60 drawings and included every character in the movie. I copied them from the books and coloring pages I had, and prided myself on being able to tell people that none of them were traced (it was a constant irritation during this period when people, mostly grownups, would use the dismissive term “trace” to describe my pictures, and I was constantly correcting them).
In 6th grade I had the brilliant (I thought) idea to take my favorite movie and recreate it in written form, turning the animals into people. For character inspiration I turned to my favorite band (Hanson), my classmates (Zach Gress and Samantha Martin), and family (Dad and brother-in-law), and although the work was horribly misguided and senseless, I loved every minute of the process. I worked on it for months, finished it before the end of that year and started on the sequel, which was never finished, now that I think about it. I had realized how silly the endeavor was, but I kept the manuscript for posterity. I still have it.
The odd thing is that no one really criticized my cheesy adaptation. My classmates thought it was cool, my teachers didn’t express an opinion, and my parents kept mostly quiet, probably because they didn’t want to tell me that if I wanted to write a story people would read, I had to come up with something original. The only family member that tried to gently talk some reality into me was my aunt Joanne. She said something about “originality” that, although I wasn’t sure what she meant at the time, I haven’t forgotten since.
(I had a typo in the previous paragraph that Microsoft Word didn’t catch – apparently “ingot” is a legitimate word. I means, a “slab, lump, brick, or bar.” Interesting.)
If I consider my “Barking Ghost” effort to be my first short story, I think of “Capsized” as my first official short story. I wrote it for Mrs. Thomas’s class in 7th grade, during “Great Lakes Week”, which I vaguely remember as a week wherein all the lessons in our classes, even Math, were tied together by a relevance to the Great Lakes. In Mrs. Thomas’s class we were divided into groups and each group was assigned a lake, and we were given free creative rein to do whatever we wanted with the topic – game show, factual report, anecdote, poem, or what have you. I ended up writing a story about a family that takes a vacation boat ride on Lake Michigan, only to have it attacked by a massive lake monster. The inspiration for the monster was a combination of Nessie (of Loch Ness fame) and Joanna (of The Rescuers Down Under fame), and the ending was pleasantly ambiguous. It wasn’t the greatest story ever written, by far, but I think coming from a 12-year old it was certainly serviceable.
But the thing that intrigued me the most was that I had loved the process of writing it. It was a story all my own.
And I got notice from my teacher and my classmates.
And I just started three sentences with conjunctions, but I’m almost 25 now and I think my creative license ought to allow for that.
Other than that I don’t recall writing much in the way of short stories in middle school, but I do remember freewriting in 8th grade. I hated it. Mrs. Chapin made us do it all the time – once a week, if I recall, we had to turn in two pages – and I never had the slightest clue what to write. I still have those composition books, with entries that fluctuate between diary-like admissions about missing my stepbrother, who was my best friend as a little girl and who had abandoned our family when I was 11, snippets of lines from movies and television shows, and random ramblings about the nonsensicalness of freewriting. I didn’t understand the concept of freewriting at the time, but by the time I got to college I was doing it on my own. But that’s for later on in this timeline.
It would be impossible to write about my middle school forays with pencil and paper without talking about Justin, Clarke, and Billy. Their story was inspired by the X-Men movie that came out in 2000, and the characters were adaptations of the Hanson brothers, with whom you may recall I spent a good chunk of my pre-pubescent life positively OBSESSED. These characters were not as far removed from the actual Hansons than the ones mentioned above in the Lion King adaptation, but they were at least acceptable, and more or less original, characters who had a unique story to tell.
This story, which has remained untitled and unfinished, was an important creative step in my life for several reasons. It was the first time I saw writing as a sustained activity – something that required prolonged attention and passion to keep it from dying. I learned (I remember my aunt Diane driving this home for me) the importance of not dating myself; I had included specific references to television shows, movies and musicians that were important to me at the time but which added nothing to the story and were far from being timeless or universal. I discovered that no matter how much you love your creation, you cannot sustain your engine on your own love alone. There are some writers that write strictly for themselves, but for those of us that hope to someday be marketable, it is not enough to be your only reader.
This is where Cindy stepped into the picture. Remember Cindy? The big sister who hoarded all the good toys from me several paragraphs ago? Well, she was still antagonizing me on a regular basis at this point, but she did something else as well, something that affected me in a positive way and encouraged me to keep writing.
She became my first fan.
She offered to read my story out loud to me before we went to bed at night, giving me feedback from a reader’s point of view, pointing out which parts were contradictory, what made no sense, what was well-composed and what she did and didn’t understand. She read my story when all of my peers were engrossed in Harry Potter and paid little attention to the sweat and blood I was putting into my own masterpiece. This is a little embarrassing to make public, but there’s a wee part of me that harbors a sort of juvenile grudge against the Harry Potter franchise for appearing when it did. Ridiculous as it is to say, I saw Harry as an adversary that was too strong for my middle school efforts, and I resented him for it.
Anyway, my point is that Cindy liked my characters, wanted to follow their story, and encouraged me to finish it, and maybe someday I will. Granted, the beginning of that story is now well over a decade old (she can probably remember the first sentence as well as I can) and would need some serious (SERIOUS) reworking, but I still have the original copy, and may someday attempt to give it new life. I still have all the notes I took during those readings. They’re in a really nice journal that my friend Jayna had gotten me for Christmas.
I don’t know how much longer this post should go on. I feel like it’s already way too long. Maybe I’m boring you guys.
I was in Dr. Lix’s class today and he encouraged us to think about a story from our pasts that we could use to connect with an audience while giving a presentation. That got me thinking about all this, and I figured it might make for an interesting blog post.
If you’re interested, I can finish with my experiences in high school and college in another post. Let me know.
♥
SM