Casting Back to the Start #2

A fairly long time before I started in with the Role-Playing Games I was a story writer. It didn't come quickly and it most certainly did not come easy, least of all the first time, or what I consider to really be the first time...

Here is where I should be telling the story of my first real story I wrote, but in actuality there is an important moment before that. There is the moment that I most vividly recall telling myself a story, orally, well with words in my head. I remember a story, a scene, fully detailed that I “played out” with some He-Man figures. Now there's really telling my age. I also remember unlike so many other times playing that I re-ran through the story after it was over. Hey, we have to start somewhere, and the importance is a coherence of what happened, and that it was more than just He-Man fights Skeletor.

Back to the writing... It was--and I almost shouldn't admit it, maybe too late all things given--grade seven to the best of my recollection. We had a nice woman teacher with what I now think back on as Twisted Sister hair (you know the curls!), in strawberry blonde. The writing assignment was to take a sentence fragment given to us and to write a story that started with that. I'm trying to remember the exact wording. I believe it was, “I opened the door in the back of the closet and...”

..and the rest as they say was history.

I struggled with it. Really struggled. I started writing, agonizingly line by line, trying to get it to go somewhere, trying to do it like I'd never done it before. An idea occurred to me, an idea based on the fact that it was in first person. Admittedly I think every story was in the first person the way they taught at that far in going through grade school. I'd love to tell you all about the story, and even the title, but there something about it. I've always had this dream to just take and redo it as a more mature and obviously better written story, maybe even of novel length.

What I can say about it is I also wrote another classmate into the story with me. A girl of course. We all know that in the end the hero gets the girl. Well it was true in the story, though certainly not out in the real world. I'd say the funniest thing had to be when the teacher then had us read the stories aloud, ourselves. Boy, that was a moment. When asked about the girl being in the story and a visual discrepancy to boot, I all but admitted to literary license even though neither I, nor that I remember the teacher, called it that.

I think what stands out most about that story are two facts, that I was proud of the final result, and that it was my first real story writing experience because it was maybe the first time we'd been asked for speculative fiction specifically, and I wrote my first horror story.

Mood: self-deprecating.
Music: Thriller by Michael Jackson and Pet Sematary by the Ramones.

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