Rummaging through the old files

One of the things about moving back home is that it gets you in close proximity to childhood memories, mementos and other items. Recently, as I was cleaning up my room, I dug up several file folders of papers from my high school years, and gripped by a nostalgia kick, I went through them. Which led to two different conclusions:

First, I can't believe some of the stuff I was allowed to get away with.

And two, for someone who wasn't thought of as the writer in the family, I sure did a hell of a lot of writing.

In hindsight, I realize I was very, very lucky. My brother's reputation for his writing skills had preceded me, as he was a couple of years older and already making himself known as a young playwright of note. So it was to be expected that I should be compared to him, especially in English class. But even though we shared many of the same teachers, the comparisons weren't so direct. One of his teachers, Mrs. Webb, was mine for three consecutive years. And even though I wouldn't say she was an inspiration to our entire class -- her background was history and it often seemed like she was teaching the English curriculum a bit by rote -- she had one knack: if a student was smart, wrote good essays and obviously had ideas, she knew enough to leave them alone to do their thing. Probably because she was, secretly, very amused by what people like myself came up with.

As I leafed through those old papers, all the things I'd learned in those formative years came back to me. I'm still mortally offended by comma splices. Learning how to write a precis of an essay, I'm sure, indirectly influenced my ability to review books in a concise fashion. But most of all, I was allowed to be fairly creative, and since I never took an English class during my university years, it was an instinct that, while not stifled, was quite muted.

Of course, there was crap. Lots of it. Bad poetry, horribly insular short stories that had no plot, bad jokes, or were thinly-veiled versions of my Tortured Life at the time. But then again, I'll look back at some of the stuff I'm writing now with the same sort of disdain. But there was, to my surprise, enough that I'm still oddly proud of. Like my senior history paper on Crime in the 1920s where, in discussing a particular pet case, I reasoned that it would never be solved because "all the suspects are dead anyway."

Or the senior English essay exam, where the night before I'd dreamed that I'd written a brilliant piece comparing the Great Gatsby to 19th century Italian Opera (of Puccini, Leoncavello and Mascagni type.) I woke up the next morning and hoped like hell I'd be able to use it because, dammit, this was brilliant and original. I got to the exam room, looked at the question, which was so vague that I could have written about anything I damn well wanted, and went to work. The logic looks more muddled now, but then again, I doubt it's a comparison anyone had made up till then.

But two pieces still linger in my mind, one for sheer audacity, and one that still holds up. The first was a short compare/contrast essay where the students were asked to find five poems that had something in common -- a theme, a setting, whatever. I cannot for the life of me remember what possessed me to do this, but I decided to look at five poems by one of the most prolific, popular and enduring writers of our time: Anonymous. With perfect seriousness I chose five poems with little in common except their byline, although I think I argued that hiding your name allowed you particular freedoms, and suggested (without much proof, of course) that many women used this byline as a means to make their voices heard.

Not only was I not laughed out of class, I got an A- on the paper. I'm pretty sure Mrs. Webb rolled her eyes when I told her what I planned to do, but she said as long as I made my case, I was welcome to try.

The second piece was written for a junior year class focusing solely on creative writing. Oddly -- or not -- I didn't think I was all that successful in the course, probably because I knew I was writing useless crap for the most part (though I still got decent marks.) But in keeping with the class, we were asked to do some kind of piece about creativity and its importance. So I came up with a story in the style of a children's fable where creativity was invented by a bored caveman who was sick of looking up at the clouds and only seeing certain images: horses, cows and elephants. But his friend didn't get it, and was not "burdened" with the gift of creativity. I even threw in a moral, since it was a fable after all. And even though I wrote it more than 10 years ago, I'm still fond of that sucker.

So that brings me to my question: what was the first piece of writing you did that you're still proud of? What is it, and why?

Comments

[Victor Gischler]

I wrote a crime story in Kindergarten. It was about a detective looking for missing donuts. Turns out these dwarves living in the woods kept stealing the donuts. The only reason we even wrote/illustrated a story was because we were making our own books with paper, glue and cloth for the covers. But what struck me about the story (30 years later) was how incredibly violent it was. The climax of the story consists of the detective/protagonist and his cop bodies gunning down like 30 dwarves. Quite a blood bath. I think if a five-year-old wrote that story today, an army of social workers would rush in to save the demented child. I guess I was a sick little goober even then.

Victor

[Jim Winter]

I took English Lit my senior year in high school. About six weeks in, we studied Chaucer's CANTEBURY TALES and were assigned to write a one paragraph parody, lampooning various school figures.

The assignment was to be typed and handed in. Come due date, I was still scribbling away on the final paragraph of the rough draft. I'd written ten in all, getting so into the assignment that I'd forgotten to stop and type one paragraph.

"OK, Winter," said Mr. Murphy, "You go first."

So I did. I turned it in scrawled long hand and got an A-.

Unfortunately, I lost that paper, but I remember that's when I knew I'd eventually be a writer.

[David Montgomery]

I wrote a Mack Bolan-type uber-violent adventure story for English class my junior year in high school. It was all macho action, big guns and heads exploding like cantaloupes. I even read it aloud in front of the class.

In today's paranoid climate, I probably would be expelled for things like that. Not to mention my predilection for wearing camouflage and carrying a big knife.

[Mary Root]

In my seventh-grade English class, we had a notebook where we had to write two pages a week. It wasn't fun coming up with something new every week, so I started writing a serial novel, with two page chapters. It was an action-adventure thriller, set in the forest, starring - deer. Every so often I'm tempted to pull it out for a rewrite.

[Bill Crider]

OK, this is off topic, but your remark about being compared to your brother (who does indeed write very well) reminds me of a story my own brother tells. He was the youngest in a family of three, and we all attended the same small high school (66 people in my graduating class). He was thrilled when he graduated and went to college at The University of Texas at Austin (20,000 students or so at the time), which was nearly three times the size of our entire hometown. Now he'd be free of his siblings at last. He was crushed when he answered the roll on the first day of his Spanish class and the teacher said, "Did you have a brother who went to school here four or five years ago?"

[Karen]

Victor's story cracked me up and reminded me of the first "book" I wrote when I was 9. I plagiarized "Born Free." Granted, the lion whose name escapes me now, did travel in economy class on a flight to America with its new family (I think there were parents and two children) but then it gets all Jane Goodall and he has to be released into the wild because that's where he belongs. I illustrated it as well with very detailed, dramatic drawings.

Karen

[Duane]

In eighth grade, we were assigned 20 weekly spelling words, and we had to come up with a sentence for each. That sounded boring, so I wrote a short horror story using all 20. (I ended up with lines like, "Allan heroically stopped the axe from splitting Karen's head.") Each week, I'd write a new installment in the series. They were gore-drenched, blood-soaked tales of violence, clearly inspired by Friday the 13th and Halloween movies--what else is a 12-year-old thinking about, right?

Craziest thing: I was taught spelling by a Catholic nun. And she loved these things. She kept encouraging me to keep the series going. (I still have them, stapled together like a book.)

But as Victor said: If the 12-year-old me wrote those stories today, I'd most likely be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, no questions asked.

[shana]

Karen - isn't that Lafcadio?

(props to sarah, of course.)

[Mary]

Don't you just love teachers who understand the importance of letting you think for yourself and then rewarding you when you are successful at it? I had a professor of history in college named Paul Helmreich who did exactly that for me. And I'm eternally grateful to him for it.

[Gerald So]

I discovered I wanted to be a writer in eighth grade, when a classmate of mine wrote a book and had it published in our school library. By ninth grade I was writing hi-tech espionage stories with flying cars and laser watches, but you asked about the earliest piece we're still proud of.

That honor goes to a fable I wrote in high school about an alien prince who on earth takes the form of a awkward, good-hearted teenager. He falls in love with a girl who never notices him because she's in love with someone else. He accepts this and does what he can to get them together before he must return to his home planet. The story was inspired by an episode of the Maureen Flannigan syndicated sitcom "Out of This World".

I wish I could remember the story in greater detail, but it's buried somewhere, stored on that ancient medium, the 5 1/4" floppy.

[Graham]

When I was in fourth grade or so, I wrote a poem that started off like this:

If I had a hundred dollars to spend,
Or maybe a little more,
I'd run as fast as my legs would go
Straight to the animal store.

I found that thing about four years ago, all illustrated with pictures of monkeys and dogs (no lemurs; even then I was anti-lemur) and I was proud of myself in a fatherly sort of way, as if one of my kids had written it.

[Cornelia Read]

I still have the miniature black three-ring binder in which I wrote my international espionage epic "Call Me Stringbean" longhand in pencil, complete with circles over every "i."

Twelve-year-old Margaret Welsch breaks up a ring of heroin dealers, with very slight help from her father the CIA agent. The gory climax occurs in the Bahamian swimming pool of my father's then-girlfriend, Martica Clapp--which had a secret underwater cave (diagram included) and a waterfall. All of the bad guys speak in unbelievably stilted 1930s Brooklynese and have names like Omar and Roscoe. On the last page I drew a little seaplane, "once again flying into the rising sun!" at a jaunty angle.

It was shameless wish-fulfillment, especially the part about being so skinny she's called Stringbean. I made spy sneakers to go along with it, with nailfiles and string and strike-anywhere matches and other implements of spycraft cradled in slots carved out of the insoles of an old pair of Keds. The whole thing was packaged up and sent to the UN with my sixth-grade teacher, Dr. Brazell, for a gifted-child conference. She came back and told me the Soviets were completely freaked, having asked her if all American children were so brainwashed about the CIA. I said it was actually the fault of Ian Fleming, not the government.

The sneakers are long gone, but the little black binder (title, now fading, painted on in my Mom's purple nail polish) still sits on the top shelf of my desk.

This was actually my third "novel," but I don't have the one about rescuing the Arabian ponies from the smugglers and getting to keep the buckskin one, or the one about how all the kids in my class who despised me as a huge geek and I lived without grownups on an island off the coast of Maine and foiled the kidnappers (fourth and fifth grade, respectively--about 60 pages longhand each, with no quotation marks for dialogue.)

My mother, bless her well-intentioned heart, kept stealing them to send to the fiction editor at the New Yorker, but she didn't know about SASEs so I never saw them again. I hid Stringbean under my mattress, so I still have it.

[Katherine]

At 13 I used to write Trixie Belden rip-offs where she and Jim used to get up to a little more than admiring each other from afar. These were keenly passed around my friends. :) For class however it was either horror - I recall a sentence about someone's eyeballs rolling down a gutter - or pony stories. They were meant to be a few pages but I could never resist filling the exercise books. I guess the preference for writing novels over short stories comes early.

[Alina Adams]

As it fits in nicely with the theme, a poem not by young me, but my five year old son:

I don't love you
No one loves you
No one loves anyone
Love is not a word.

(Speaking of social workers descending...)

[Naomi Hirahara]

You know what's freaky? I think what eats at us creatively in childhood continues through adulthood. I was obsessed with American pioneer stories and my first attempt at a novel in grade school involved Ma and Pa and their ten million kids. A couple of years later, I stapled together 3 x 5 cards and made a diary for each of the kids, using mispellings and dialect appropriate to their age and education. Many decades later, I'm still fascinated with dialect. I know some people hate the use of vernacular language, but as I look back at what I was writing as a kid, I realize that I'm just wired a certain way.

[Donna]

When I was 13 our English teacher got us all to write a story entitled "My Class in The Year 2000" - ie when we would all be pushing 40. I had great fun with it - it gave me a chance to give my friends glamourous jobs and my enemies...not quite so glamourous ones. None of my predictions came true - my friend Gillian did not become a dancer with Pans People, Sylvia did not become a nun and swim the English channel, Nicola and Helen did not sail a hot air balloon around the world. And, as far as I'm aware, my nemesis John Watson did NOT become a bloodhound, hired by a detective agency to sniff out clues. Reading it back, there's only one I felt sorry about. In my class was a very inoffensive boy called David Manson. Our English teacher used to say we were made for each other - our initials were the same, we were both studious and quiet (yes, I was, once upon a time). My 13-year old self cringed every time Mr Browning referred to it. So the last line of my story was "And David Manson went to be a missionary in Africa and was eaten by the cannibals." I was so embarrassed when Mr Browning read the story out in class. Sorry David - I hope you escaped the cannibals.
Donna

[Arline Chase]

All my childhood writing is lost to time, but in my first writing class I wrote a 45 page short story called "THE DROWNED LAND". I was scared in that class. I was the only one wearing polyester,NOT wearing jeans, sandals, and love beads, and the only one over 40, including the instructor.

Writing had always been my secret dream and I planned to pursue it in earnest. It was the first real story I ever wrote and garnered comments from the other students like, "Boy, that really SUCKS." When I explained that it was a period piece, loosely based on family history, the reply was, "Who cares?"

But I listened and learned. Eventually that story became a novella and a collection. One of the stories grew up to become my first novel, KILLRAVEN.

I've never regretted taking that class and have been listening and learning ever since.

[Karen]

Of course I meant Joy Adamson, not Jane Goodall. But lions, monkeys, don't they all live in Africa? Fortunately I left my plagiarism days behing me after that venture and went on to write about Henry Octopus and his friends "Under the Sea." (But there must be something about guns and elementary school, because I have quite the shootout in that one between Goldie Goldfish and some starfish.)

[Dave White]

I wrote a Sherlock Holmes story in 4th grade that got published in the district lit magazine, the Cobbler. "The Adventure of the Golden Bookcase" it was called. Pretty fun stuff.

[MJ]

The summer after 6th grade (1978), I wrote a sequel to Star Wars that ran to over 100 pages (handwritten on college rule). Unfortunately, Alan Dean Foster had already beaten me to it, or I know I'd be a millionaire today. :-)

I don't have that one, so I don't know if it stands the test of time. But every once in a while I run across a spiral notebook that my friend Steve and I passed back and forth in 8th-grade science, writing alternate chapters about a couple of crime-solving kids who lived at opposite ends of an abandoned estate called Seven Oaks and were supposed to eventually have a number of zany hair-raising adventures. It wasn't bad work, really. But then we both started failing the class, and Steve, at least, decided to actually do some work. I, otoh, kicked back and read "I Never Loved Your Mind" behind my book and got a D in 8th-grade science.

[Scott Phillips]

This doesn't exactly count as writing, but when I was in Kindergarten my class was illustrating the life of Lincoln, with each student assigned an incident from old Abe's life. I was assigned this caption: "Abe wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and was shot." So I drew him at a little writing desk with a hand behind him holding a pistol, from which a tiny bullet flew toward the back of his head. Speed lines and everything...a very odd thing to assign a small child to draw, and probably an indicator of things to come. My dear old Mother still has it.

[Rebecca]

MJ - that's bizarre about 8th grade science. In sixth grade science I got bored out of my mind and started writing the adventures of a Sheriff (whose name escapes me) in the Old West. He had a pet bobcat that he'd rescued as a kitten that was tame and was going to help him track bad guys. I was also planning a tentative romance between him and a Navajo girl who was good with bobcats. (I liked the idea of having a personal attack cat.) Unfortunately, the semester ended and in seventh grade I had a really good science teacher who made the class interesting. But I learned a valuable lesson -- teachers can't read upside down, and as long as you look up every so often, and it looks like you're taking notes you can write anything you like....a trick I used through college and still use on occasion in meetings.

All of my early works were unfinished, but I think I won my first true standing in third grade when my beloved third grade teacher read the beginning of "Earth Diaries" the story in diary entries of a girl in 2640 whose family returns from a space station to recolonize an abandoned earth. (She hates gravity, but likes poking around the ruins of skyscrapers.) My teacher said it was the first story of mine she had read that was genuinely original. (Being me, I was very offended at the idea that I had ripped off the idea for all of my previous work.) I must admit I also have a soft spot for the unfinished opus about the lion cubs who bravely volunteer to infiltrate a camp of human hunters posing as harmless kittens and learn their plans to save their pride. (I think that was around second or third grade too.) Then in sixth grade (before the Old West adventure in science class) there was the prose retelling of the Lady of Shalott that was going to clear up all the unclear bits in the poem. I actually did a lot of retellings of fairy tales, plays, poems and what not. Not having to worry about the plot left me free to focus on the characters, which was much more interesting.

[Jon Jordan]

In 7th grade we had an assignment to write a book. I never finished the book (20 whole pages due) but I hade a great cover and title. I called it Vengence and it was all about a guy getting revenge for his family being gunned down. Violent as hell 8 pages and then I never finished. It was kind of an early Punisher.

And as others have said, kids try to write this today and they are off to see the counslers and get meds.

It's crazy ol' world!

jon