Things I Wrote in High School

  1. A fantasy story which combined the siblings-transplanted premise of the Narnia stories with the wartime-travel premise of the Lord of the Rings. I mostly remember setpieces in forests and caves.
  2. A fantasy story which combined the suffering-orphans trope from Dickens with the madcap bizarreness of the Oz books. I remember, like, a giant mouse with butterfly wings? That can’t be right.
  3. A fantasy story based pretty heavily on John White’s “Archives of Anthropos” series, itself basically a Lewis/Tolkien pastiche, and from memory not a very good one. I don’t remember anything about my story at all, except that I thought it was the best thing I’d written yet.
  4. A science fiction story about a cat that had been genetically experimented on and became a mountain lion, I guess? A thoroughgoing ripoff of “Lab Animal” in Garfield: His 9 Lives.
  5. A story called Deadman’s Isle. I remember this one well, because I wrote two drafts and had started a third by my senior year. It was based on a really intense dream in which memories of the Australian western family series Five Mile Creek, combined with a book on Australian art and a collection of Poe stories I had read the night before, produced a surprisingly coherent narrative about a collection of people chasing after a legendary pirates’ treasure on a dangerous, booby-trapped, and beautiful island. There was backstory and romance and a magnetically handsome British captain half-crazed with lust for gold and faithful retainers and all kinds of stuff; what’s most striking about it now is that the most competent action hero of the piece was a Peruvian woman, and it was supposed to be set in the 19th century. I had spent much more time watching “color-blind” 90s television than reading actual 19th century adventure fiction — which doesn’t mean the story wasn’t racist (it really, really was), just that I based all the characters on people I knew, and I knew hypercompetent, athletic Latin American girls.
  6. A story about, like, a Celtic princess? I dunno, I had a crush on a red-haired girl.
  7. A story that was a really, really close ripoff of the Star Wars trilogy (the only one that existed at the time), with character designs based on half-memories of comic books and this one feature that the Christian youth magazine my parents had subscribed me to ran about Christian teens who drew comics art about Jesus. I spent a semester alone in the computer lab writing it instead of reading and analyzing The Scarlet Letter, which I now think was very poor judgment on the part of my English teacher.
  8. A dozen or so erotic stories. Most of which were started and languished unfinished, sometimes for the obvious reason and sometimes due to moral scruples. The only memorable feature of any of them were the times I tried to go historical-fiction. (Plus the one time I threw away the pages in the bathroom trash instead of my own, so as to keep them further away from me, and my mom found them and confronted me over their sinfulness. I remember being nearly as angry that she’d read something I had thrown away — which was an implicit statement that it should never be read — as I was ashamed of my compulsive fascination with sex.)
  9. A hundred or so song lyrics, mostly in blatant imitation of whatever Christian music (or Bon Jovi) I was listening to at the time. My best friend’s older brother had a band, and they talked about setting some of my lyrics to music, but I don’t think that ever really happened.
  10. A few pages of a superhero comic featuring all original characters, until my Spanish teacher made it clear that he’d prefer it if I worked on Spanish homework. I recycled some of the characters a few years later when I posted a bunch of superhero fiction online.
  11. A short story set in the Biblical era of the Forty Years’ Wandering. This was my first attempt at actual literature, with themes and psychology and something like feminism and the intersection of sexuality and morality. It was based on the first and only time I ever read through the Pentateuch, spinning out what a scenario laid out in one of the obscurer commandments might actually look like. I remember being very proud of it winning a prize at school for fiction, and even prouder of there being a mild controversy over the fact that I had used the word “bastard” in the text.
  12. The full script, songs, and character bios for an animated movie based on the Rapunzel fairy tale, explicitly patterned on Disney’s Little Mermaid and Beauty & the Beast. I can’t imagine it could have been any good — I remember a swamp, mostly. I think the heroine’s animal sidekicks were, like, a raccoon and a firefly, because I could draw them in a cartoony way.
  13. Several dozen poems that I pretentiously called a “cycle” based on the Arthurian legends and increasingly — as I wrote more — any old fairy tale or myth I could make vaguely fit into the Camelot setting. Heavily influenced by a very surface reading of Charles Williams’ Taliessin poems, and terrible on a molecular level — I mean, I assume. You couldn’t pay me to revisit them.
  14. A couple of short short stories that were mostly about mood. I associate them for some reason with Maupassant and R. D. Blackmore, but that may just be because I read those books in the same room where I wrote the pieces. One was about a jungle? Another was maybe about fairies?
  15. The broad outline for a dystopian action novel/film treatment starring a cyborg killer on the run from the government program that created him, and the porn star he falls in love with. I didn’t have anything filled in except the courtship scenes, which were almost entirely based on John Wemmick in Great Expectations.
  16. A chapter or two of a detective series starring a European Guatemalan and her indigenous maidservant, patterned explicitly on Peter Wimsey and Bunter. Aaaaaaaaaand RACIST, as the friend I shared it with pointed out immediately.
  17. A twenty-years-in-the-future fanfic about my graduating class and all the impressive achievements we were each destined to achieve. I honestly believed the graduating-speech twaddle about how special and full of potential each one of us was, and tried to envision it. I ran out of steam halfway through, and left it on the plane back from Guatemala. I haven’t seen any of them in fifteen years, or heard from any of them in five.

16 Notes/ Hide

  1. luria-p said: I thought you were going to post actual text of something you wrote in high school and I was really excited. & now I kind of want to have a Post Something You Wrote in High School theme week.
  2. girlboymusic said: Man, you were busy. All I ever wrote were the beginnings of Anne Rice and Francesca Lia Block knockoffs, a noromo X-Files fanfic I never published, and a the first 300 pages of a novel which, in retrospect, was the most lesbian thing ever written.
  3. isabelthespy said: 1) bless this entire post 2) anime fanfiction, i win (“win”)
  4. jonathanbogart posted this

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