While I was never exceptionally prolific, like some people are in childhood, I did write a lot more than what is represented on this blog. Like many people, most of my childhood writing did not survive through the years. It got lost or thrown away for one reason or another. “Smart Wolves” I remember specifically throwing away myself, much to my later regret. The rest I’m not sure what happened, but I suspect they fell victim to my mother’s cleaning at some point.
I’m sure this is of interest to no one except me, but I retain an author’s fondness for all of my projects, even the ones that I no longer have. And so I thought I would at least write them up on this blog.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Smart Wolves
From the title alone, I suppose I don’t even need to say this was done during my “Wolf-phase”. From about 3rd grade through 8th grade everything I wrote had to deal with Wolves in one form or another. This particular story I worked on for a couple of years (which seemed like an epic amount of time back then) from about 4th or 5th grade through 6th grade.
It all started out as a picture in National Geographic of two wolves running on the snow beneath the shadow of a plane. Presumably the shadow was just from the plane that was used to take the picture, but to my imagination the wolves were running away from hunters (or “wolfers”, as I once read these illegal wolf poachers were called.)
I cut the picture out, pasted it onto a piece of paper, and started to write a story about what would happen to these two wolves, who I named Snow Wolf and Slet. Like most of my childhood stories, I had no idea what would happen after I began, and some of the bizarre turns this story takes can be explained by keeping in mind I was simply making it up as I went along.
About the name Slet: I should clarify that in the naivety of childhood innocence I was blissfully unaware of how closely this name resembled a derogatory term for a sexually loose woman. It just sounded cool at the time, sort of like “sleet” but shorter. My mother brought it to my attention when I attempted to give a toy wolf the same name, but I was already several chapters into my story by that time, so I was stuck with it. (Remember this was back in the days when everything was hand written out on paper before the easy editing of word processors.)
Anyway, Snow Wolf and his female mate Slet are running, and they get caught by these poachers. Only instead of being killed for their pelts, they’re shot with tranquilizer darts, and handed over to a private scientist.
The scientist is named Jonathon Angle. He is demonstrating his new invention to his friend, professor Brown.
Although I don’t think I described it very well on paper, in my mind Jonathon Angle and professor Brown were very similar to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Jonathon Angle was the young brilliant scientist with the skinny angular body (as the name implies) and professor Brown was his more skeptical sidekick with a stockier build and a bowler hat.
Anyway, Jonathon Angle is demonstrating his new machine, which has the power to give human intelligence to animals and inanimate objects. He demonstrates it first on Snow Wolf and Slet, and then on a piano. Finally Jonathon Angle turns the machine on itself to give it intelligence as well.
The machine, by the way, is named JAM for Jonathon Angle’s Machine (seemed like a snappy acronym at the time). I envisioned it as this huge robot on wheels with an opening for pianos and wolves to pass under and be given the intelligence treatment. As the story progresses, it turns out JAM has a lot more neat Robot tricks as well.
Where was I? So, Snow Wolf, Slet, the Piano, and JAM all have had their intelligence increased, and can talk and reason now and participate in the conversation and all that stuff. Professor Brown says he’s sorry he ever doubted Jonathon Angle’s abilities. Jonathon Angle accepts the apology, and then says that the experiment was just for demonstration purposes, and for ethical reasons he now has to reverse the process and turn everything back to its original state.
The Piano however is horrified at the idea of loosing the gift of life, and runs out of the room. (Or zoomed rather. I think I had envisioned a piano on wheels). Everybody runs after the piano and tries to stop it. The piano zooms out of the house and is rolling down a hill when everybody is struck by lightening and disappears.
Everyone reappears in the middle of a cave and a small elf-like creature appears. It is at this point that we learn the lightening was not a natural phenomenon, but rather a ray of magic which had transported everyone to the cave.
I forget exactly what name I used for the cave creatures. They resembled elves with pointed ears and about half the height of a human, and although they are descended from the world of fantasy, I chose to give them a different name and species.
At any rate, the name of the creature who greets them is called Fown. Fown apologies to them for the inconvenience, and explains that they were experimenting with their transportation magic when they had an accidentally discharge which had enveloped Jonathon Angle, Professor Brown, JAM, the Piano, Snow Wolf and Slet and transported them to the cave.
Fown, by means of a magical portal, is able to show everyone his story. It began 1,000 years ago, when he and his race were ambushed by the Goblins. Fown, at that time just a young child, has to run for safety with the rest of his village. In the course of the flight, first his mother and then his father are killed by Goblin attacks. Finally everyone runs into a cave, at which point a rock slide permanently closes up the entrance, protecting them from the Goblins but also trapping them inside the cave forever.
Although Fown and his race are vulnerable to death from sickness or fatal wounds, if kept free from harm they have a potentially infinite life span. Thus Fown and his friends have spent the last 1000 years in the cave, mostly trying to find a way out. At last, through various experiments, they have found a way to transport themselves not only out of the cave, but back in time so that they can prevent the Goblin ambush in the first place.
Fown apologies, but now that the accident has already occurred, there will not be any extra energy to transport Jonathon Angle and his friends back out of the cave. The only option to get out will be to accompany Fown and his friends back in time.
They travel back in time where they are able to prevent the Goblin ambush. JAM, it turns out, has a laser attached to his machinery, and is able to take part in the fighting.
I was, at this time, greatly influenced by Tolkien, or at least the Rankin-Bass animated interpretation of his work. And, like many young fantasy fans before or since, I was unsure what was Tolkien’s invention and what was from traditional folklore. Therefore, in accordance with the animated version of the Hobbit, I had the Goblins riding on wolves. Of course at this stage in my life it went against everything I believed in to have the wolves as the bad guy, and so I interjected a scene in which JAM captures one of the Goblins’ wolves and analyzes it. JAM is able to discover that the wolves are under mind control by the Goblins’ magic. Since there is no cure, the only humane solution is to kill the wolves to put them out of their misery. And with that moral problem solved, Snow Wolf and the rest are free to enter the fight against the Goblins and their wolves.
Fown succeeds in saving his father and mother as well as his five year old self. With both the past and the future Fown now in the same story, the older Fown volunteers to rename himself Fown II in order to prevent any confusion.
The Goblin army is driven back, but the Goblin General vows revenge. Several minor attacks follow. During the middle of the night two Goblins on Wolves raid the house and carry off the younger Fown. Snow Wolf and Slet give chase, and manage to rescue young Fown, but Slet is stabbed in the chest during the fight and dies.
In the course of the story, for reasons I don’t remember, two other wolves join the good-guys team. I don’t remember what their names were, and I don’t remember the exact chronology either. They might have joined before Slet died. In fact, I think they did, because I remember having four wolves on the team.
While the skirmishes continue, the Goblin army is recruited to join in the fight between the Witches and the Warlocks. The Goblins, it turns out, are vassals of the Witches, and thus recruited to join in the fight. The Goblin leader keeps wanting to send out expedition forces to capture Fown and his family. At present the Goblin army has a force of 100 Goblins sent out to capture Fown; an extremely small fraction of the whole Goblin forces. But the head Witch eventually says even that is too much, so she sends another Witch out to bring back the 100 Goblins.
Meanwhile fighting continues. At one point Fown II is surrounded by Goblins and their wolves, and is able to fight only by his quick reflexes and guarding his neck from the wolves’ teeth. He is saved by the Piano who rushes in and uses his wooden frame to bowl the Goblins over. The Piano knocks the Goblins over several times, and, because he has no vital organs, is unhurt by the Goblin arrows. Until the Goblins use flaming arrows, and then the Piano catches on fire. In a last heroic effort the Piano uses itself as a flaming wreck to ram into the Goblins one last time before it burns away to nothing.
At this point the witch flying on a broomstick appears to recall the Goblins, and she also attacks the good-guys. JAM shoots the witch with his laser gun. The witch falls to the ground and screams out her death agonies. In her last minutes before Death, she manages to deliver the curse of the five rings.
This doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but at this point I realized the story wasn’t really going anywhere and so, like any fantasy writer who doesn’t know what to do next, I decided to come up with a quest to set my characters on. They have to find the five Golden Rings within a year, or they will all die. (Fown II explains this to the other characters. I think he might even have given some sort of short back story about what these five Rings are and how they came to be cursed as well, but I don’t really remember).
At this point, the team splits up in search of the different Golden rings. I don’t remember how many teams they split into, or who was in which group. Each group, however, encountered different adventures and gradually added new friends to their ranks. I fell into the trap, common to many fantasy writers, of wanting to find excuses to incorporate every single mythical creature into my story.
As the story branches out into many different directions, it is at this point especially that I start to forget the details. There was one part when Fown II and his group entered a strange city and got drawn into some sort of fight. A new character (a dwarf or an elf I think) had his arm completely cut off at the shoulder by an axe, and Fown II and the others nurse him back to health, at which point he joins the quest. (I remember having a conversation with my mother about someone’s chances of surviving this kind of wound. I had already devised a tourniquet to stop the blood in my story, but once my mother mentioned shock was also a problem I added that Fown II had used some of his magic to stop the shock.)
Another group is crossing a steep mountain trail. The Young Fown is, out of childlike curiosity, wandering dangerously close to the edge and singing a song. His mother yells at him to get away from the edge, but actually her sharp voice has the unintended effect of frightening Young Fown and causing him to fall over the edge. He is saved by a landing on a ledge below, but the ledge is starting to crack. Jonathon Angle instructs JAM to manufacture a rope (apparently another one of JAM’s powers), but JAM takes too long in doing it, and the ledge breaks and Young Fown falls off.
(I remember this was one of the first scenes in which I tried to build some tension in my writing. “JAM, we need that rope now.” “Almost finished.” “Hurry, the ledge is breaking.” “Almost finished.” Etc.)
He is saved by a fairy and her flying Unicorn. (I don’t remember their names, but they were pretty standard Fairy/ Unicorn names, like Rainbow or Moon Beam). After introductions are made, the fairy and the unicorn also join in the quest.
Another thing I remember near the end is an attempt to use the Smart Wolves story as an epic framework within which I could insert some of my other stories. I wanted to combine the characters from my “Three Giraffes” story into the Smart Wolves story. I figured since I was already writing in the Fantasy realm, the addition of talking Monkeys and Giraffes wasn’t a big problem. What was a problem was the addition of guns, which struck me as an anachronism in my fantasy world. So I re-wrote the “Three Giraffes” and gave the pirates bows and arrows instead of guns. It did seem a little strange to me to have pirates shooting arrows, but I figured this was a change I had to make in order to incorporate the two stories.
I had plans for incorporating the two stories together, but as far as I remember I never actually got far enough to when the characters from each story met up with each other.
I don’t remember much more of the details, and the story pretty much fades out after this point. I had plans for a huge dramatic conclusion (don’t I always) but eventually I lost interest in this story and just let it sit. Eventually I started working on other things.
This story is unique among the Lost Works in that I am guilty of deliberately and consciously throwing it out. Everything else just got lost under mysterious circumstances as time went on (personally I suspect my Mom’s cleaning). But this one I remember throwing out myself. It feel victim to my own cleaning.
I’m a bit of a messy person, and this is a habit I’ve had from childhood. And like most messy people, I tend to go throw long periods of mess and then strange bursts of cleaning. During one of those bursts, I decided I was never going to finish this story anyway, so I threw it out.
I have a lot of regrets in my short life, but this decision is right up there. Not because this was a great work of art, but because it was something I worked hard on for a while, and it shows my writing and my mind in transition. As it is now, I have almost nothing to show in between “Prisoner of the Pirates” and “The Wolf Clan”.
The reason I threw it out was because I was undergoing a transition in the length of my writing. Everything before this I had worked on for a couple days, and finished usually in a night, or a week tops. This was something I had worked on for months with no end in sight, and I thought that an unfinished story was no good hanging onto. Little did I know that everything I wrote after this would be an unfinished story, until I finally was able to bring “The New Era” storyline to a conclusion of sorts.
Influence on Other Works
This was my first serious foray into the World of Fantasy, and I decided I enjoyed it. I would return later with the Wolf Clan and the world of Fabulae.
I quite like the idea of household furniture becoming characters (like the Piano) and also having a past and present version of a character together on the same quest (Young Fown and Fown II). I’ve never re-used any of these concepts again, but I might some day.
It all started out as a picture in National Geographic of two wolves running on the snow beneath the shadow of a plane. Presumably the shadow was just from the plane that was used to take the picture, but to my imagination the wolves were running away from hunters (or “wolfers”, as I once read these illegal wolf poachers were called.)
I cut the picture out, pasted it onto a piece of paper, and started to write a story about what would happen to these two wolves, who I named Snow Wolf and Slet. Like most of my childhood stories, I had no idea what would happen after I began, and some of the bizarre turns this story takes can be explained by keeping in mind I was simply making it up as I went along.
About the name Slet: I should clarify that in the naivety of childhood innocence I was blissfully unaware of how closely this name resembled a derogatory term for a sexually loose woman. It just sounded cool at the time, sort of like “sleet” but shorter. My mother brought it to my attention when I attempted to give a toy wolf the same name, but I was already several chapters into my story by that time, so I was stuck with it. (Remember this was back in the days when everything was hand written out on paper before the easy editing of word processors.)
Anyway, Snow Wolf and his female mate Slet are running, and they get caught by these poachers. Only instead of being killed for their pelts, they’re shot with tranquilizer darts, and handed over to a private scientist.
The scientist is named Jonathon Angle. He is demonstrating his new invention to his friend, professor Brown.
Although I don’t think I described it very well on paper, in my mind Jonathon Angle and professor Brown were very similar to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Jonathon Angle was the young brilliant scientist with the skinny angular body (as the name implies) and professor Brown was his more skeptical sidekick with a stockier build and a bowler hat.
Anyway, Jonathon Angle is demonstrating his new machine, which has the power to give human intelligence to animals and inanimate objects. He demonstrates it first on Snow Wolf and Slet, and then on a piano. Finally Jonathon Angle turns the machine on itself to give it intelligence as well.
The machine, by the way, is named JAM for Jonathon Angle’s Machine (seemed like a snappy acronym at the time). I envisioned it as this huge robot on wheels with an opening for pianos and wolves to pass under and be given the intelligence treatment. As the story progresses, it turns out JAM has a lot more neat Robot tricks as well.
Where was I? So, Snow Wolf, Slet, the Piano, and JAM all have had their intelligence increased, and can talk and reason now and participate in the conversation and all that stuff. Professor Brown says he’s sorry he ever doubted Jonathon Angle’s abilities. Jonathon Angle accepts the apology, and then says that the experiment was just for demonstration purposes, and for ethical reasons he now has to reverse the process and turn everything back to its original state.
The Piano however is horrified at the idea of loosing the gift of life, and runs out of the room. (Or zoomed rather. I think I had envisioned a piano on wheels). Everybody runs after the piano and tries to stop it. The piano zooms out of the house and is rolling down a hill when everybody is struck by lightening and disappears.
Everyone reappears in the middle of a cave and a small elf-like creature appears. It is at this point that we learn the lightening was not a natural phenomenon, but rather a ray of magic which had transported everyone to the cave.
I forget exactly what name I used for the cave creatures. They resembled elves with pointed ears and about half the height of a human, and although they are descended from the world of fantasy, I chose to give them a different name and species.
At any rate, the name of the creature who greets them is called Fown. Fown apologies to them for the inconvenience, and explains that they were experimenting with their transportation magic when they had an accidentally discharge which had enveloped Jonathon Angle, Professor Brown, JAM, the Piano, Snow Wolf and Slet and transported them to the cave.
Fown, by means of a magical portal, is able to show everyone his story. It began 1,000 years ago, when he and his race were ambushed by the Goblins. Fown, at that time just a young child, has to run for safety with the rest of his village. In the course of the flight, first his mother and then his father are killed by Goblin attacks. Finally everyone runs into a cave, at which point a rock slide permanently closes up the entrance, protecting them from the Goblins but also trapping them inside the cave forever.
Although Fown and his race are vulnerable to death from sickness or fatal wounds, if kept free from harm they have a potentially infinite life span. Thus Fown and his friends have spent the last 1000 years in the cave, mostly trying to find a way out. At last, through various experiments, they have found a way to transport themselves not only out of the cave, but back in time so that they can prevent the Goblin ambush in the first place.
Fown apologies, but now that the accident has already occurred, there will not be any extra energy to transport Jonathon Angle and his friends back out of the cave. The only option to get out will be to accompany Fown and his friends back in time.
They travel back in time where they are able to prevent the Goblin ambush. JAM, it turns out, has a laser attached to his machinery, and is able to take part in the fighting.
I was, at this time, greatly influenced by Tolkien, or at least the Rankin-Bass animated interpretation of his work. And, like many young fantasy fans before or since, I was unsure what was Tolkien’s invention and what was from traditional folklore. Therefore, in accordance with the animated version of the Hobbit, I had the Goblins riding on wolves. Of course at this stage in my life it went against everything I believed in to have the wolves as the bad guy, and so I interjected a scene in which JAM captures one of the Goblins’ wolves and analyzes it. JAM is able to discover that the wolves are under mind control by the Goblins’ magic. Since there is no cure, the only humane solution is to kill the wolves to put them out of their misery. And with that moral problem solved, Snow Wolf and the rest are free to enter the fight against the Goblins and their wolves.
Fown succeeds in saving his father and mother as well as his five year old self. With both the past and the future Fown now in the same story, the older Fown volunteers to rename himself Fown II in order to prevent any confusion.
The Goblin army is driven back, but the Goblin General vows revenge. Several minor attacks follow. During the middle of the night two Goblins on Wolves raid the house and carry off the younger Fown. Snow Wolf and Slet give chase, and manage to rescue young Fown, but Slet is stabbed in the chest during the fight and dies.
In the course of the story, for reasons I don’t remember, two other wolves join the good-guys team. I don’t remember what their names were, and I don’t remember the exact chronology either. They might have joined before Slet died. In fact, I think they did, because I remember having four wolves on the team.
While the skirmishes continue, the Goblin army is recruited to join in the fight between the Witches and the Warlocks. The Goblins, it turns out, are vassals of the Witches, and thus recruited to join in the fight. The Goblin leader keeps wanting to send out expedition forces to capture Fown and his family. At present the Goblin army has a force of 100 Goblins sent out to capture Fown; an extremely small fraction of the whole Goblin forces. But the head Witch eventually says even that is too much, so she sends another Witch out to bring back the 100 Goblins.
Meanwhile fighting continues. At one point Fown II is surrounded by Goblins and their wolves, and is able to fight only by his quick reflexes and guarding his neck from the wolves’ teeth. He is saved by the Piano who rushes in and uses his wooden frame to bowl the Goblins over. The Piano knocks the Goblins over several times, and, because he has no vital organs, is unhurt by the Goblin arrows. Until the Goblins use flaming arrows, and then the Piano catches on fire. In a last heroic effort the Piano uses itself as a flaming wreck to ram into the Goblins one last time before it burns away to nothing.
At this point the witch flying on a broomstick appears to recall the Goblins, and she also attacks the good-guys. JAM shoots the witch with his laser gun. The witch falls to the ground and screams out her death agonies. In her last minutes before Death, she manages to deliver the curse of the five rings.
This doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but at this point I realized the story wasn’t really going anywhere and so, like any fantasy writer who doesn’t know what to do next, I decided to come up with a quest to set my characters on. They have to find the five Golden Rings within a year, or they will all die. (Fown II explains this to the other characters. I think he might even have given some sort of short back story about what these five Rings are and how they came to be cursed as well, but I don’t really remember).
At this point, the team splits up in search of the different Golden rings. I don’t remember how many teams they split into, or who was in which group. Each group, however, encountered different adventures and gradually added new friends to their ranks. I fell into the trap, common to many fantasy writers, of wanting to find excuses to incorporate every single mythical creature into my story.
As the story branches out into many different directions, it is at this point especially that I start to forget the details. There was one part when Fown II and his group entered a strange city and got drawn into some sort of fight. A new character (a dwarf or an elf I think) had his arm completely cut off at the shoulder by an axe, and Fown II and the others nurse him back to health, at which point he joins the quest. (I remember having a conversation with my mother about someone’s chances of surviving this kind of wound. I had already devised a tourniquet to stop the blood in my story, but once my mother mentioned shock was also a problem I added that Fown II had used some of his magic to stop the shock.)
Another group is crossing a steep mountain trail. The Young Fown is, out of childlike curiosity, wandering dangerously close to the edge and singing a song. His mother yells at him to get away from the edge, but actually her sharp voice has the unintended effect of frightening Young Fown and causing him to fall over the edge. He is saved by a landing on a ledge below, but the ledge is starting to crack. Jonathon Angle instructs JAM to manufacture a rope (apparently another one of JAM’s powers), but JAM takes too long in doing it, and the ledge breaks and Young Fown falls off.
(I remember this was one of the first scenes in which I tried to build some tension in my writing. “JAM, we need that rope now.” “Almost finished.” “Hurry, the ledge is breaking.” “Almost finished.” Etc.)
He is saved by a fairy and her flying Unicorn. (I don’t remember their names, but they were pretty standard Fairy/ Unicorn names, like Rainbow or Moon Beam). After introductions are made, the fairy and the unicorn also join in the quest.
Another thing I remember near the end is an attempt to use the Smart Wolves story as an epic framework within which I could insert some of my other stories. I wanted to combine the characters from my “Three Giraffes” story into the Smart Wolves story. I figured since I was already writing in the Fantasy realm, the addition of talking Monkeys and Giraffes wasn’t a big problem. What was a problem was the addition of guns, which struck me as an anachronism in my fantasy world. So I re-wrote the “Three Giraffes” and gave the pirates bows and arrows instead of guns. It did seem a little strange to me to have pirates shooting arrows, but I figured this was a change I had to make in order to incorporate the two stories.
I had plans for incorporating the two stories together, but as far as I remember I never actually got far enough to when the characters from each story met up with each other.
I don’t remember much more of the details, and the story pretty much fades out after this point. I had plans for a huge dramatic conclusion (don’t I always) but eventually I lost interest in this story and just let it sit. Eventually I started working on other things.
This story is unique among the Lost Works in that I am guilty of deliberately and consciously throwing it out. Everything else just got lost under mysterious circumstances as time went on (personally I suspect my Mom’s cleaning). But this one I remember throwing out myself. It feel victim to my own cleaning.
I’m a bit of a messy person, and this is a habit I’ve had from childhood. And like most messy people, I tend to go throw long periods of mess and then strange bursts of cleaning. During one of those bursts, I decided I was never going to finish this story anyway, so I threw it out.
I have a lot of regrets in my short life, but this decision is right up there. Not because this was a great work of art, but because it was something I worked hard on for a while, and it shows my writing and my mind in transition. As it is now, I have almost nothing to show in between “Prisoner of the Pirates” and “The Wolf Clan”.
The reason I threw it out was because I was undergoing a transition in the length of my writing. Everything before this I had worked on for a couple days, and finished usually in a night, or a week tops. This was something I had worked on for months with no end in sight, and I thought that an unfinished story was no good hanging onto. Little did I know that everything I wrote after this would be an unfinished story, until I finally was able to bring “The New Era” storyline to a conclusion of sorts.
Influence on Other Works
This was my first serious foray into the World of Fantasy, and I decided I enjoyed it. I would return later with the Wolf Clan and the world of Fabulae.
I quite like the idea of household furniture becoming characters (like the Piano) and also having a past and present version of a character together on the same quest (Young Fown and Fown II). I’ve never re-used any of these concepts again, but I might some day.
Junky Funky
The last I heard about this, it was in the possession of one of my friends whom I lost touch with. It may turn out someday that it is still in his possession, and has not actually become a lost work. If that ever happens, I’ll have to transcribe the whole thing up on this blog, but until then I’m going to have to assume it is lost.
This was a collaborative work done around 5th grade by me and my friends Matt, Josh, and David. It was Matt’s idea if I recall correctly. He said he thought it would be cool if we started writing a story and every night one of us would write a different part of it. The rest of us all said that we had often thought of the same idea at one point or another, and had just been waiting for someone else to suggest it. (This is probably one of those things that occurs to every child at one point or another as a cool idea).
Somehow for reasons I don’t remember, I ended up being the one who was given the job of starting it off. The only instructions were I was to write one page only, and then leave the story for others to continue after that. No other caveats were given, and I was free to take the story in any direction I chose. In the end, I chose a bit of a bizarre tale which was meant half as a joke, but which the others agreed to follow willing enough.
Actually, the first installment ended up being two pages, because of some confusion. I was in the habit of skipping every other line when writing on lined paper because this made my appalling penmanship look slightly less messy. So I made an appeal, and was told if I skipped every other line, I could use two pages. There was a bit of a miscommunication however as to whether this was one side, or two pages front and back. I turned in two pages front and back, which wasn’t what Matt had wanted, but we ended up deciding that the first installment could be a bit longer because you need time to set the plot.
Junky Funky was the name of the hero, largely just because that was the first name that came into my head, and it was half as a joke. It’s the kind of name only a 5th grader would think of. But after we had been writing about him for a while, we actually got used to the name and it didn’t seem so funny.
I think Junky Funky was a forest ranger, or a zoologist, or some sort of animal related job. Somehow he stumbles across a plot by the bad guys, who plan to exterminate all the wolves in the world. And I think something involving time travel as well. There is a bit of a fight, Junky Funky is knocked unconscious, and then he has to go back in time to chase the bad guys and stop their evil plan.
At this point in my life, I felt like I had to write something with wolves in it. I had a reputation to keep up. The other guys were expecting it of me.
Actually we all had our own animals that we liked, and we always incorporated our favorite animals into all of our stories and games. David liked gorillas, Josh liked Duck-billed Platypuses, and Matt…Damn, for some reason I’m drawing a blank on what Matt used to like. Koalas, maybe. I’m going to have to look him up one of these days and refresh my memory.
Anyway, all of our favorite animals were incorporated into the story. The bad guys were expanded to be against all of our favorite animals, not just wolves. Junky Funky had to save all these animals, and at various points was helped by them as well. (I seem to remember something about Junky Funky being in a Nasa like control room run by talking gorillas, which must mean at some point we decide to give some of these animals more human like attributes.)
As to the bad guys…I’m not sure really why they wanted to kill off all animals. I don’t think we ever delved seriously into their motivations. I suppose this is a serious literary flaw, but if you look at the Saturday morning cartoons we were brought up on, is it any wonder we had bad guys who were bad just for the sake of badness?
I think in Matt’s next installment, Junky Funky goes back in time, is able to briefly foil the bad guys plan, returns to modern day, and the story continues in the present, where it is just one long battle between Junky Funky and the bad guys, filled with all the standard narrow escapes and rescues and battle scenes. My mind forgets the chronology, and I remember the story only in fragments.
Josh, at one point, had the bad guys actually take over our school, and then wrote himself in as the kid who saved the school. This was of course every kids fantasy to save the school from terrorists, but Josh was the only one of us with the ego to actually write it down on paper and then submit it to the rest of us. Matt was half genuinely disgusted, and half amused at this, but he took it as another opportunity to mock Josh.
I followed Josh in the circulation order, so I continued the story from there. I was doubly intrigued, both by the concept of writing oneself into one’s own story, and also by the humor of Matt’s disgust with Josh, so I tried to continue the theme in my next chapter to increase the humor.
Josh had not explicitly named the rest of us in his chapter (he had said something like “Josh and his friends”) so I proceeded to name David, Matt, and myself as Josh’s collaborators. My first act was to kill off myself, because the last thing I wanted was to be accused of Josh-like egotism. The bad guys had all of us at gun-point, I attempted a brash escape, and was promptly shot. That left David, Matt and Josh as Junky Funky’s remaining side kicks.
Matt and David were not pleased about being written into the story, nor with the fact that I was continuing to emphasize Josh’s character. Josh went along with it for a while, but as the story continued even he began to tire of the gag. Every time the chapter came around to me again, I would find some excuse to bring back Josh into the story. Sometimes David and Matt as well, but always Josh.
The rest of them were at times upset about this, but they put up with it. Only once did Matt (who followed me in the rotation) resort to using the “Junky Funky woke up, and realized the proceeding chapter had all been a dream” tactic on me, and that was when I genuinely had gone to far.
It started, as usual, with Josh going to far. Josh wrote in Samus Aran (sp?), the hero from then popular Metroid video game, into the story. Samus Aran crashes through the wall, rescues Junky Funky from the bad guys, and tells Junky Funky, “call me Samus Aran, for I will never tell you my true name.” (If memory serves, this was before it was common knowledge that Samus Aran was actually a girl, this being only revealed at the end of the Metroid game. I think he was a masculine character in our story).
Matt was again appalled at Josh’s chapter, and I once again took the ball and ran with it. In my chapter Samus Aran turns to Junky Funky and said something like “Oh you know what, I’ll tell you my real name anyway. It’s Josh. Want to know another secret? I don’t have a brain”. (In those days, we used to tease Josh by saying he didn’t have a brain. Somehow it seemed like the height of repartee at the time.)
Anyway, everyone agreed this had gone too far, and Matt erased the previous two chapters with the dream sequence.
After that last outrage, I made an effort to be more conciliatory. I didn’t kill off Matt and David, but I gave them a nice send off where they part company from Junky Funky, and ride off into the proverbial sunset. I kept using the Josh character, but I made an effort to use him more seriously, and eventually everyone came around to accepting Josh as Junky Funky’s sidekick.
By the start of 6th grade, Matt had transferred schools, and Josh, David, and myself took it upon our selves to bring the Junky Funky story around to an end. But of course it had to be an all out climatic end, pulling out all the stops. We decided that the one page rule was to be ended. The only goal was to build up as much action as humanely possible before handing the story off to the next person. (I think this was mainly Josh and I at this point. For some reason I don’t remember David writing too much of these end parts, but I could be wrong.)
For the climatic final, we also agreed to bring back all the characters that Junky Funky had thus far interacted with, which meant especially Josh. In theory that also met David and Matt come back to make another appearance, although I don’t remember if that was the plan or the reality. I only remember writing about Junky Funky and Josh near the end.
At one point, either Junky Funky or Josh (I think it was Junky Funky) gets his arm cut off in a fight, and it is later replaced by a super strong robotic arm. I don’t remember which arm was lost, but I remember writing scenes in which Junky Funky uses his arm to cut down trees, or punches all the way through the chest of a bad guy. (I think both of those scenes were part of a 6-page long blow-by-blow fight scene between Junky Funky and Josh against a bunch of bad guys. I wrote it up, then it got lost and I wasn’t sure what happened to it. I accused the real Josh of loosing it after I handed it off to him, but later I found it in my folder. By that point, however, we had already written ahead with the story, so I guess it never got to technically be cannon status.)
Eventually we brought it to some sort of conclusion, although I don’t remember what that was. At that point we decided our story was epic enough that we wanted to give it a proper write up, so we gave it to a classmate who had a type writer and knew how to use it (this was in the days before word processors were common) and paid her something like $5 to type the whole thing up. I don’t remember ever seeing the finished product after that. Last I heard it was residing in the house of Matt, where it is either still there today, or one day went out with the garbage.
Josh's recollections:
I e-mailed Josh, the only one I'm still semi in touch with, about his memories. He's not near as verbose as me, but he did send me a couple paragraphs:
Junky Funky. I haven't thought of that in a long time. didn't matt end up with the transcript we paid jenny to type up? Wasn't that the story that ended up with terrorists in ada christian, time travel and the continent of animal comming into play somehow?
I feel like you might have killed your own character off in a bathroom collapse. Other than that, my memory is very shaky.
Influence on Other Works
Because I had a lot of fun writing this with my friends, “The Story of Giddo” was an attempt to replicate this within my family. It didn’t work out so well, mostly because my siblings were too young to write whole pages on their own, and we had to trade off sentence by sentence
This was a collaborative work done around 5th grade by me and my friends Matt, Josh, and David. It was Matt’s idea if I recall correctly. He said he thought it would be cool if we started writing a story and every night one of us would write a different part of it. The rest of us all said that we had often thought of the same idea at one point or another, and had just been waiting for someone else to suggest it. (This is probably one of those things that occurs to every child at one point or another as a cool idea).
Somehow for reasons I don’t remember, I ended up being the one who was given the job of starting it off. The only instructions were I was to write one page only, and then leave the story for others to continue after that. No other caveats were given, and I was free to take the story in any direction I chose. In the end, I chose a bit of a bizarre tale which was meant half as a joke, but which the others agreed to follow willing enough.
Actually, the first installment ended up being two pages, because of some confusion. I was in the habit of skipping every other line when writing on lined paper because this made my appalling penmanship look slightly less messy. So I made an appeal, and was told if I skipped every other line, I could use two pages. There was a bit of a miscommunication however as to whether this was one side, or two pages front and back. I turned in two pages front and back, which wasn’t what Matt had wanted, but we ended up deciding that the first installment could be a bit longer because you need time to set the plot.
Junky Funky was the name of the hero, largely just because that was the first name that came into my head, and it was half as a joke. It’s the kind of name only a 5th grader would think of. But after we had been writing about him for a while, we actually got used to the name and it didn’t seem so funny.
I think Junky Funky was a forest ranger, or a zoologist, or some sort of animal related job. Somehow he stumbles across a plot by the bad guys, who plan to exterminate all the wolves in the world. And I think something involving time travel as well. There is a bit of a fight, Junky Funky is knocked unconscious, and then he has to go back in time to chase the bad guys and stop their evil plan.
At this point in my life, I felt like I had to write something with wolves in it. I had a reputation to keep up. The other guys were expecting it of me.
Actually we all had our own animals that we liked, and we always incorporated our favorite animals into all of our stories and games. David liked gorillas, Josh liked Duck-billed Platypuses, and Matt…Damn, for some reason I’m drawing a blank on what Matt used to like. Koalas, maybe. I’m going to have to look him up one of these days and refresh my memory.
Anyway, all of our favorite animals were incorporated into the story. The bad guys were expanded to be against all of our favorite animals, not just wolves. Junky Funky had to save all these animals, and at various points was helped by them as well. (I seem to remember something about Junky Funky being in a Nasa like control room run by talking gorillas, which must mean at some point we decide to give some of these animals more human like attributes.)
As to the bad guys…I’m not sure really why they wanted to kill off all animals. I don’t think we ever delved seriously into their motivations. I suppose this is a serious literary flaw, but if you look at the Saturday morning cartoons we were brought up on, is it any wonder we had bad guys who were bad just for the sake of badness?
I think in Matt’s next installment, Junky Funky goes back in time, is able to briefly foil the bad guys plan, returns to modern day, and the story continues in the present, where it is just one long battle between Junky Funky and the bad guys, filled with all the standard narrow escapes and rescues and battle scenes. My mind forgets the chronology, and I remember the story only in fragments.
Josh, at one point, had the bad guys actually take over our school, and then wrote himself in as the kid who saved the school. This was of course every kids fantasy to save the school from terrorists, but Josh was the only one of us with the ego to actually write it down on paper and then submit it to the rest of us. Matt was half genuinely disgusted, and half amused at this, but he took it as another opportunity to mock Josh.
I followed Josh in the circulation order, so I continued the story from there. I was doubly intrigued, both by the concept of writing oneself into one’s own story, and also by the humor of Matt’s disgust with Josh, so I tried to continue the theme in my next chapter to increase the humor.
Josh had not explicitly named the rest of us in his chapter (he had said something like “Josh and his friends”) so I proceeded to name David, Matt, and myself as Josh’s collaborators. My first act was to kill off myself, because the last thing I wanted was to be accused of Josh-like egotism. The bad guys had all of us at gun-point, I attempted a brash escape, and was promptly shot. That left David, Matt and Josh as Junky Funky’s remaining side kicks.
Matt and David were not pleased about being written into the story, nor with the fact that I was continuing to emphasize Josh’s character. Josh went along with it for a while, but as the story continued even he began to tire of the gag. Every time the chapter came around to me again, I would find some excuse to bring back Josh into the story. Sometimes David and Matt as well, but always Josh.
The rest of them were at times upset about this, but they put up with it. Only once did Matt (who followed me in the rotation) resort to using the “Junky Funky woke up, and realized the proceeding chapter had all been a dream” tactic on me, and that was when I genuinely had gone to far.
It started, as usual, with Josh going to far. Josh wrote in Samus Aran (sp?), the hero from then popular Metroid video game, into the story. Samus Aran crashes through the wall, rescues Junky Funky from the bad guys, and tells Junky Funky, “call me Samus Aran, for I will never tell you my true name.” (If memory serves, this was before it was common knowledge that Samus Aran was actually a girl, this being only revealed at the end of the Metroid game. I think he was a masculine character in our story).
Matt was again appalled at Josh’s chapter, and I once again took the ball and ran with it. In my chapter Samus Aran turns to Junky Funky and said something like “Oh you know what, I’ll tell you my real name anyway. It’s Josh. Want to know another secret? I don’t have a brain”. (In those days, we used to tease Josh by saying he didn’t have a brain. Somehow it seemed like the height of repartee at the time.)
Anyway, everyone agreed this had gone too far, and Matt erased the previous two chapters with the dream sequence.
After that last outrage, I made an effort to be more conciliatory. I didn’t kill off Matt and David, but I gave them a nice send off where they part company from Junky Funky, and ride off into the proverbial sunset. I kept using the Josh character, but I made an effort to use him more seriously, and eventually everyone came around to accepting Josh as Junky Funky’s sidekick.
By the start of 6th grade, Matt had transferred schools, and Josh, David, and myself took it upon our selves to bring the Junky Funky story around to an end. But of course it had to be an all out climatic end, pulling out all the stops. We decided that the one page rule was to be ended. The only goal was to build up as much action as humanely possible before handing the story off to the next person. (I think this was mainly Josh and I at this point. For some reason I don’t remember David writing too much of these end parts, but I could be wrong.)
For the climatic final, we also agreed to bring back all the characters that Junky Funky had thus far interacted with, which meant especially Josh. In theory that also met David and Matt come back to make another appearance, although I don’t remember if that was the plan or the reality. I only remember writing about Junky Funky and Josh near the end.
At one point, either Junky Funky or Josh (I think it was Junky Funky) gets his arm cut off in a fight, and it is later replaced by a super strong robotic arm. I don’t remember which arm was lost, but I remember writing scenes in which Junky Funky uses his arm to cut down trees, or punches all the way through the chest of a bad guy. (I think both of those scenes were part of a 6-page long blow-by-blow fight scene between Junky Funky and Josh against a bunch of bad guys. I wrote it up, then it got lost and I wasn’t sure what happened to it. I accused the real Josh of loosing it after I handed it off to him, but later I found it in my folder. By that point, however, we had already written ahead with the story, so I guess it never got to technically be cannon status.)
Eventually we brought it to some sort of conclusion, although I don’t remember what that was. At that point we decided our story was epic enough that we wanted to give it a proper write up, so we gave it to a classmate who had a type writer and knew how to use it (this was in the days before word processors were common) and paid her something like $5 to type the whole thing up. I don’t remember ever seeing the finished product after that. Last I heard it was residing in the house of Matt, where it is either still there today, or one day went out with the garbage.
Josh's recollections:
I e-mailed Josh, the only one I'm still semi in touch with, about his memories. He's not near as verbose as me, but he did send me a couple paragraphs:
Junky Funky. I haven't thought of that in a long time. didn't matt end up with the transcript we paid jenny to type up? Wasn't that the story that ended up with terrorists in ada christian, time travel and the continent of animal comming into play somehow?
I feel like you might have killed your own character off in a bathroom collapse. Other than that, my memory is very shaky.
Influence on Other Works
Because I had a lot of fun writing this with my friends, “The Story of Giddo” was an attempt to replicate this within my family. It didn’t work out so well, mostly because my siblings were too young to write whole pages on their own, and we had to trade off sentence by sentence
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Spaceship Wars
Truth be told I’m not entirely sure that I remember the title of this accurately, but it was some generic space opera title.
I wrote this around 3rd grade/ 4th grade. All of it in a single night as well as I can remember. It was inspired by repeated re-watching of “Star Wars” but I was also in the period of my life when I had to incorporate Wolves into everything I wrote.
The story starts out with an Alien named Jot, who is a citizen of one of those standard intergalactic evil empires, but escapes to start a new life on Earth.
Jot lives out in the countryside in peace. His alien race has a special way with animals, and Jot is able to communicate with a wolf, who becomes his pet and is given the name of Jotted. (I remember my mom used to complain about the similarity in names when I gave this to her to read, but it seemed natural to me that the Alien should give his pet wolf some variation of his own name. I don’t know why).
Two boys, Mike and Tom (or some generic names like that) run away from the orphanage one day and are also taken in by Jot.
The four of them are living quite happily until the evil galactic empire returns. At which point Jot is captured and taken as a prisoner back to the space ship.
Mike, and Tom find one of Jot’s spare spaceships and decide to go on a rescue mission. They take the wolf Jotted with them as well. Also somehow a girl named Judy gets mixed up in all this as well. (I’m really sketchy on all the details).
The main action of this story was inspired by Star Wars, in that almost all the action took place inside the big space ship with everyone running around the ship having laser gun battles. The heroes were captured several times, and escaped several times. I don’t remember any of the details, except that at one point Jot escapes by grabbing the arm of his guard and throwing him over his back (a move I saw a lot in action movies in those days, but I’m not entirely sure if it makes sense).
In another instance, the boys are climbing up a rope ladder to escape into a shuttlecraft, when laser fire cuts the ladder in two and they fall back onto the ship.
And that’s all I remember. I assume everyone managed to escape in the end and the good guys were victorious, all that stuff.
My most vivid memory associated with this work is when my 4th grade teacher allowed us to bring in stories we wrote and read them to the class. I brought this one in, but while I was up in front of everyone I discovered I could barely read my own handwriting (something that happened to me a lot in the days before my parents bought a word processor). I could make it out if I looked at it hard enough, but it was painful for everyone involved in listening. Eventually the teacher cut me off and told me I could finish reading it another time, but she never mentioned it again, and neither did I.
Influences on Later WorksWhen I was creating a Wolf Character for my Fabulae story, I gave him the name Jot in memory of the wolf in this story (even though in this story it was the Alien who was named Jot, and the wolf was Jotted).
I wrote this around 3rd grade/ 4th grade. All of it in a single night as well as I can remember. It was inspired by repeated re-watching of “Star Wars” but I was also in the period of my life when I had to incorporate Wolves into everything I wrote.
The story starts out with an Alien named Jot, who is a citizen of one of those standard intergalactic evil empires, but escapes to start a new life on Earth.
Jot lives out in the countryside in peace. His alien race has a special way with animals, and Jot is able to communicate with a wolf, who becomes his pet and is given the name of Jotted. (I remember my mom used to complain about the similarity in names when I gave this to her to read, but it seemed natural to me that the Alien should give his pet wolf some variation of his own name. I don’t know why).
Two boys, Mike and Tom (or some generic names like that) run away from the orphanage one day and are also taken in by Jot.
The four of them are living quite happily until the evil galactic empire returns. At which point Jot is captured and taken as a prisoner back to the space ship.
Mike, and Tom find one of Jot’s spare spaceships and decide to go on a rescue mission. They take the wolf Jotted with them as well. Also somehow a girl named Judy gets mixed up in all this as well. (I’m really sketchy on all the details).
The main action of this story was inspired by Star Wars, in that almost all the action took place inside the big space ship with everyone running around the ship having laser gun battles. The heroes were captured several times, and escaped several times. I don’t remember any of the details, except that at one point Jot escapes by grabbing the arm of his guard and throwing him over his back (a move I saw a lot in action movies in those days, but I’m not entirely sure if it makes sense).
In another instance, the boys are climbing up a rope ladder to escape into a shuttlecraft, when laser fire cuts the ladder in two and they fall back onto the ship.
And that’s all I remember. I assume everyone managed to escape in the end and the good guys were victorious, all that stuff.
My most vivid memory associated with this work is when my 4th grade teacher allowed us to bring in stories we wrote and read them to the class. I brought this one in, but while I was up in front of everyone I discovered I could barely read my own handwriting (something that happened to me a lot in the days before my parents bought a word processor). I could make it out if I looked at it hard enough, but it was painful for everyone involved in listening. Eventually the teacher cut me off and told me I could finish reading it another time, but she never mentioned it again, and neither did I.
Influences on Later WorksWhen I was creating a Wolf Character for my Fabulae story, I gave him the name Jot in memory of the wolf in this story (even though in this story it was the Alien who was named Jot, and the wolf was Jotted).
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Battle of the Frogs
This is another example of a title that I’m not really sure about. It was something cheesy like that though.
Our final project for 8th grade English was to write a novel. I had known this was coming ever since 7th grade, and given my love for writing, this was something I looked forward to for a long time. However very few of my school assignments ever turned out to be very good.
The best kind of story idea is the kind that comes to you out of the blue one afternoon on the walk home from school, and then is promptly written up that night or the day following. The worst ones are the ones thought up under pressure. “I’ve got to think of something for a story in English class…Okay, what about this….”.
Perhaps because it was the spring, and the frogs were coming out of their winter hiding places, I had the image in my mind of a battle between the frogs and the snakes. Gradually a story began to take shape. There was a pond in the woods where the forest creatures lived. The snakes always tried to catch a frog and eat it if they could, but both sides accepted this as the pattern of nature. Then, the snakes started acting strangely. Instead of simply eating the occasional frog, they started engaging in a coordinated extermination effort. The frogs had to band together and defend themselves.
I was, however, at the stage in my life when I regarded it as a moral principle that every story of mine had to include wolves somehow. The frogs initially wait to ask the wolves for help because they are too proud. Eventually they give into their pride and ask the wolves for assistance, and the wolves kill all the snakes. The moral: sometimes it’s okay to ask for help.
I should mention that my 8th grade teacher had us all make an outline of our stories before we began which included a title, plot outline, character descriptions, and a thread. Although I understand now that he was just trying to give us tools to experiment with, I wish he would have made clearer that this is just an example and that not all stories have to be plotted out this strictly.
I was not in the habit of having themes in my stories, and I even asked in class if all stories needed to have themes. “All superior stories do”, he answered. So I tried to shoehorn a kind of moral into the story about the frogs asking for help.
Also, despite my teacher’s attempts at explanation, I really had no idea what the hell a thread was. I eventually wrote in my outline that the thread was after every killing, the snail Jake shows up to mutter some mysterious words of advice to the frogs.
My best friend Josh, who saw my outline, was absolutely appalled. “Not everything has to include wolves, you know,” he said. “You had a really cool idea going until you changed the whole plot to include wolves. And that moral really sucks.”
I knew he was right, but probably would have gone ahead with it anyway if I hadn’t gotten another idea.
In art class we were making our final clay projects. Usually these were carefully supervised constructed projects, but the final year we were allowed to either make a clay pot, or some sort of structure. Because art was one of those subjects were I could never do anything right, I decided to keep it simple and just make a pot. However I soon got bored with it, and added fingers at the bottom. The art teacher wasn’t terribly happy about this turn of events, but I thought it was fun to imagine a hand was emerging from the bottom of the pot. Why a hand was coming out of the pot I couldn’t say. It just seemed cool.
As I continued to work on the pot, I began to imagine its back story, and think of a way to incorporate it somehow into my frog story.
The hero of our story, young Jumpy, is hopping around the banks of the pond when he sees a discarded pot lying on the ground. Suddenly a hand begins to emerge from the pot. And then gradually a whole body, vaguely human in shape, but covered with snake like hairs. It’s none other than the dreaded snake devil, and under his leadership the snakes begin their diabolical plan to kill all the frogs in the pond.
If you’ve spent your whole life in Christian schools, as I had, you get to the point where you begin to see religious parallels in everything. Now that I had a snake devil character, it seemed that the story practically rewrote itself as a parallel story. The snakes were demons, the snake devil was Satan, the frogs were humans, the wolves were angels, and the Alpha Wolf was God/Jesus.
The frogs (humans) are of course incapable of defeating the snakes (demons) on their own. But if they can only bring themselves to ask for help from the wolves (angels) the wolves will come in and save them.
The alpha male off course takes on the snake demon in a dramatic fight. The alpha male kills the snake devil, but appears to die himself as a result of wounds from the fight. And of course is later resurrected. You know how these kind of stories work as well as I do.
A classic example of how things go wrong when you’ve got a good story, and you are looking for some way to force a theme into it (I think my English teacher was full of crap). But I was pretty proud of how clever I was at the time.
And now that I had my outline finally completed, I was ready to start on the actual story itself.
Of which I only got a couple pages written before the end of school. The English teacher ended up just grading us on our outlines, and didn’t actually demand a finished novel.
Since I was in love with my own cleverness at the time, I planned to finish this on my own time, but my enthusiasm quickly faded out.
Influence on Later Works
This actually marked a thrice-fold transition in my writing.
1). The rebuke of my friend must have made an impression. Maybe an unconscious one, because I don’t remember making an outward decision, but this was the last of my wolf stories. I did use Jot as a minor character in my Fabulae story, but he died pretty early on.
2). For a while afterwards I thought it was cool to write stories centering around frogs. I had a lot of ideas about frog stories, none of which ever got beyond the outline phase (see “Invasion of the Frogs”)
3). For about a year after this time I accepted my 8th grade teachers outline formula as gospel. “Invasion of the Frogs” and “Dishon” were both designed according to this formula. After I got bored with the outline in my Dishon story, and decided I had more fun writing when I didn’t know what was coming next, I ditched the structured outline. However I continued to be nagged by the feeling that all superior writing must have a theme or a moral. This is one of the reasons why parts of Fabulae became so preachy. Subtlety is not one of the strengths of a 15 year old.
Our final project for 8th grade English was to write a novel. I had known this was coming ever since 7th grade, and given my love for writing, this was something I looked forward to for a long time. However very few of my school assignments ever turned out to be very good.
The best kind of story idea is the kind that comes to you out of the blue one afternoon on the walk home from school, and then is promptly written up that night or the day following. The worst ones are the ones thought up under pressure. “I’ve got to think of something for a story in English class…Okay, what about this….”.
Perhaps because it was the spring, and the frogs were coming out of their winter hiding places, I had the image in my mind of a battle between the frogs and the snakes. Gradually a story began to take shape. There was a pond in the woods where the forest creatures lived. The snakes always tried to catch a frog and eat it if they could, but both sides accepted this as the pattern of nature. Then, the snakes started acting strangely. Instead of simply eating the occasional frog, they started engaging in a coordinated extermination effort. The frogs had to band together and defend themselves.
I was, however, at the stage in my life when I regarded it as a moral principle that every story of mine had to include wolves somehow. The frogs initially wait to ask the wolves for help because they are too proud. Eventually they give into their pride and ask the wolves for assistance, and the wolves kill all the snakes. The moral: sometimes it’s okay to ask for help.
I should mention that my 8th grade teacher had us all make an outline of our stories before we began which included a title, plot outline, character descriptions, and a thread. Although I understand now that he was just trying to give us tools to experiment with, I wish he would have made clearer that this is just an example and that not all stories have to be plotted out this strictly.
I was not in the habit of having themes in my stories, and I even asked in class if all stories needed to have themes. “All superior stories do”, he answered. So I tried to shoehorn a kind of moral into the story about the frogs asking for help.
Also, despite my teacher’s attempts at explanation, I really had no idea what the hell a thread was. I eventually wrote in my outline that the thread was after every killing, the snail Jake shows up to mutter some mysterious words of advice to the frogs.
My best friend Josh, who saw my outline, was absolutely appalled. “Not everything has to include wolves, you know,” he said. “You had a really cool idea going until you changed the whole plot to include wolves. And that moral really sucks.”
I knew he was right, but probably would have gone ahead with it anyway if I hadn’t gotten another idea.
In art class we were making our final clay projects. Usually these were carefully supervised constructed projects, but the final year we were allowed to either make a clay pot, or some sort of structure. Because art was one of those subjects were I could never do anything right, I decided to keep it simple and just make a pot. However I soon got bored with it, and added fingers at the bottom. The art teacher wasn’t terribly happy about this turn of events, but I thought it was fun to imagine a hand was emerging from the bottom of the pot. Why a hand was coming out of the pot I couldn’t say. It just seemed cool.
As I continued to work on the pot, I began to imagine its back story, and think of a way to incorporate it somehow into my frog story.
The hero of our story, young Jumpy, is hopping around the banks of the pond when he sees a discarded pot lying on the ground. Suddenly a hand begins to emerge from the pot. And then gradually a whole body, vaguely human in shape, but covered with snake like hairs. It’s none other than the dreaded snake devil, and under his leadership the snakes begin their diabolical plan to kill all the frogs in the pond.
If you’ve spent your whole life in Christian schools, as I had, you get to the point where you begin to see religious parallels in everything. Now that I had a snake devil character, it seemed that the story practically rewrote itself as a parallel story. The snakes were demons, the snake devil was Satan, the frogs were humans, the wolves were angels, and the Alpha Wolf was God/Jesus.
The frogs (humans) are of course incapable of defeating the snakes (demons) on their own. But if they can only bring themselves to ask for help from the wolves (angels) the wolves will come in and save them.
The alpha male off course takes on the snake demon in a dramatic fight. The alpha male kills the snake devil, but appears to die himself as a result of wounds from the fight. And of course is later resurrected. You know how these kind of stories work as well as I do.
A classic example of how things go wrong when you’ve got a good story, and you are looking for some way to force a theme into it (I think my English teacher was full of crap). But I was pretty proud of how clever I was at the time.
And now that I had my outline finally completed, I was ready to start on the actual story itself.
Of which I only got a couple pages written before the end of school. The English teacher ended up just grading us on our outlines, and didn’t actually demand a finished novel.
Since I was in love with my own cleverness at the time, I planned to finish this on my own time, but my enthusiasm quickly faded out.
Influence on Later Works
This actually marked a thrice-fold transition in my writing.
1). The rebuke of my friend must have made an impression. Maybe an unconscious one, because I don’t remember making an outward decision, but this was the last of my wolf stories. I did use Jot as a minor character in my Fabulae story, but he died pretty early on.
2). For a while afterwards I thought it was cool to write stories centering around frogs. I had a lot of ideas about frog stories, none of which ever got beyond the outline phase (see “Invasion of the Frogs”)
3). For about a year after this time I accepted my 8th grade teachers outline formula as gospel. “Invasion of the Frogs” and “Dishon” were both designed according to this formula. After I got bored with the outline in my Dishon story, and decided I had more fun writing when I didn’t know what was coming next, I ditched the structured outline. However I continued to be nagged by the feeling that all superior writing must have a theme or a moral. This is one of the reasons why parts of Fabulae became so preachy. Subtlety is not one of the strengths of a 15 year old.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Jungle Farm/ Battle of the Animals
These are two different ideas that got merged into one. Both are the kind of ideas that only make sense to the mind of a child, and in order to understand them you have to try and enter that mindset.
The first idea was that a farmer moves his farm into the jungle. Initially he did it just for the challenge, but in later versions he was fleeing a troubled past back home, and the jungle was the only place he could start a new life.
Again, this needs to be understood through the lense of a child, where both the idea of a farm and that of a jungle represent clearly defined images from cartoons and picture books. A farm has a barn, a guy in a farmer’s hat, cows, horses, chickens, sheep, and all the usual barnyard animals, no more no less. The jungle is a wild place where tigers and alligators are lurking behind every corner. Can the farmer and his farm animals defend themselves against all the wild beasts? Lots of adventures are sure to follow.
The second idea was also based on the childhood image of a farm. In this case the animals revolt against the farmer and fight for their freedom. In the first version the farmer was an evil tyrant. In later versions the farmer is not a bad guy, and the story would be sympathetic to both the farmer and the animals. I was at the age where I thought it would be cool to write a war epic with no good guys or bad guys. Around this time I had started several such stories, but very few of them ever got beyond the idea phase.
Eventually these two ideas got combined. The farmer goes out to the jungle, and against all odds he makes his farm prosper. The first animals to try and drive him out are an alligator and a tiger, who attack him together. It is a long bloody battle, but eventually the farmer is victorious. He then nurses the wounded Alligator and Tiger back to health, and comes to earn their respect, after which the Alligator and the Tiger join the animals on the farm.
After the reader has admired the farmer through all this struggle, when the battle between the animals and the farmer finally breaks out, the reader does not know who to support. Do you support the animals in their battle for freedom, or the farmer who has sacrificed so much to get the farm started?
The first versions of this story appeared during 3rd grade. I had come up with the idea for my own writing, but tried to incorporate it into a writing assignment at one point. (My 3rd grade teacher was less than enthused).
The story was in the back of my mind for a long time after that, on and off the back burner. I would sometimes start writing a version of it, then get discouraged and go onto something else.
When my parents bought their first computer and word processor, this was the first story I started writing on it (circa 6th or 7th grade). As is often the case, my imagination was running way ahead of my writing ability. As I struggled to write the first few chapters, I had already envisioned a whole series. After the epic battle, the farmer and the animals work out a power sharing agreement, and go on to have many more adventures in the jungle.
It was around this time that my fascination with comic books was beginning, so I envisioned this as my own comic book (without the pictures). Every animal on the farm would be named and indexed on another sheet of paper, and they would all have their own separate adventures as well as over arching plot lines that would incorporate all of the farm. I could sell issues to members of my family (I didn’t envision much more of an audience) and even invite them to write in their own animal characters and adventures if they wanted.
I began writing the first story, which concerned the back-story of the farmer. It turns out he is a prince and heir to the thrown, but his brother wants the kingdom instead and tries to kill him. They have a fight in which the farmer wins, but not caring for riches or power, gives up the throne to his brother anyway. He then leaves together with his best friend to pursue their joint dream of starting a farm in the jungle.
(In all previous drafts, the farmer had simply been known as Farmer Jones, which I had stuck somewhere in my mind as the standard name for all farmers. I must have gotten it from a children’s book or a fischer price toy somewhere along the line. When I started creating a list of all the characters around 6th grade, I decided it would be cool to use only names from the Bible, so I changed the farmer’s name to Timothy. I don’t remember any of the other character’s names).
After writing the first chapter, I started to print off several copies on the printer to sell to the rest of the family. My mother stopped me because it was a waste of ink. She volunteered to use the copy machine at work, and I gave it to her on the promise that she wouldn’t read it first. She returned it to me the next day and said, “I noticed there are a lot of typos in here. Why don’t you fix those before we start making copies?”
You can never trust parents. Woe to any child who doesn’t learn this quickly on. We had a debate about whether she had broken her promise, and she justified herself by saying she shouldn’t have had to make that promise in the first place, and as my mother she had a right to read everything I wrote without having to pay for it.
I never did get the copies made, and the quarrel left a bad taste in my mouth. I lost enthusiasm for this project shortly after that. (Although given my track record, that probably would have happened regardless).
Influence on Other Works
The idea of taking names straight from the Bible, which I had initially used here just because I had to think of a lot of names for all the animals, was one I continued in several other stories, incorporating both Biblical and classical names as the main source for my stories.
The idea of a comic-book type serial was one I used again in Fabulae.
The first idea was that a farmer moves his farm into the jungle. Initially he did it just for the challenge, but in later versions he was fleeing a troubled past back home, and the jungle was the only place he could start a new life.
Again, this needs to be understood through the lense of a child, where both the idea of a farm and that of a jungle represent clearly defined images from cartoons and picture books. A farm has a barn, a guy in a farmer’s hat, cows, horses, chickens, sheep, and all the usual barnyard animals, no more no less. The jungle is a wild place where tigers and alligators are lurking behind every corner. Can the farmer and his farm animals defend themselves against all the wild beasts? Lots of adventures are sure to follow.
The second idea was also based on the childhood image of a farm. In this case the animals revolt against the farmer and fight for their freedom. In the first version the farmer was an evil tyrant. In later versions the farmer is not a bad guy, and the story would be sympathetic to both the farmer and the animals. I was at the age where I thought it would be cool to write a war epic with no good guys or bad guys. Around this time I had started several such stories, but very few of them ever got beyond the idea phase.
Eventually these two ideas got combined. The farmer goes out to the jungle, and against all odds he makes his farm prosper. The first animals to try and drive him out are an alligator and a tiger, who attack him together. It is a long bloody battle, but eventually the farmer is victorious. He then nurses the wounded Alligator and Tiger back to health, and comes to earn their respect, after which the Alligator and the Tiger join the animals on the farm.
After the reader has admired the farmer through all this struggle, when the battle between the animals and the farmer finally breaks out, the reader does not know who to support. Do you support the animals in their battle for freedom, or the farmer who has sacrificed so much to get the farm started?
The first versions of this story appeared during 3rd grade. I had come up with the idea for my own writing, but tried to incorporate it into a writing assignment at one point. (My 3rd grade teacher was less than enthused).
The story was in the back of my mind for a long time after that, on and off the back burner. I would sometimes start writing a version of it, then get discouraged and go onto something else.
When my parents bought their first computer and word processor, this was the first story I started writing on it (circa 6th or 7th grade). As is often the case, my imagination was running way ahead of my writing ability. As I struggled to write the first few chapters, I had already envisioned a whole series. After the epic battle, the farmer and the animals work out a power sharing agreement, and go on to have many more adventures in the jungle.
It was around this time that my fascination with comic books was beginning, so I envisioned this as my own comic book (without the pictures). Every animal on the farm would be named and indexed on another sheet of paper, and they would all have their own separate adventures as well as over arching plot lines that would incorporate all of the farm. I could sell issues to members of my family (I didn’t envision much more of an audience) and even invite them to write in their own animal characters and adventures if they wanted.
I began writing the first story, which concerned the back-story of the farmer. It turns out he is a prince and heir to the thrown, but his brother wants the kingdom instead and tries to kill him. They have a fight in which the farmer wins, but not caring for riches or power, gives up the throne to his brother anyway. He then leaves together with his best friend to pursue their joint dream of starting a farm in the jungle.
(In all previous drafts, the farmer had simply been known as Farmer Jones, which I had stuck somewhere in my mind as the standard name for all farmers. I must have gotten it from a children’s book or a fischer price toy somewhere along the line. When I started creating a list of all the characters around 6th grade, I decided it would be cool to use only names from the Bible, so I changed the farmer’s name to Timothy. I don’t remember any of the other character’s names).
After writing the first chapter, I started to print off several copies on the printer to sell to the rest of the family. My mother stopped me because it was a waste of ink. She volunteered to use the copy machine at work, and I gave it to her on the promise that she wouldn’t read it first. She returned it to me the next day and said, “I noticed there are a lot of typos in here. Why don’t you fix those before we start making copies?”
You can never trust parents. Woe to any child who doesn’t learn this quickly on. We had a debate about whether she had broken her promise, and she justified herself by saying she shouldn’t have had to make that promise in the first place, and as my mother she had a right to read everything I wrote without having to pay for it.
I never did get the copies made, and the quarrel left a bad taste in my mouth. I lost enthusiasm for this project shortly after that. (Although given my track record, that probably would have happened regardless).
Influence on Other Works
The idea of taking names straight from the Bible, which I had initially used here just because I had to think of a lot of names for all the animals, was one I continued in several other stories, incorporating both Biblical and classical names as the main source for my stories.
The idea of a comic-book type serial was one I used again in Fabulae.
Monday, April 10, 2006
The Bad Monkey
This was a play script that my best friend TJ and I came up with around 1st or 2nd grade. We performed it in front of my mother.
Basically there is a monkey who insults these two dogs all the time. The dogs plan to get revenge on the monkey. They get the shark to help them. Then they lure the monkey into the water (I think they do something like get the monkey to chase them, run up to the edge of the water, and then step aside at the last minute as the Monkey runs past them.) At which point the shark eats the monkey.
In retrospect, this seems a little harsh for a monkey who was only guilty of insults. I’m not exactly sure why my youngest stories tend to be my most violent. But then again, if you look at the fairy tales and bible stories I grew up on, it’s probably no wonder.
There was a sequel as well that I wrote over the following summer. The two dogs meet a monkey who looks sad. They ask him what is wrong. He tells them his brother was just killed by two dogs. The dogs either confess, or the monkey figures it out, and there is a fight. The monkey swears revenge, and there is another plan devised to kill the second monkey. (It was slightly more elaborate, but I think the end might have also involved being eaten by a shark).
Basically there is a monkey who insults these two dogs all the time. The dogs plan to get revenge on the monkey. They get the shark to help them. Then they lure the monkey into the water (I think they do something like get the monkey to chase them, run up to the edge of the water, and then step aside at the last minute as the Monkey runs past them.) At which point the shark eats the monkey.
In retrospect, this seems a little harsh for a monkey who was only guilty of insults. I’m not exactly sure why my youngest stories tend to be my most violent. But then again, if you look at the fairy tales and bible stories I grew up on, it’s probably no wonder.
There was a sequel as well that I wrote over the following summer. The two dogs meet a monkey who looks sad. They ask him what is wrong. He tells them his brother was just killed by two dogs. The dogs either confess, or the monkey figures it out, and there is a fight. The monkey swears revenge, and there is another plan devised to kill the second monkey. (It was slightly more elaborate, but I think the end might have also involved being eaten by a shark).
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