Mar 03 2009
The Myths of One’s Youth
I came home from Florida to a room that need unpacking and organizing: my family moved while I was away and emptied a storage unit we’ve been renting for years, so I went through boxes full of stuff I barely remember. In keeping with my chief occupation of the last — well, long time — a lot of that “stuff” was paper. And some of it was really exciting. I found old scenes and notes from Worlds Unseen when it was still in idea stage, its events and characters bearing little resemblance to what they are now. I found my favourite rejection letter, sent from Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux when I was only 13, telling me that Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe was clever and funny. And I found The Sword and the Shadow.
When I was 12 or so, I invented an entire fantasy world called Alacondra. My imagination was detailed and vivid, and Alacondra had races, legends, and an ongoing story. When we first moved to California I wrote chapters and scenes for a book set there, but they never shaped into an entire manuscript — though they came closer than anything else did before Theodore. I’ve often wished I could find some of those old scraps and myths, if for no other reason than to revisit my 12-year-old imagination.
So yesterday I struck gold. I found a binder with some (not all) of those old scenes, a pencil-sketched map, and, most exciting of all, a complete outline. I didn’t think I even wrote outlines back then. But as it happens, the story is kind of interesting. The myths of my youth are back, and I just might do something with them yet.
That’s really neat; I’m just gearing up to write a series of short stories based on the imaginary games my brother and I used to play when we were younger. The protagonists are Isabella (Mokey) Avery, and her cousin, Gilbert (Gully) Gabriel.
[...] Rachel Starr Thomson put an intriguing blog post on The Myths of Oneâ [...]
Hehe, that reminds me of all those rejection slips I got a few years ago when I wrote my first novel, Schider Wood. It was impressive to write a 60,000 word novel I thought, but when I look back at it, it’s very childish and unimpressive as far as original goes. No wonder those publishers didn’t want it!
A slave girl who’s lineage is royal, her destiny to be a queen, her quest to get there and to escape the evil Drewar Stone who’s heart is of course, like stone. Her childhood friend who helps her along the way, an old seer who prophesies the Shachath (skeletal demons with wings and fire breath) to come for her blood. Finally getting to Schider Wood and proving her royalty by a marking on her palm, and then the final show down with Drewar Stone where of course, the heroine wins.
Does that sound corny or what?! I finally gave up on it, ha, just to start another story about an assassin. Don’t know if that’d go over too well. It’s not that graphic and it’s shaping up, it’s got its morals, but I don’t know if that would go over too well.
I love finding old manuscripts from when I was younger, even if they do make me cringe sometimes! Recently I found a whole series of stories on my dad’s computer which is probably eight or nine years old, that I completely forgot I’d written. I wrote about the find on my blog:
http://elisabethscorner.blogspot.com/2009/02/files-and-dialect.html
Finding old stories – or scraps of stories – from “way back when” is SO much fun! Most of my stories are collected together on a shelf in my room, neatly organised and labled in folders and files. Not long ago, though, my mother found an old file of my school work – from when I was eight or nine, maybe? There, among sheets and sheets of math exercises and cursive practices and maps and timelines (and all that stuff – you get the idea!), I found a story about Robin Hood and Maid Marion. It was beautifully written – and illustrated with maps and drawings. The story took twists and turns possible only in the imagination of a child under ten and I laugh every time I remember it, but – although I don’t anticipate reworking this story into anything now! – but it’s a rather charming reminder of how writing stories has long been close to my heart!
Chelsea, that sounds really cool! A friend of mine wrote a whole series of novellas based on similar stories. She had a lot of fun and even self-published some of them, I think.
Jessica: I don’t know, those skeletal fire thingies sound pretty scary to me! You should use them sometime. As for assassin stories — we have one in the Romany Epistles (Aiden), and yeah, it presents some interesting moral challenges. If nothing else, you’d probably go on quite a journey while writing it!
Elizabeth and Elisabeth, thanks for sharing about your childhood work. It never ceases to amaze me how we can look back into our own imaginations through old writings.