In some capacity, I’ve been writing since the mid-1960s, when I was six years old. My first story of note was titled, My Little God Fluff, a tale about our family’s dog. The story was writ large on coarse, cheap, writing paper with broad, heavy green lines and a dotted center line to help bourgeoning young minds grasp the differences between upper- and lower-case print. The writing implement was a cumbersome bit of lumber painted yellow and sharpened to a nub of graphite. When pressed hard into the paper by a chubby hand endowed with dubious fine motor skills, the pencil produced shaky etchings on the page.
Aside from the obvious titular misspelling, a result of what my wife calls developmental spelling, each of the roughly six sentences contained a subject and a predicate, and the story itself contained a beginning, middle, and end. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Kritzer, was elated. The story was singled out and praised for its inherent structure by the four first-grade teachers in our school. My fellow classmates ridiculed the reversal of consonants in the title. I crawled under my desk as instructed to do when faced with nuclear holocaust. Ahhh, those were the days.
For me, spelling is still a problem. I tend toward a Shakespearean approach, “If it sounds right, so-be-it,” rather than newsprint standardized spellings, which came into vogue around the turn of the 19th century, “There is only one way, you dolt.” That, at least, is the story I tell myself. Thank dog for spellcheck.
My fine motor skills have improved only slightly in the ensuing fifty-five or sixty years. However, sentence structure has become far more complex. And storytelling? Well, storytelling is inclined more toward middle, beginning, and end (or not, as is the modern way).
Do you remember the first time a piece of your writing made some person take notice? Was it a moment of joy and triumph? Did something within you curdle the experience? Or was it a little of both? What is the story you tell yourself about that experience? Care to share with the class?