Meme: A Paralyzing Trip Down Memory Lane

[nebroadwe]

In a recent post, fmanalyst pointed out that the creative projects your parents coo over when you're six or eleven look ... different ... when you're thirty or forty. All of my wretched attempts at the visual and plastic arts but one have disappeared into the mists of time, but my parents saved my elementary school writing juvenilia and I have just about everything I've attempted since high school. (Amazingly, it's only a file-drawer's worth of hard copy, though I have a lot more tucked away on the computer.) So, here's a challenge to the creatively-inclined on my f-list: anyone got any work demonstrating his/her early promise that s/he'd care to share? Myself, I'd like to offer a brief helping of fanfiction, based on the characters in my elementary school reading books (aside: anyone else remember Sam, Ann, and Walter?), composed probably when I was six or so:

Kit Gets Lost
Tab is Ann's cat. Tab has a kitten. Her name is Kit. Kit likes milk and fish. Tab likes Kit. But Kit is always frightened by anything. Sam and Ann were getting ready for a picnic. Crash! Ann has dropped a dish. Kit ran away into the woods and got lost. Kit was sad.

Kit heard a noise. Kit stood still and the noise Kit heard was a fox! The fox bit Kit and took her away. What will happen next?

Whe[n] the fox got to his den he put Kit down. Kit stood up.

Kit tryed to sneak out. The fox was away and she got out.

She was cold and hungry. She heard a noise. Pat, pat. Kit stood still. The noise was Sam and Ann they were looking for her. They took her home and fed her fish and milk. The End.

All very melodramatic, isn't it? I didn't discover comedy until high school, when I made friends with a group of girls who'd been writing a collective novel for a couple of years and they let me play along. Ah, the joy of having an audience: I remember parties where we'd all sit around scribbling and then read out our scenes to each other -- my contributions were usually Monty-Python-esque interludes, filled with pratfalls and slapstick, since I wasn't comfortable with the kissing bits and didn't have enough seniority to suggest major plot developments. But occasionally I weighed in with something slightly less manically silly, though verbal play still drove the plot-engine:

Tom walked into the kitchen with purposeful stride. He was, at the moment, a man with a mission; and that mission was to discover something more edible than the carnations he had been subsisting on all morning. He paused at the kitchen table to entertain the amazing image of himself as a knight in shining armor mounted on a white horse, about to take leave of his ladylove and set out on a quest from which he might, conceivably, never return. The ladylove, a small, dark-haired young woman dressed in white, smiled bravely and proudly through her tears at Tom as he cantered off, and waved a small hand in farewell.

Tom sighed. What's wrong with this picture? The real ladylove would have been dressed in chainmail and brandishing a mace; and she would probably have insisted on accompanying him. Either that, or she would have been entertaining another knight in the castle not ten minutes after he had disappeared over the horizon. Tom let the image dissolve and continued across the kitchen toward the refrigerator.

He had no idea what is interior would look like; probably very bare, since regular meals had ceased in the huggermugger of arriving guests with assorted luggage crises, mental hang-ups, and family feuds, all of which set Marilyn's teeth on edge. Tom paused with his hand on the refrigerator door to entertain another wild mental image, this one of Marilyn grinding her teeth to shrapnel and making soup out of them. The ensuing chaos was rather horrible and extremely messy, so Tom let the image go and opened the door.

The refrigerator was, to coin a phrase, a mess. Tom had to admit, however, that it did give a rather unique insight into the personalities of the assorted wedding guests. The sheer amount of specialty foods that had been crammed onto the shelves was in itself extraordinary, but it was the variety that stunned him. The guests had brought everything from leftover escargot to chicken noodle soup, including caviar, peanut butter, whale's tongue in liver sauce, celery, and -- Tom blinked -- pickled chicken fingers, all in hand-labelled Tupperware containers. It was difficult to determine the potentially edible from the definitely inedible from the things that had been banned on six continents as more dangerous dead than alive. If they were dead; Tom kept getting an impression of movement on the second shelf out of the corner of his eye.

Well, life is short anyway, thought the knight-errant philosophically as he plunged his hand into the depths of the refrigerator and snagged an indefinite food item. It looked like some sort of meat in a sauce and smelled tangy. Tom gingerly poked his finger into the sauce. Nothing attacked him, so he pulled his finger back and tasted the residue of sauce still on it. It was edible, even tasty, whatever it was. Tom took his mystery meat to the table and dug in.

Meg walked into the kitchen about five minutes later, also with purposeful stride. She was a woman with a mission, and that mission was to convince her fiancé that they needed to go someplace exotic on their honeymoon. She plopped down on the chair opposite Tom. "I need to talk to you."

"Fine," said Tom through a mouthful of his indeterminate main course. "Talk."

"We haven't decided where we're going on our honeymoon yet," said Meg, having decided that a frontal attack would be her best tactic.

"We haven't decided to have a honeymoon yet," retorted Tom. "Just an elopement."

"I was hoping the one would just -- you know, sort of lead into the other," coaxed Meg.

Tom sighed and put down his fork. "Look, my little spendthrift, I don't have that much of a stake, and I don't want to squander your bridal portion in the first week of our marriage."

Meg decided to switch tactics. "Is life important to you?"

"Huh?" Tom was momentarily fazed by this non sequitur.

"Do you want to live past your wedding night?"

Tom began to eat again, relaxing now that he had Meg's argument pegged. "Are you threatening me with fatal violence if I don't indulge your little whim?" he asked, fishing through the dark red sauce for another piece of mystery meat.

"Noooo," said Meg slowly, savoring the victory she knew was coming. "But my mother might -- if we don't drop out of sight for, say, a fortnight, so that she has time to get used to the fact that I've married an em-ploy-ee."

"Um," said Tom, swallowing to clear his mouth and wet his suddenly dry throat. "The practical value of an extended wedding tour does begin to present itself."

"Good lad," said Meg, reaching across and patting him on the cheek. "I thought it might. How about Acapulco?"

"What?" Tom spluttered. The image of the knight-errant arose unbidden in his brain again, this time with the ladylove across his saddlebow as the two happy lovers rode off into the sunset. The ladylove, Tom noticed, was not giving the knight-errant directions, nor was she insisting that the ride into the sunrise instead. Bleah, he thought at them.

"Well, it was only a suggestion," sulked Meg. Then, brightening, "How about Saint Moritz?"

Tom nearly choked on his tongue. "How about the moon?" he shouted. "How about a round-trip tour of the solar system, with stopovers at Mars and Venus? How about a short excursion to Alpha Centauri?"

"Shush," cautioned Meg. "You'll bring the house down on us."

Tom felt as though it had already fallen in on him. "You can't be serious. Do you have any idea what that would cost?" he asked without much hope of an affirmative answer.

"Do you have a better suggestion?"

"Yes!" said Tom, surprised to find that he did. "Let's see the country."

"Huh?" Now it was Meg's turn to look at him as if he were crazy. "I've seen all the important parts already."

"Yeah, all the tracks and show rings."

"What else is there to see?" demanded Meg.

Tom thought fast. "The great cities -- New York, Los Angeles, Dallas."

"Bleah," opined Meg.

"Green and rolling fields, lofty purple mountains -- "

"Bleah."

"Wild horses, running free over the endless prairies," offered Tom in desperation.

"Bl-- what?"

Tom smiled at her. "Caught you."

"Ha, ha," said Meg. "Ha, ha."

"Is that reaction favorable or unfavorable?"

Meg considered. It was no good fighting to a draw; that was as bad as a loss. Compromise seemed the best course. "I'll tell you what," she said. "I'll stay in this country if you let me pick our honeymoon spot."

"Hmm, that sounds fair enough," said Tom doubtfully, fishing for more indeterminate meat. "Yes, I suppose that's okay."

Geography had never been Meg's best subject, but almost immediately the perfect locale travelled from her brain to her tongue. "I choose Las Vegas."

"No way!" shouted Tom before he could censor himself. Wild fantasies surged through his brain, all of them involving Meg and the loss of a too-large sum of money, and all ending with his death at the hands of the local mafia in a variety of unpleasantly excruciating ways. Tom cursed his overactive imagination and resolved never to eat carnations on an empty stomach again.

"You promised," pouted Meg, and then changed moods as if she were changing hats. "We will be able to see a lot of America that way, Tom," she cooed at him. "Do it for me. Please? Pretty, pretty please?"

For a while Tom had entertained the hope that long exposure to Meg's wiles had given him a sufficient immunity to them to be able to overrule her more extravagant caprices, but he now discovered to his intense chagrin that she could still melt his resolve right out from under him, as if she were a heat lamp and he were standing on thin ice. "All right," he sighed, resolving never to even look at a carnation again. "All right, we'll go to Vegas. But," he added firmly, attempting to salvage some authority, "we will not gamble away our fortune, okay?"

"Anything you say," agreed Meg glibly. "I'll go make reservations at the Golden Nugget." She came around the table and kissed him quickly. "I love you," she whispered.

After Meg had gone, Tom picked at his food, wondering how he could feel happy when he had so obviously been taken for a ride. Meg had a way of turning his every attempt to rein her in into a fiasco, and then leave him feeling good about the fact that she had won. He sighed. Knights-errant shouldn't have to deal with willful ladyloves.

I hadn't yet learned to eschew excess verbiage and I was still in love with other people's phraseology, though I had begun to learn about the ebb and flow of dialogue and the use of metaphor and action to tie a scene together. Still, the most important thing writing stuff like this allowed me to do was make my friends giggle -- the finest compliment on earth.

Anyone? Anyone? C'mon, this isn't embarrassing at all ... :-)

Comments

[haleysings.livejournal.com]

*deer-in-headlights look* Um, I don't know if any of my early stuff should see the light of day again. Most of it is unfinished stuff, anyway. Seeing as how my writing is still sort of...mm...unrefined...
If you're REALLY that interested, though, if you google or yahoo search for my full name, you might find a non-fiction article I wrote as a preteen for a magazine, and one other story that won a local award. (My two things I show off to prove that I am a writer. XD;) I might actually find the courage to show some old, old stuff later...

Your stuff is rather good, I think. ^^ Better than I could write at that age!

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Um, I don't know if any of my early stuff should see the light of day again. Most of it is unfinished stuff, anyway. Seeing as how my writing is still sort of...mm...unrefined...

Hey, you're talking to someone who just posted the run-on sentence "The noise was Sam and Ann they were looking for her." Doesn't get much more unrefined than the stuff one produces at age six. (I love getting my godchildren to dictate stories to me -- the oddest things get rolled into the narrative.) Or perhaps I should transcribe one of those other pieces, the ones with the slapstick ("You hocked the eight-day Waterbury? Why?" "Um, um -- it was temporary insanity! I throw myself on the mercy of this court!") to prove that at fifteen I could give the comedians of FF.net a run for their money ... :-)

[haleysings.livejournal.com]

True. XD; When I was six, though, I could barely even spell "noise". (It was odd, I could read very well, but my writing and spelling was horrible.) I'm sure at fifteen you at least had better spelling and grammar than a lot of the other 15-year-olds on FF.net do. XD; (Not that there's not good writers on FF.net--there's just also bad ones.)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

When I was six, though, I could barely even spell "noise". (It was odd, I could read very well, but my writing and spelling was horrible.)

When I was six, I was finally figuring out not to draw my lower-case "y"s backwards. I could read very well, but my handwriting was butt-ugly. I learned how to type in sixth grade and never looked back, not once. The odd of it is that my handwriting's actually quite legible now, but I only ever use it for random note-taking.

[haleysings.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank goodness for typing. XD; I'll sometimes handwrite things still, but now that I have a laptop it's pretty rare.

[ishte.livejournal.com]

Oh boy. hee... I could submit some.... Wonder if I can find Star Crossed... my very first 'published' work. In the school creative writing magazine. hee...

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Post! Post! Post! Post! :-)

[ishte.livejournal.com]

Oi.. it's something that will have to be dug up... and either typed or Dragoned in...(Dragonned? Hrm.. maybe I guess it would be more correct to say dictated haha.)I'm totally not sure where those old texts are. The Sketches of the Mind magazines are undoubtedly in my basement filled with spiders and becoming musty smelling. >_< Stupid damp basement.