Early Writing

I remember that I was reluctant to write at first. I didn't trust that I had anything to say, or enough to say. The first writing assignment I remember was at the beginning of kindergarten or first grade. I was at a Montessori school in Austin for both of those grades, so they're a little blurred in my mind. It was probably the second year. I was asked to write an essay, and I didn't know what the word "essay" meant. I ended up writing about the swingset we'd just gotten for our backyard.

The next bit of writing that I remember was in second grade. It was nearing Christmas, and we were supposed to write a piece with the theme being "Three wishes." I wrote it as a little story. We recently found this story, and it was nowhere near as good as I remembered it, although I suppose if you were really searching for evidence of a nascent writer, you could find one or two traces in there. By the fourth grade, I was writing longer and longer stories. I would compose them in my head and then write them down, sometimes shortening them because my hand would get tired before I ran out of words.

In seventh grade, there was kind of a story contest in English class. Everyone would write a story, and we'd read them out loud, and then there would be a silent vote (everyone put your heads down and raise your hand when I say the name of the person you think wrote the best story). I wrote a wild tale of me and two friends investigating a video arcade where there had been mysterious disappearances. It was sort of an homage to the "Three Investigators" series of mystery books, which I was big into at the time. Anyway, before we know it, the three of us are sucked into the videogames, experiencing them in a kind of immersive, virtual reality type way. Like, for "Asteroids" we ended up on the bridge of the little spaceship, looking out its viewscreens at these onrushing rocks. It won the contest. I remember being guilty about this, because a girl in the class had written a really beautiful story, grounded in reality and exploring complex emotions. You know, something that seemed like real writing to me, not just a bunch of crowd-pleasing hoo-hah. I was glad I won, but I honestly felt that she had deserved to.

By the time I was 15, I was getting involved in the Austin BBS scene, gravitating towards those with a creative bent. There were some exceptional continuing-story boards, where anyone could write the next little chapter, and I flexed a lot of creative muscles working on those. I had to figure out what the general style was, and then match the creativity and general direction of the top contributors. One of them, called "The Pub," I remember with a great deal of fondness and pride. There were other outlets for contributing original fiction of your own, and I wrote a number of things for these as well.

---jrw 09-20-03