Samples of my early fiction (ouch)
"Not describing the POV character is a weakness of mine - I just have trouble finding a graceful way to do it. I hate the 'Jesse walked to the mirror, meeting his own intense, hazel-tending-towards-green gaze beneath the unruly locks of his floppyish, straight mud-brown hair. Damn, he thought, I am hot' approach.
--maculategiraffe.
Topic in this post: Excruciating examples of why the world was better before teens could post their writings online.
Okay, that's an exaggeration; I'm sure there are some splendid teenage writers posting their stories online. I'm just glad that my early efforts weren't preserved on the Internet.
This post is inspired by another author's post (Friends-locked, which is why I'm not linking to it), in which she recreated part of a story she wrote at age twelve. She then asked, "Anybody else have some marvelously embarrassing fic from when they were younger?"
If I were wise, I would follow her course of rewriting a childhood story. However, I already did that. So instead I'm going to present some snippets of my early stories in all their unvarnished glory (*cough cough*). I don't quite have the courage to post any of my efforts from age twelve; the passages below, which are from my late teens, I'm not ashamed to acknowledge as my own. Nonetheless, they should provide abundant encouragement to anyone out there who thinks that good writing springs instantly forward, without trial.
On to sample one:
* * *
They stopped a few feet away. "What is your name?" Drendill asked sharply but not mechanically.
"The Doctor. What's yours?"
"Doctor what?"
"Just the Doctor. Would you like a jelly-baby?" he added affably.
* * *
Oh, dear god. Don't tell me I was writing fan fiction. (*Hides eyes*.)
That was from age sixteen. I'm not going to inflict all my early writings on you. Let me offer three more samples.
(*Skims the working titles in one of my story notebooks*.) "Incest," "Rape," "Sex Commune" . . . Ah, yes, 1981, the year when I discovered sex. Here's a snippet from "Sex Commune," a science fiction story that I wrote just after I turned eighteen.
* * *
To her left, under the recent sun, was a row of pink and ruby rose bushes, which served as a living fence to the garden. . . .
"Reminds you of the old fairy tales, doesn't it? 'Beauty and the Beast.' Of course, Beauty had to pay a price for her view of such a vision."
Theresa turned rather too rapidly and found herself backed against the rough red bricks covered with sharp ivy. A second later she discovered her hair was tangled in the ivy and she twisted her head only to feel a sharp pain at her skull as the ivy refused to give up its prize.
"Permit me," the speaker said politely. He was a dark man of her age - dark not in face but in hair and eyes and in expression, though the sharp indrawn lines of his [face] were presently formed in a look of careful [courtesy]. His clothing, too, was dark: black leather, at a time when leather was only available from doubtful sources. The jacket - for he wore no shirt - had its first button a little above the navel, exposing a chest as pale as his face. The pants were in a skin-tight style long abandoned. His belt, Theresa noted without surprise, was a large metal chain.
From a brown leather sheath attached to the left side of his "belt," the man withdrew something and held it in front of Theresa; a second later she was staring at a thin metal blade about three inches long.
* * *
Dear me. You'd never have guessed I was a child of the seventies, would you?
I will spare you the first sex scene I ever wrote, at age eighteen; suffice it to say that one of the sentences was, "He felt his organ ache with hardness." There's also a bit about "the sweet taste of her mouth" and "he felt her heart quicken." Thankfully, all that comes from a passage in a novel that my protagonist was reading while he masturbated. I'd like to think that my early erotic writing wasn't that bad.
On to my gen stuff. This is poetry from age seventeen, but I'd been writing stories like this since elementary school.
* * *
GREY DAWN
Sky too grey for comfort,
Sun was cued, enter east,
When he hadn't yet accepted
The impending night.
He slumped in corner,
Watching the shadows solidify
Upon the prison floor.
Metal bars clanged like church bells,
Feet shuffled like monks' at sunrise service.
"Any last requests?"
He marvelled at the perfection
Of the computerlike voice.
His own too tight
To hide his fear of dark--
"Wait till sunset," he asked.
Sunrise was the time when
The sun drove away darkness,
Good evil,
Life death,
As he'd heard in the sermon
Separating white from black.
It was in the grey of dawn
That he'd been confused,
Caught,
And sentenced.
"Any last requests?" Recording stuck
in the groove of correct procedure.
He shook his head.
The man mumbled his faults
Like a priest giving benediction,
His coat a meaningless grey.
Placed on the edge
Of black shadow and white stone,
He rejected the blindfold--
The man seemed disturbed.
The bird spoke in the last minute,
Singing descants of yes or no,
And never maybe.
His eyes seemed to focus
On the congregation of guns,
But saw only the halo of light
At blue sky's edge:
Heralder of morning and life,
Heralder of death and night,
Too obvious a deceit,
Black passing as white,
It prejured its name as bird sung of life--
And lied.
The risen sun
Obscured risen guns,
And a bird's song drowned their black retorts.
* * *
From the time I began writing stories, at age eight, my characters had a very strong tendency to die noble deaths. Some things never change.
Finally, here's what some of you have been waiting for. It's from age eighteen, when I finally found the courage to write down such scenes. The two main characters in this fantasy story are young men. The younger character, Donal, is a victim of amnesia, due to illness. This was part of a very long saga in my head, in which Donal ended up becoming a sexual rebel in his society, going around recruiting fellow sexual rebels . . . who invariably had sex with him as their initiation into the revolution. (I told you I was a child of the seventies. I was also an avid reader of Robert A. Heinlein.)
* * *
"It's going to rain," John said. His voice was muffled.
"Yes." Donal looked at John and saw that his eyes were almost closed; the bones in his cheeks seemed to stand out. "John?"
[His] tutor made no reply. Behind them was the muffled sound of thunder.
"John?" Donal repeated.
"God," said John in a half-strangled voice, "you're so young."
Donal was too taken aback to comment.
"When you become Duke, they're going to take your heart and eat it. And you're going to give it to them on a silver platter, because they promised to give it back and you believed them. And once your heart is gone you'll become a prisoner at the throne, like your father--"
"Shut up!" Donal was pale with anger. "Believe it or not, John, I do know that not everybody is nice. And I don't trust everybody in the world. I'm not the four-year-old you keep taking me for."
"You trust me." John's face was wet now, though the rain was just beginning.
"Just because you don't trust yourself," Donal said tightly, "doesn't mean you can deny everyone else the privilege."
The sky opened, and a river of water fell out of the gap. The two continued to walk slowly without looking at each other. As they turned into the path toward the castle entrance, John said, "It's easy to have confidence when you never remember being hurt."
A few minutes later, they were inside the suite. John had taken off his shirt when he saw Donal at his bedroom door.
"You'd better get those wet clothes off," John said without looking up.
"Do you know why I took you to Fairy Circle today?" Donal was slightly breathless with anger. "To see if we could spend a day together without you avoiding my eye, trying not to look at me. It didn't work. If you can't cope with what you are, I'm sorry. But if you're going to treat me like a disease, I want you to leave, I can't--" A sob blocked the words. "I wish you could trust me, at least."
Donal gave up his struggle for control and let the tears flow. A few seconds later he felt himself enfolded into the warmth of John's body. One hand scrunched against his chest, another flat against John's, Donal let the hot tears fall onto John, his forehead on John's shoulder. For three minutes they stood thus, Donal wringing out all the tensions of the past week, John standing motionless. Then Donal became aware of John's fingers playing against his back, sending tingling sensations to several parts of his body. Without noticing it he stopped crying as he concentrated on the touch; then he looked up and stared at John.
John looked back; then, without any noticeable change in expression he leaned forward and their lips met.
Donal wasn't sure what to expect; he knew what he was supposed to feel when he kissed, but wasn't sure if that applied when you were kissing a man as well. He concentrated with interest on the softness of John's tongue; then, as John's lips slipped downward, on the gentle touch of John's lips against his neck. Nothing seemed to be happening.
John's hand slipped between them and undid the first button on Donal's shirt. As it reached the second, John paused.
"Donal?" John's voice was slightly muffled by Donal's body.
"Go ahead."
"You're sure?"
He was anything but that. Though his heart was pouding, it was from fright, not passion. But Donal, who had spent the last year collecting experiences to puzzle out, was not ready to stop. He knew if he stopped now, he would never get the chance again. "Yes."
He lifted John's face and tried an experimental kiss. Somewhere below, he was starting to feel something. If he concentrated a little harder . . .
"What the hell is going on?"
Both young men looked at the doorway to the suite simultaneously. Donal started to answer his father's question, then decided, from the Duke's expression, that it had been rhetorical.
* * *
That was the first m/m lovemaking scene I ever wrote down (among the abundant m/m fantasies that were going through my head in my teens). It was also the last one I dared write down, till I discovered the slash world twenty years later.
--maculategiraffe.
Topic in this post: Excruciating examples of why the world was better before teens could post their writings online.
Okay, that's an exaggeration; I'm sure there are some splendid teenage writers posting their stories online. I'm just glad that my early efforts weren't preserved on the Internet.
This post is inspired by another author's post (Friends-locked, which is why I'm not linking to it), in which she recreated part of a story she wrote at age twelve. She then asked, "Anybody else have some marvelously embarrassing fic from when they were younger?"
If I were wise, I would follow her course of rewriting a childhood story. However, I already did that. So instead I'm going to present some snippets of my early stories in all their unvarnished glory (*cough cough*). I don't quite have the courage to post any of my efforts from age twelve; the passages below, which are from my late teens, I'm not ashamed to acknowledge as my own. Nonetheless, they should provide abundant encouragement to anyone out there who thinks that good writing springs instantly forward, without trial.
On to sample one:
* * *
They stopped a few feet away. "What is your name?" Drendill asked sharply but not mechanically.
"The Doctor. What's yours?"
"Doctor what?"
"Just the Doctor. Would you like a jelly-baby?" he added affably.
* * *
Oh, dear god. Don't tell me I was writing fan fiction. (*Hides eyes*.)
That was from age sixteen. I'm not going to inflict all my early writings on you. Let me offer three more samples.
(*Skims the working titles in one of my story notebooks*.) "Incest," "Rape," "Sex Commune" . . . Ah, yes, 1981, the year when I discovered sex. Here's a snippet from "Sex Commune," a science fiction story that I wrote just after I turned eighteen.
* * *
To her left, under the recent sun, was a row of pink and ruby rose bushes, which served as a living fence to the garden. . . .
"Reminds you of the old fairy tales, doesn't it? 'Beauty and the Beast.' Of course, Beauty had to pay a price for her view of such a vision."
Theresa turned rather too rapidly and found herself backed against the rough red bricks covered with sharp ivy. A second later she discovered her hair was tangled in the ivy and she twisted her head only to feel a sharp pain at her skull as the ivy refused to give up its prize.
"Permit me," the speaker said politely. He was a dark man of her age - dark not in face but in hair and eyes and in expression, though the sharp indrawn lines of his [face] were presently formed in a look of careful [courtesy]. His clothing, too, was dark: black leather, at a time when leather was only available from doubtful sources. The jacket - for he wore no shirt - had its first button a little above the navel, exposing a chest as pale as his face. The pants were in a skin-tight style long abandoned. His belt, Theresa noted without surprise, was a large metal chain.
From a brown leather sheath attached to the left side of his "belt," the man withdrew something and held it in front of Theresa; a second later she was staring at a thin metal blade about three inches long.
* * *
Dear me. You'd never have guessed I was a child of the seventies, would you?
I will spare you the first sex scene I ever wrote, at age eighteen; suffice it to say that one of the sentences was, "He felt his organ ache with hardness." There's also a bit about "the sweet taste of her mouth" and "he felt her heart quicken." Thankfully, all that comes from a passage in a novel that my protagonist was reading while he masturbated. I'd like to think that my early erotic writing wasn't that bad.
On to my gen stuff. This is poetry from age seventeen, but I'd been writing stories like this since elementary school.
* * *
GREY DAWN
Sky too grey for comfort,
Sun was cued, enter east,
When he hadn't yet accepted
The impending night.
He slumped in corner,
Watching the shadows solidify
Upon the prison floor.
Metal bars clanged like church bells,
Feet shuffled like monks' at sunrise service.
"Any last requests?"
He marvelled at the perfection
Of the computerlike voice.
His own too tight
To hide his fear of dark--
"Wait till sunset," he asked.
Sunrise was the time when
The sun drove away darkness,
Good evil,
Life death,
As he'd heard in the sermon
Separating white from black.
It was in the grey of dawn
That he'd been confused,
Caught,
And sentenced.
"Any last requests?" Recording stuck
in the groove of correct procedure.
He shook his head.
The man mumbled his faults
Like a priest giving benediction,
His coat a meaningless grey.
Placed on the edge
Of black shadow and white stone,
He rejected the blindfold--
The man seemed disturbed.
The bird spoke in the last minute,
Singing descants of yes or no,
And never maybe.
His eyes seemed to focus
On the congregation of guns,
But saw only the halo of light
At blue sky's edge:
Heralder of morning and life,
Heralder of death and night,
Too obvious a deceit,
Black passing as white,
It prejured its name as bird sung of life--
And lied.
The risen sun
Obscured risen guns,
And a bird's song drowned their black retorts.
* * *
From the time I began writing stories, at age eight, my characters had a very strong tendency to die noble deaths. Some things never change.
Finally, here's what some of you have been waiting for. It's from age eighteen, when I finally found the courage to write down such scenes. The two main characters in this fantasy story are young men. The younger character, Donal, is a victim of amnesia, due to illness. This was part of a very long saga in my head, in which Donal ended up becoming a sexual rebel in his society, going around recruiting fellow sexual rebels . . . who invariably had sex with him as their initiation into the revolution. (I told you I was a child of the seventies. I was also an avid reader of Robert A. Heinlein.)
* * *
"It's going to rain," John said. His voice was muffled.
"Yes." Donal looked at John and saw that his eyes were almost closed; the bones in his cheeks seemed to stand out. "John?"
[His] tutor made no reply. Behind them was the muffled sound of thunder.
"John?" Donal repeated.
"God," said John in a half-strangled voice, "you're so young."
Donal was too taken aback to comment.
"When you become Duke, they're going to take your heart and eat it. And you're going to give it to them on a silver platter, because they promised to give it back and you believed them. And once your heart is gone you'll become a prisoner at the throne, like your father--"
"Shut up!" Donal was pale with anger. "Believe it or not, John, I do know that not everybody is nice. And I don't trust everybody in the world. I'm not the four-year-old you keep taking me for."
"You trust me." John's face was wet now, though the rain was just beginning.
"Just because you don't trust yourself," Donal said tightly, "doesn't mean you can deny everyone else the privilege."
The sky opened, and a river of water fell out of the gap. The two continued to walk slowly without looking at each other. As they turned into the path toward the castle entrance, John said, "It's easy to have confidence when you never remember being hurt."
A few minutes later, they were inside the suite. John had taken off his shirt when he saw Donal at his bedroom door.
"You'd better get those wet clothes off," John said without looking up.
"Do you know why I took you to Fairy Circle today?" Donal was slightly breathless with anger. "To see if we could spend a day together without you avoiding my eye, trying not to look at me. It didn't work. If you can't cope with what you are, I'm sorry. But if you're going to treat me like a disease, I want you to leave, I can't--" A sob blocked the words. "I wish you could trust me, at least."
Donal gave up his struggle for control and let the tears flow. A few seconds later he felt himself enfolded into the warmth of John's body. One hand scrunched against his chest, another flat against John's, Donal let the hot tears fall onto John, his forehead on John's shoulder. For three minutes they stood thus, Donal wringing out all the tensions of the past week, John standing motionless. Then Donal became aware of John's fingers playing against his back, sending tingling sensations to several parts of his body. Without noticing it he stopped crying as he concentrated on the touch; then he looked up and stared at John.
John looked back; then, without any noticeable change in expression he leaned forward and their lips met.
Donal wasn't sure what to expect; he knew what he was supposed to feel when he kissed, but wasn't sure if that applied when you were kissing a man as well. He concentrated with interest on the softness of John's tongue; then, as John's lips slipped downward, on the gentle touch of John's lips against his neck. Nothing seemed to be happening.
John's hand slipped between them and undid the first button on Donal's shirt. As it reached the second, John paused.
"Donal?" John's voice was slightly muffled by Donal's body.
"Go ahead."
"You're sure?"
He was anything but that. Though his heart was pouding, it was from fright, not passion. But Donal, who had spent the last year collecting experiences to puzzle out, was not ready to stop. He knew if he stopped now, he would never get the chance again. "Yes."
He lifted John's face and tried an experimental kiss. Somewhere below, he was starting to feel something. If he concentrated a little harder . . .
"What the hell is going on?"
Both young men looked at the doorway to the suite simultaneously. Donal started to answer his father's question, then decided, from the Duke's expression, that it had been rhetorical.
* * *
That was the first m/m lovemaking scene I ever wrote down (among the abundant m/m fantasies that were going through my head in my teens). It was also the last one I dared write down, till I discovered the slash world twenty years later.
Amusing