I’m cleaning house, otherwise known as getting rid of junk, and ran across some early writing. I won’t say in which decade I wrote them, but I’m taking the stand it was before I could vote. Grade school maybe. I think they were written in crayon. Yeah, they’re that bad. They predate finding my “voice” and clearly show the influence of the authors I read at the time. If those authors were angst-ridden masochists who were fond of including the character’s first name in EVERY LINE OF DIALOGUE.
Here’s a sample:
“How many men did you have after me, Lisa? How well did you satisfy your hunger after you whetted your appetite with me?”
“Nick – ”
“My successors, Lisa,” he commanded. “How many were there? Who were they?”
****
As you can see, Nick was extremely fond of quotation marks. He also shook Lisa a lot, yelled at her and wasn’t a very nice guy. The anti-hero. He had no character arc. None of the characters did.
These tragic pieces are going in the trash. I don’t need validation of how much my writing has matured. I think I’ll find my humor in other areas from now on.
How bad is your early writing? Do you still have samples tucked in a drawer?
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