One of my favorite things to do as a teenager was write stories. They were not adventures and not science fiction. Instead they would probably be categorized as “youth literature, romance.” Not that I would ever try to get any of them published.
Looking back, they were pretty silly. All of them were about the main character, a girl similar to myself but in slightly different circumstances. Tori was a middle child with two sisters, all daughters of a single mom. Dawn one of a set of quadruplets, but the only girl; their family was well off and her parents didn’t mind that her friends came over every day, no matter how many of them there were. Catrina was an only child whose mother had died when she was younger and whose father was the most important man in the small town where they lived.
Each of those three stories had a different fate. I actually finished Tori’s story, in which she reformed the ‘date em and dump em’ guy at her school by refusing to be his girlfriend until he realized what a jerk he was. I had Dawn’s story planned out from beginning to end, but I lost the plot when I was almost halfway through, and my attention wandered off. I never finished Catrina’s story, and never knew really how I wanted it to turn out. The last time I worked on it, the hero to her heroine was about to leave town; with that ominous happening, things would probably not have ended well.
Somewhere between Tori and Catrina I had become a writer who allowed her characters to determine the plot. The best example of this was Kasey’s story, which began with her excitement in introducing her best friend Seth to the rest of her good friends at school. My plan was to have all of her friends point out what a good boyfriend Seth would make and to have her deny it vehemently until finally giving in. Instead, her friend Jaden hijacked the plot and decided that he would be a better boyfriend for Kasey. He made such a convincing argument that even I couldn’t stop him.
Something that is a part of every high school writing class is the introduction of free writing. Free writing is when a writer puts pencil to page (or fingers to keys) and just lets words flow out, whether they’re coherent or not. My high school English teacher would announce that we were going to free write for a certain amount of time, and I would frown. I didn’t see how free writing was productive, since pretty much everyone started with something like, “This is stupid.” Not only that, but the teacher was going to look at what we’d written, and I didn’t want to annoy her with my true feelings about free writing.
I would stare at the page for the first three or four minutes, and then, concerned that the teacher would notice that I wasn’t doing anything, I would start writing dialogue. It was usually just a conversation between two people. I didn’t know who they were, but that became clearer as they spoke to one another. Sometimes it was two friends discussing relationship gossip. Occasionally it would be siblings talking about what they would do after school. I didn’t often continue with these scenes beyond free writing time, but they were interesting to think about. They got me through the ten or so minutes of mandatory free writing, and usually made me wish the free writing time would go longer to allow me to meet my characters.
One of the things my friends and I enjoyed doing was to write together. We did all of the normal things high school girls did: talk on the phone, write notes to each other in class (though I suppose now high schoolers text each other), and gossip about boys. Another thing we enjoyed, though, was playing writing games.
During study hall, hanging out after school, or in the downtime between playing in pep band at basketball games, my friends and I would pass a notebook around. We would take turns advancing the story, writing a sentence apiece. Sometimes we would play the “and” game (write until you get to the word ‘and,’ then pass the notebook on), and other times the challenge was in beginning the sentence with the same letter with which the last person had ended their sentence. Bored basketball spectators could look across the gym to see us sitting on the stage, cackling crazily at something one of us had written, or rolling on the floor giggling at one another.
I once used one of these games to complete a very late assignment for an English class. I was bored and didn’t want to write it, but the following day was the last I had to turn it in or I would recieve a zero. My mother suggested that I use one of the writing games I was so fond of, and a couple of hours later I was finished.
Every sentence (except those during dialogue) began with the letter that the last one had ended with. To accomplish this, every character’s name ended with a vowel and started with an often-used consonant. Despite these restraints, I had tons of fun writing it, and there was no awkwardness in it; it still reads like a normal story: the characters walk in the rain and dark from their broken down car to an aunt’s house, where they meet some new friends. There’s even a bit with a musical number. I’d have to dig around in some boxes, but I’m pretty sure I still have a copy of it somewhere.
In addition to the amount of pages exceeding those that were assigned, my teacher was impressed with the story. She gave me an A, then apologized for having to downgrade it to a D+. “If only you’d turned it in on time,” she told me sadly.
One semester during my sophomore year of college (the word “year” being the only one that fits, in reality it was more like three or four years) I took an English class which focused on the writing of memoirs. We read them; we wrote them. Before that class I would not have thought I could enjoy writing non-fiction since my first love was fiction. Now, non-fiction is all I do.
I’m kind of afraid to try fiction again. I don’t want to fall back into the silly stories I wrote when I was a teenager, and I’m not confident that if I do write something that anyone will like it.
Maybe someday I’ll try again. But for now, I like to write what I like to write; though I’ll never forget my silly teenage days, or the characters I brought to life.
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