What better way to begin a blog about writing than with some stories I wrote when I was 8? Start from the beginning, that's what I always say (that's not true). Anyway, I was in the cellar in my mother's house, when I stumbled upon a scrap book filled with pictures, commendations, and school assignments from when I was in elementary school. I'm pretty sure that the following two gems, which I'm going to reproduce here with all the grammatical and spelling errors intact, were the result of a vocab assignment in which we were supposed to create a story using all the words in a vocab list. I infer this because a fair number of the words are underlined. This also goes a little way towards helping explain the non-sequiturs, although if you know me well then you know that this is also just how my mind works. One last thing: keep in mind that I must have been in about second or third grade for these, so any psycho-analysis you want to do should be done with a filter for things 8-year olds care about.
"The squirrel who wanted to play baseball"
Once there was a squirrel who wanted to play baseball. But thier was one proplem that he thought of again and again when he though of baseball. The problem was the bat was to big for his hands. He had a picture of a pitcher but he didn't want to be pitcher for his team. He wanted to be all time batter.
So he dicided to ask the squirrels who made bats to make a few smaller bats. Because he had been in the children's league. But they had smaller bats. When the squirrels heard the other squirrel requested they said we can't make smaller bats so you might as well just mind your own business.
He felt very lonely. He had no wife to keep him company. And he didn't have any friends either. All he had was a littel puppet that made a squeaking sound.
And the puppet only held a little toy pumpkin with toy tomato sauce on it. But he was never able to reach it because it sat on the umbrella that he had. One day while he was playing with it he accidently threw it up there.
And since he didn't live in a neighborhood he wasn't able to make any friends. But since he new alot about science he dicided to do that to get his mind of being lonely. Then one day somebody who got list in the woods while hiking *at night* (in the story, "at night" was added afterwards with a ^ in the sentence) found his house. He knocked on the door and asked "May I sleep hear tonieght?" And of course the squirrel that lived there said yes.
In the morning the squirrel that lived there asked Would you like to live with me? Because I don't have a wife and I don't have any friends.
then the squirrel that got list said "Shure, I'd love to. Because I don't have a wife or any friends either." And so they both lived happily together.
The End.
"Aliens"
One quiet day on July 15, 1943, an alien air craft came up to land on earth. When it did it kicked up a lot of dirt. The air craft was the size of a whale! A lot of people went in and out of their houses again and again to get some weapons to defend themselves.
But the police said wait to shoot because they might be friendly. The first pair of aliens were silent as they walked out of the craft. But they did look friendly and also a little scared. Then one of the aliens said to the other, "I think we landed on the wrong planet"! Then one of the people who was riding a bicycle came up and said, "We might be able to help you depending upon what you need". Just then the aliens' pet chicken named Tough came out and started looking at a building. "What is that?" the chicken asked. "It's a building." said one of the people. "It sure doesn't look much like the ones on my planet" said the chicken. "That's because you're on earth," said one of the police men. "Earth!" said one of the aliens, we're way off course. "Well, we can help you put your craft together," said the people. And after a lot of hard work they were ready to go. Then the person on the bicycle said "Here is a dollar for a souvenir". And then they were off.
The End.
After reading these, I can't help but wonder what I'd come up with today if someone put a list of words in front of me and told me to incorporate them all into a story. As an 8 year old, I can imagine myself sitting there and thinking of random connections for certain words. Clearly I got to the end of the alien story and still had the word "dollar" left on my list, and for whatever reason I thought it made sense to have some dude on a bike hand one to an alien as a souvenir. Freely associating what initially appears to be a list of unrelated words might just be a great way to come up with truly useable plot elements!
After all, one interesting fact from Orson Scott Card's writing workshop was that to generate story ideas, he himself uses the exercise of trying to come up with how two unrelated terms actually DO relate to each other.
I have plenty more to say about the workshop, by the way, but that's for another post. Anyway, thought I'd start off with a light note :)
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