Grumble!grumble at a crackly stack of old papers from the
right era—and with that gray-brown Big Chief Tablet paper, which feels soooo delicious
beneath a ballpoint pen, ah memory!—but doesn’t contain the thing I was looking
for. Shove box back under bed. Reach for next, only there isn’t one because apparently
I was able at one miraculous point in my adult life to throw something away,
which in general is a good thing, only I wish I’d kept this one thing because—
Oh! Hi. Sorry. I meant to post earlier, but I’ve been
treasure hunting all morning and time got away from me.
This week on SFF Seven we’re posting the earliest bit of our
writing we can get our hands on, and I really thought I’d saved this thing I wrote in seventh grade called “The
Golden Walnut,” which was part court intrigue, part murder mystery, and
revolved around a prince hunting down his mother’s assassin. It was the first
thing I finished, so if you’ve defining a story as a thing with a beginning, middle,
and end, this was my first. I had hoped to share some of it and solicit
giggles, but I can’t find the thing.
After the walnut story, I wrote a lot of angsty, emo crud,
and by that time I was using a computer, so I do, unfortunately for your
eyeballs, have an early story from back then. It’s a Russian vampire fairy tale
with lots of murder in it and is, uh, pretty bad. I’ll just screenshot the
first few lines here.
I guess in between the era of the walnut story (middle
school) and the vampire story (high school) I didn’t grow much
beyond the beginning-middle-and-end understanding of what makes a story. Even though I read canon and wrote papers about tons of books in college, it was like for the purposes of my own work, I didn’t
understand the first thing about narrative voice or point of view or theme or genre. That Russian vampire
story? Is about the baby. She’s the
one who grows up and becomes a vampire. There’s no reason to start with her
birth, teenage-me! You start at the good part! The killing-people part! What
were you even thinking?!
(I was also somewhat bloodthirsty as a beginning writer. I’m
sure a psychologist would have a field day trying to trace a path from that
brain to the one that just wrote three fluffy-sweet romance novels.)
At any rate, there was a whole era where I had no idea how
to write a story or what even made a story. I could wield gorgeous grammar –
did you see that semicolon?—and even
lay down a nice scene here or there, but tying it all together eluded me. I was
writing okay stuff, but there was no point to it. And if there is no point to
it, there is no reason for a reader to invest the time to read it.
I tried to crack the nut of storytelling for a long time,
churning out flowy sentences and occasionally some nice scenes, exhausting my
fingers with a crud-ton of fanfiction, even begging advice from more experienced
writers. (Note: Critique groups that spend a lot of time talking about first
sentences and the overuse of the word “was” might be super helpful for
low-level sentence crafting, but they are completely useless for learning how
to compose an entire story.) Eventually, I found my way to the Austin chapter
of Romance Writers of America, and specifically to a little critique group
there which was run at the time by Skyler White. Y’all, I learned so much in
such a short amount of time. The last decade has been a thrill ride like crazy.
I can’t put it all here, but the eureka moment for me was
when I learned that all those books I read in college and wrote long, thoughty papers
about? Were stories! Penned by people! And I am also a person!
Shut up, this was a revelation.
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that the core lesson of
storytelling, the thing that changed my life, was realizing that I don’t have
to invent storytelling. There’s a long history of it, in every language on the
planet, a deep treasure trove of shapes and sizes and purposes, a giant bin of bright-colored candy that we can reach in and grab and lick.
Okay, that might have been a bit much. But you get the
point. Things changed for me when i realized that good writing isn’t sentences or semicolons. It’s stories. Yeah with beginnings,
middles, ends, but also with treasure nuggets of purpose.
