So my mom cleaned a bunch of old stuff out of the basement. Among the various piles of junk were two beat-up oversized envelopes stuffed to bursting with things my sister and I had written as kids. Our efforts included school assignments, holiday and birthday cards, letters we penned while away at school, etc.
Got me wondering: does anybody else have their old kid-writings? If so, would you be willing to share here, either excerpts or whole pieces? It can include any of the stuff I’ve mentioned above, or anything else that you find significant, hilarious, cringe-inducing, or whatever.
Oh, yeah…
The best thing I ever wrote when I was a kid (eight), in my opinion, was a poem about my favorite holiday, Halloween. It went like this:
The moon is full on Halloween,
As the witches and goblins fly.
The skeletons rattle,
Black cats have a battle
On a fence that is up pretty high.
One cat fell off,
And started to cough,
And not too much later, he died.
That’s what I get for breaking my diet and eating a Payday Bar… you go and post that and the pregnant mom poem and now I am choking on chewed-up peanuts! Excellent! You hipster, you!
Actually, your novella opener is quite a hook… eerily Stephen Kingesque, even…
This wasn’t me, but my little brother (well, “little” brother just graduated college and is going to law school)…
He was not the world’s best speller back in elementary school. I believe this was first grade. One day, the teacher had the class write an essay about things they like to do. My brother decided to write about making mud pies. Except, through the whole one paragraph essay, he had misspelled the word “mud pies”… as “mad piss”.
The teacher made a point of writing on his essay: “It sounds like you really enjoy making MUD PIES!” so that my parents wouldn’t think he was some kind of deviant.
My mom broke the essay out a few Christmases ago and we were howling! “I like to make mad piss. My sister and I make mad piss together in the back yard. I like it when it rains, because we can make mad piss all the time in the back yard. Mad piss is fun to play with.” Oh the poor kid… heehee!
I wrote this poem when I was about 7, and right now, at age 21, I find it seriously disturbing.
I once made my parents a Valentines Day card. It was a big, red construction-paper heart, with paper lace and glitter and other frilly things. The caption read:
Cow?
Around 6th grade I started writing a lot of short stories, but I always struggled trying to reconcile what I WANTED to write with what I COULD write in school. I remember in one of my stories I used the term “P.O.ed” and was chastised by the teacher for using inappropriate language. And I thought I WAS using the “clean” way of saying something that could be a lot worse. “Would ‘ticked off’ be better?” I ask, and my teacher gets all flustered, and suggests I say “very angry” or some such. And I get frustrated, because, dammit, my characters weren’t “very angry,” they were fucking “pissed off”!
I know I’ve got a whole box full of stuff at home. If this thread is still active a week from now I might post some more of it.
I’ll have to get to my mom’s house, I know she’s got a lot of my early works. I found one just a few days ago while going through my folders of short stories. I’ll try to remember to dig up what I can find tonight and post some of it tomorrow when I get to work.
I apologize in advance if I’ve killed this thread but this early literature is great. I just wanted to add some of my own. Following is my first and only book of poetry, in it’s glorious entirety (spelling errors and all, for flavor) from 1st grade. Please hold your applause until the end.
rain
rain is pretty
what I like best about is puddle
flowers
flowers are pretty and
you know what keeps flowers growing
Showers.
Diffence
The difference outside the world is sky and air
and trees and flowers everwhere
but inside it is walls and floor that lead to outside
through a door.
Discovery
Round and round I spin
making a circle so I can fall in.
mud
mud is very nice to feel
I’d rather wade in mud then smell
a yellow rose.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Author’s note:
I have no idea what possessed me to pencil that last verse. I always hated being dirty as a child.
I didn’t write any poetry as a kid, but I still have a few stories I wrote around, I’ll have to type some up. One of my favorites tells the story of a satellite that was sent into space by Germany in 1960. The German scientists forgot to make sure the satellite could function in vacuum, so it fell back down to Earth, landing in Africa. Some chimps playing with the wires caused it to give off a ray that hit an elephant and made it grow to giant size and develop intelligence. The elephant was contacted by a ghostly Allosaurus that sent it on several quests to prove itself - the first was retrieving a pearl from the bottom of a pond, I forget what the second was, the third was to rescue the chimps who accidentally created him from evil scientists, and the fourth was to fight the King of the Monsters on Monster Island. After the completion of each quest the glowing dinosaur told him ‘You done good’. I can tell I wrote it when I was 4 because I have all my As and Js backwards, which was corrected in kindergarden.
I also have a space opera starring a guy named Don Johnson who colonized a planet on the other side of the sun, I wrote it when I was 8.
I once won a creative writing competition at the University of Surrey when I was nine. It was a shocking piece of sub-Dungeons & Dragons mush - warrior on a quest, etc (I’m well and truly over the fantasy thing now). I think the only reason I won was that the judges thought it was satire.
The first poem I remember writing was about a dinosaur. Naturally I illustrated with a big dragon complete with severed leg sticking out of its mouth and blood dripping all over the place. Classy.
I wrote another story once where I strapped myself into a barrel and went over Niagara Falls.
…Nothing to match BM’s glowing dinosaur story, natch…
In like the 2nd grade I wrote a short story (about 3 pages of wide-spaced lined paper, 2nd-grader manuscript, so probably about a typed page and a half) which had as it’s main character a dolphin. The dolphin spent most of the story going on about how silly the words were that humans used to describe his species. That’s all I can remember of it. Even at the time I thought it showed a lot of linguistic creativity (I mean, the fact that I was aware that a speaker of a different language might be amused at the words we use to refer to them seems to me to be awfully advanced for a 2nd-grader). My teacher hated it. I remember her reaction to it being that it was hardly worth grading.
I’d really like to read it again now to see if (a) it was as creative as I remember and (b) if it was as bad as she thought. Notice that I’m not automatically considering those two things to be mutually exclusive.
I wrote a play in high school that we took to competition. It was about … well, a lot of stuff … but the title I stole from Fran Lebowitz and on the surface it had nothing to do with the play. It was called “Never Allow Children to Mix Drinks.” Easily 75% of the questions we got about it were of the “what did this play have to do with alcoholism” variety. It was truly depressing.
When I was a kid I wrote a short story where each line began with a different letter of the alphabet (First line A, second line B, ect.). This is probably only an idea which would appeal to kids, but I still think it’s neat. Which probably shows how immature I am.
In my fourth grade class we were in the creative writing unit, and we had to make little books of our stories, which were nothing more than construction paper stapled together with pictures and the story on sheets of notebook paper that had been cut out paragraph by paragraph. My first one was Sam and Scottie Save Vegetable Land, about a St. Bernard and a Scottish Terrier who save the fruits and vegetables in Vegetable Land. It was very popular in the class. So popular, that the teacher had me and my best friend write a story that would be allowed to be published through the school’s little publishing center. Published books got to be set up in the library. So we wrote Teddy’s First Day of School about Teddy the Tiger’s first day of school. It may sound sappy, but I consider those two stories in very high regard because they’re the very begining of my writing career and my love of writing.
God this thread is funny. I’m going to be taking a mad piss all day.
My sister (six years younger than me) wrote a serious commentary on the true meaning of christmas when she was about eight and my family put it in a frame and we still put it up in the front foyer every holiday.
“This christmas when you’re with your family, remember the true meaning…and please don’t love the tinsel.”
yes.
One time in 4th or 5th grade, we had an assignment to write a story about what our ancestors did a few hundred years ago. Well, my ancestors were Cossacks that rode around the countryside looting and pillaging, and that’s what I wrote about. I always hated writing but I remember being proud of this one, thinking this was my best effort ever (and actually good instead of just passing), but it just got me in trouble. The teacher made me re-write it because the subject was inappropriate or something. I was crushed. I mean, that’s what my people did, I couldn’t change the past or anything. I ended up making up some crap about farmers or something.
Actually, this is how most of my creative writing projects went (I’ve always sucked at writing), but it stands out in my mind because it’s the only school assignment that got me in trouble. Well, except for the Valentine’s Day card that got me sent to the principal’s office in 3rd grade, but that’s more of an art project than writing project, and a story for another time.
Dragons munching torn-off legs, mutated elephants, Cossacks, warriors on quests… this is totally hilarious, awesome stuff. And I gotta agree with evilbeth… dwyr, your kid poetry is great! I loved this one especially:
I planted a balloon in the ground
(Because it had no string).
I didn’t know what to call it,
So I looked at it and called it a something.
When I thought it was time,
I pulled the balloon out of the ground,
And I saw what had grown,
Out of that big dirt mound.
I planted it, and it grew a root, and then it had a string, and… oh never mind. My mom thought it was the most brilliant thing ever, though!
I mean, that’s what my people did, I couldn’t change the past or anything. I ended up making up some crap about farmers or something.