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.