How it Began - Kind Of

Been in an awful writing rut of late. This hasn't happened in a good many years. I don't much care for it.

Writing small pieces helps. I think. At least I feel like I've written something. There may not have been any point to it, but at least I've put words into the computer.

I wrote my first story when I was in grade school. That was such a long time ago. I have no recollection of my earliest stories, other than that I wrote them. Most tended to revolve around dogs, cats - and ghosts.

It was a ghost-mystery story which brought me my first acclaim. I was in fourth grade. That would have made me nine-years-old. We were given an assignment to write a ghost story for Halloween. It had to be at least two pages long - hand written. There was no limit to its length. That was a mistake my teacher would not make with me again. You see, while everyone else wrote two - or almost two - pages of story, I wrote ten or twenty pages. I forget now if each chapter was one page or two.

The story was about a family of six taking a vacation at a castle overlooking a small lake. There were several ghost sitings, disappearances, and missing treasure. My hero and heroine (brother and sister) ultimately solved the mystery by proving the castle caretaker responsible for the ghostly hoax. He was a smuggler. (If this sounds strangely like Scooby Doo you must remember that I was only nine - and Scooby Doo wouldn't be on television for several more years.)

A few things stick out in my mind about that story. First, I left a loose end, which I didn't realize until after the story was "published". Amazingly, I was the only one who saw it. Second, my sister, Gayanne, who was an avid reader and considered herself a better storyteller than me, was quite jealous of the attention I got throughout the school as a result of that story. And third, I was hauled around to every classroom in school throughout the day so I could read my story to each class. (This was my "publication".)

For years I devoted myself to ghostly tales. Not all were hoaxes. Living in what I (and nearly everyone else) believed to be a haunted house gave me what I considered to be a certain level of credibility. After all, I knew first hand some of the manifestations which happened in a haunted house.

By the time I was through with junior high I had added another dimension to my writing: sarcasm. Parents (mainly my mother) and teachers and certain older siblings filled me with enough anger and disgust at how foolish people in charge can be. But in those days I was completely powerless to say just how foolish. Until I discovered I could disguise it in stories. The more clever knew exactly what I was doing, but they also tended to let me get away with it.

In high school I discovered true fantasy. It was like coming home.

Probably my most popular stories were those which involved the people I knew in real life. I wouldn't even bother to change names. They were all comedies along the vein of the Airplane movies. I would take one dominant trait or behavior from each person in real life and make them be like that ALL the time. Or, even more amusing sometimes, make them the exact opposite. Most found it both amusing and flattering. Some were offended. My response to them was always the same: If you don't like how I portrayed you then don't be like that.

I did several plays. My favorite is lost. The Monsters. I wrote that after my mother gave me five packs of bubble gum cards. The cards were monster cards. On the back was a piece to a puzzle. Being a bit of a puzzle addict I found myself going to the drug store and buying every pack of cards they had until I could complete the puzzle. It was a collage of monsters. One in particular was a very sexy looking vampire. This inspired me to write my play. It was a comedy. It's gone now. Probably thrown away. I've tried several times to rewrite it, but lightning seldom strikes twice you know.

It's been years since I've seriously tried writing a play. I wish I was more involved with theatre, but there is no theatre near here. The closest is forty miles away, and that's just too far to justify the expense of getting there and back.

Meanwhile, I write small pieces of a story which currently has no plot. It's just a bunch of events. I know what I want the conflict to be, but I have to think it through properly so that all of the motivations and plans make sense within the world I have created. Sometimes that can be quite difficult to do.