My earliest forays into writing

NOTE: Upon re-reading I am considering deleting this post due to lack of humor.  I don't know what happened.  In my head, a little girl writing stories about death, murder and mayhem seemed loaded with amusement.  Perhaps it is lack of pictures.  A drawing of little me with my perpetual blonde pigtails scrawling bad drawings of gruesome deaths with black crayons would have made it funny.  I don't know.  But I fear this post has failed, and as such may soon disappear.

NOTE 2: I don't give a damn

I don't know why these popped into my head today, but I randomly remembered my earliest writing style.

Okay, to be honest, the first I don't remember, it has been shared with me by my father.  Apparently, when first requested to write something 'creative' (if the contents of a 4 year olds brain can actually be called creative) my thoughts were short and to the point.

I wrote: A girl walked into the forest.  She died.

I am curious what my kindergarten teacher thought of this as a first effort.  Given that it is accepted that you have to be about 7 to understand the true concept of death, I clearly didn't know what I was writing.  Its not like I was exposed to TV that could have influenced my thoughts, because I was absolutely forbidden at that time from watching anything other than Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers if I was sick, and the national news (no local news) and Redskins and Celtics games (my father had some sense of the idea that hypocrisy would have been bad so we were allowed to watch anything he watched).  On a side note this led to an early sense of being an outsider when the other kids discussed The Cosby Show and I was like, 'Who?'

I must have been reading something, but I didn't think my parent's were letting me read anything very gruesome.  Then again, there's no way they could police with the quantity of reading I was doing, and after all you assume you can trust the school library.

Now, at least initially this seemed to be a one off thing.  My writing soon grew prolific.  We had that light green paper, which you turned sideways, and thereby had these gigantic lines to write on to encourage you to write in straight lines rather than scrawling illegibly all over the paper.  I would fill 10, 20 of these pages.  No big deal, right? Well, for parent's day, everyone's stories were stapled to the wall.  Each sheet was stapled to the next and hung on the wall.  Mine, ummmm, was fine for the first say 7 pages, but then the rest lay in a disordered heap on the floor.  There really wasn't much to do.  You could straighten up the heap, that's about it.




So other kid's parents could go read through their kids lovely story.  My parents arrived at a heap of paper, which was perhaps a premonition of years of heaps of papers which would surround me until the ability to keep absolutely everything on my computer just requires that I keep track of what's stored on each of three computers and phone.  There is a history of literal paper avalanches over many years.  Its kinda cute and funny when you're 8.  Leans more towards embarassing when you're 28.  The only saving grace was that my boss suffered from more frequent avalanches than I did.  I just never got the hang of binders or file folders, or any other methods of paper management.

But back to writing.  The next time I really remember writing anything I was in first grade.  We had an assignment where we needed to write a longish story and illustrate it.  I was concerned about this illustration bit.  I considered and still consider myself to be a terrible artist.  I remember being seriously concerned that my artistry would not be up to par with my writing and begged to be allowed out of the drawing part.  This was not to be.  Something about the assignment I guess was intended to integrate thoughts with writing with drawing.  Boy do I bet my teacher regretted not letting me out of the drawing.

You see, what my 7 year old brain came up with was a very, very long, detailed story of a woman (a witch for lack of better descriptor) who lived in a castle.  Now, a large group of people decided that they were going to brave the castle to go and speak to the witch.  Now, I must stress that there was nothing particularly malevolent about the witch herself.  She was just a very protective homeowner.  So, the entire story was about how each of the people in this group was picked off one by one by some horrible booby trap.  If I remember correctly it opened with most of the group just barely escaping as the floor gave way and a couple plunged to their death in a pit of blood-thirsty alligators (or crocodiles, I don't remember)  Then there was flaming oil poured on them, spikes coming out of the floor, and every imaginable thing I could think of by which people could be killed in a gruesome fashion.

Now, since illustrations were required.... Pathetic little drawings of each step in this parade of death were included along the way.  I called dibs on the black and red crayons whenever we worked on this assignment.

My best friend was writing a story about Fluffy the bunny hopping in a field with butterflies.  Seriously.

Once some of the boys noticed what I was doing, my story became a point of fascination.  I got mad props for that story.

Now, I do wonder, in the current environment of child-raising, where it seems like parents and teachers are perhaps more involved, more focused on every detail, more, well, paranoid for lack of a better word, what would a teacher do now if a student wrote either of these stories?

If when asked to write whatever they wanted to write, a current 4 year old girl wrote: 'A girl walked into a forest.  She died.'  Would this go unnoted? Or would she be sent forthwith to a school psychologist for analysis.  Same goes for the bloodthirsty castle which somehow managed to kill any number of people without actually implicating a human being in the rampage.  Would a current teacher allow a 7 year old to work unquestioned on that story for weeks without ever getting a little curious?

Perhaps if I actually caused any trouble there might have been some problems.  I think I might have been sent to the principal's office once.  Aside from that the biggest trouble you could say I caused was to perpetually lose my sweater.  However, it was easily identified by the large amount of my beloved dog's hair all over it. (We had uniforms so otherwise the sweaters were hard to distinguish.)

Somewhere along the way I clearly lost whatever early bloodthirsty notions I had.  Instead I became the consummate peacekeeper and have remained a perfect little angel ever since.  Seriously.