I don’t remember exactly when I decided to stop writing, but I do know that it all began to unravel soon after the start of seventh grade.
The preceding summer was filled with all of the usual things. Attending camp at the local YMCA. Half-assing my way through my violin lessons. Devouring entire Mary Higgins Clark mysteries in between chapters of Oliver Twist. (Dickens and I had a complicated relationship right from the start.) It was also that summer when I sat down at my typewriter and started to tap out what I only assumed would be The Great American Novel.
I loved that Brother with all of my little heart, and in the preceding years it had borne witness to small papers about various elementary school things and some fucking atrocious poetry. But 12-year-old Samantha decided it was time to make the move to prose. The story was simple enough. It was about secrets and lies in a small Connecticut town. The Mary Higgins Clark mysteries had done their work. They had crawled into my brain and infected everything. The tale followed four middle-aged women and their 12-year-old daughters. The women had been living on that same street their entire lives and each of their daughters deeply resembled her respective mother. The older women had been close in their youth, but no longer spoke to each other, forcing their own children to be secret best friends. An old resident moves back into town, another woman with a 12-year-old girl. The two once again greatly resembled each other except for the fact that one side of this mother’s face had been badly burned. With her re-entrance into the neighborhood, the original four women become even more anxious and their daughters try to discover the root of all of the whispering. It was to be called The Treehouse.
There are many questions that weren’t addressed in those opening pages. Why had no one moved away? Had a warlock cast a spell binding them forever to that idyllic Connecticut street? How had everyone gotten pregnant at the same time? Coincidence? A pact? Why did the victim of the incident that led to the breaking of the original friend group move back to the town? Those questions were left unanswered as August came to a close, but I assumed there would be time enough to answer them all. I was 12. What else would I be doing?
However, once summer ended there was the business of seventh grade to attend to. New students. New teachers. Field hockey games and dance classes and the reading of my first Shakespeare play. Three years ago I tried to investigate why I stowed it away. I blamed puberty then, but I think that I was giving myself both too little and too much credit. Although I started to become enchanted by boys and boy-related things around that age, I was not partaking in any of that turmoil and tumult. I was starting my third year at girls’ school and was just beginning my long history of crushing on people from afar.
When you grow up and still crush from afar, sometimes you drink too much wine and gaze dreamily into the eyes of the person that you like and everyone gives you shit about it because you are an adult now, get it together.
It’s easy to blame missteps and mistakes on youthful stupidity and adolescent distractions because such things can’t be helped. What I could help was my own cowardice. Writing took work, and I struggled with it, with finding my voice and discovering the types of stories that I wanted to tell. I liked classes and activities in which praise came easily. I loved the simple A and the gold star. Two years passed before I gave the story more than a passing glance. I decided then that it wasn’t worth my time.
It took many, many years, and a violent unmooring, for me to understand that all of those things that I let myself believe I loved because of the simple As and the gold stars were the things that should be stashed away in a drawer. I once again tried my hand at writing here and there, but I held most of the stories close.
After I moved back to my childhood home for my second, post-collegiate stay, a friend suggested that I get myself a notebook, the opening page of which is filled with timidity.
Katie says that I should start at the beginning. But at the beginning of what?
Tags: no you can’t read my middle school poetry, starting again, writing
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Your Brother and my Smith Corona should get together and tell stories about our adolescences to each other. Oh, the angst-ridden verse!
I was the Resident Poet of middle school. It was one of my two claims to fame (the other was the fact that I read books incessantly – in class, walking between classes, standing in the lunch line.) (I still do.) I had a little following, and would make copies, and hold impromptu recitations out by the bus circle. Fortunately I put down my quill shortly after my first bad break-up at 16 or so, and focused solely on prose.
But boy can I ever write some doggerel nowadays!
My mom loves to tell stories of the phone calls she would get from friends’ parents when I was over for birthday parties.
Parent: I think you should come pick Verity up.
Mom: Is everything okay?
Parent: Oh, no, she’s fine, I just think she’s ready to come home now.
Mom: Did she ask to come home?
Parent: No… she’s sitting in the [basement/guest room/family room/porch] by herself, reading a book.
Mom: I’ll be right over.
I still do this. I spent an entire day with some friends last summer sailing and playing lawn games and drinking cheap beer. It was great, but at one point I was just like “I’m done” and pulled out my notebook and a pen.
Oh man, my friends’ parents never called my parents to have them pick me up, everybody just let me do my thing. #blessed
Still sounds way better than the stories I tried to write at that age, most of which involved parents dying in the backstory so they wouldn’t be around to care about what their kids were getting up to.
The warlock theory sounds pretty interesting, actually; you should run with it.
I have a steamer trunk in my bedroom full of everything I’ve written* since I was in the fourth grade and decided I would start writing novels.
There are some embarrassing, terrible things in there, guys.
I can say, however, that 8th grade me writes a sex scene much like 34-year-old me, tho. Both of us, twenty years apart, are trying to describe sexy times and we both stop and look up at the ceiling like “…wait…how…?“
*when I say “everything I’ve written” the paper trail ends in about my senior year of high school when I discovered computers.
Experience doesn’t seem to matter – writing sex scenes is all about staring blankly at the wall wondering where limbs go during all this fuss.
So you are basically Anne Shirley. Awesome.
This was really lovely and I am jealous of your Brother, as I did not get a typewriter ’til senior year of high school and had to make do with umpteen green notebooks from CVS.
Also, I suspect that there are many of us here who would read the shit out of The Treehouse, especially (but not only) if it included a warlock.
I was totally going to say that I would totally read that!
My parents gave me a CD player for my 16th birthday. Now, this was in 1985, so that was a BIG DEAL, tech-wise.
I made them take it back and get me my electric typewriter instead.
I was totally going to say that I would totally read that!
I read more classics when I was young (Dickens, Virgil, whatever else was labeled as classics at the library) than I did in college or since, and wrote and read constantly. In elementary school, the librarian let me take out more books than everyone else because she knew I'd read them. She was AWESOME.
*tries to find suitable replacement word for “unmooring” in Toast draft in progress, gnashes teeth*
My personal thesaurus crisis aside, this was great. I “quit” writing at seventeen, but it had already wormed into my brain by that time and wouldn’t be denied. And I, too, would totally read that novel.
*tries to find suitable replacement word for "unmooring" in Toast draft in progress, gnashes teeth*
My personal thesaurus crisis aside, this was great. I "quit" writing at seventeen, but it had already wormed into my brain by that time and wouldn't be denied. And I, too, would totally read that novel.
I quit writing when I was fifteen because my grandmother died and I. just. couldn’t. anymore.
My Great American Novel was about a hostage situation in a high school. It sounds all dramatic, but it was a Rom-Com, Shakespearean style, where literally everyone pairs off at the end.
“What I could help was my own cowardice. Writing took work, and I struggled with it, with finding my voice and discovering the types of stories that I wanted to tell. I liked classes and activities in which praise came easily. I loved the simple A and the gold star.” You just described me. Still. At age 36.
"What I could help was my own cowardice. Writing took work, and I struggled with it, with finding my voice and discovering the types of stories that I wanted to tell. I liked classes and activities in which praise came easily. I loved the simple A and the gold star." You just described me. Still. At age 36.
Ahhh, this is so evocative. I miss being a kid at the library, especially in the summer.