Stories You Wrote As A Child

Oh boy, do I. When I was about 10-11 I wrote a story about two super heroes known as The Wonder Twins. One was an orange wearing a Santa hat named Snowmann (yes two n's) and his partner Kitty who was a giant domestic cat, also wearing a Santa hat. They saved the world fighting against their enemies: the evil James Pond (oh yes) who was a monocle wearing giraffe who frequented suit, and his partner Mr. Carrot With the Phony French Accent, who was a supposedly French carrot with legs and arms, who also sported a suit. For whatever reason, his hair was always on fire on the left side but no one ever addressed it.

James Pond and Mr. Carrot would often attempt to foil the Wonder Twins with Team Rocket like antics and would always end up basically defeating themselves. Occasionally, the Wonder Twins would get help from PB and J, who were cape wearing pieces of toast spread with their respective condiment. It was mostly in comic strip format and I would share it with the class whenever there was a new edition. I didn't feel embarrassed then, but now...

The funny thing though, my current WIP is sort of like a super hero story, so I guess I haven't grown up much.

I wrote more 'serious' stuff a little later, but it wasn't any better quality.

I remember the poem I was proudest of, from when I was...seven years old, I think? Maybe eight.

I've made an invention, I've made an invention,
It's so very famous the name I won't mention,
It holds things together with a tightening grip,
Oh my goodness! It's the paper clip!

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I wrote quite a lot of doggerel at that age, but by god, that was my masterpiece. I still think that for seven years old it's not bad.

The first stories I wrote were not in English so unfortunately I can't make a clown out of myself, but I still remember them fondly Well some.

First thing ever was a cute adventure of a mouse who met a mouse-sized dragon and saved a lion by taking a thorn out of its paw. I was six or seven when I did that, I feel justified

Then, I was around 12 and I dared to write a bane of my literary ego: a mermaid story about a girl who dreamt to become a mermaid and met some mermaids and fell in love with a Triton called Morpheus and... gods, that thing should have NEVER taken place. The big part of it was a description of a regular room that included carpet patterns and paintings on the walls.

I've started many more, but they usually died a quick and relatively painless death. A dog rescued from the dog rescue, an oh-so-damn-original story of a good drow... That one actually made me cringe in shame when I dug it up recently

Needless to say I'd be very sad if I lost any of them permanently

I had a ton of real bad poems as well!

The other year I found my creative writing notebook from grade 3... I wish I had it with me or I'd type some up! Most of my main characters were cats or unicorns and about half the total word count consisted of me telling the names of everyone and all their friends and their pets. Creative genius.

I did actually write a novel when I was 11-12-- an actual, 42,000 word one (I found it the other year too, the word count is noted on the front page-- I had it all formatted for submission, which I'd researched, oh dear). It's about a dragon. I was terribly invested in it, and even now I can't bring myself to read it, because I don't really want to know how bad it was....

Unfortunately, a lot of my early, early work has vanished. It was all pen and paper (and Commodore 64). I do remember one work in particular was about a metal dinosaur with built-in guns saving earth from invading aliens.

Now that I think about it, my current work isn't that far afield from the early days...

This thread is so cute!

When I was 4 or 5, I used to write picture books. The stories were all about girls in triangle dresses with no arms. My mom would ask me where the arms were and I would say "they're behind her back." I guess I didn't like drawing arms.

I don't remember much of the surely literary content of these books, but I do remember that in one of them, I diverged from the plot completely to draw a picture of a bird sitting on a shelf with the caption "the vulture that sat on the mantle just sat there."

I was around four when I wrote and illustrated my first ever story: an adventure about a globe-trotting Scottie dog. I really liked Indiana Jones and G.I. Joe.

Between then and third grade, I wrote these goofy inconsistently-characterized serials. One was about an intergalactic detective agency, one was about a group of little siren girls trying to blend into a human school, and one was about a zombie with a bandaged face living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and cooking fancy dishes with human flesh for people he encountered (...I have no explanation, except that Night of the Comet was my favorite movie, and I loved reading the Weekly World News).

In third grade, I wrote my first full-length disasterpiece. It was about a soccer team that started a rebellion in an alternate dimension ruled by a tyrant. Said tyrant got one of the most humiliating death scenes an iron-fisted ruler could: the team captain knocked him into his overloading superweapon with a soccer ball. On behalf of my third-grade self, I apologize to that fictional tyrant for doing that to him.

Then, Darkness descended upon my world. I discovered Final Fantasy and D&D- which was good- but under their influence, I penned the first draft of (*thunderpeal*) The Albatross. A teen heroine discovered a villainous "Luxomancer" was creating a network of mirrors that he could somehow use for evil (I don't think I ever clarified that point), so she led a group of knights through the five gates to his castle, defeated a dragon, and put a stop to it. Lots of mirror/fire/water shenanigans ('cause Luxomancy). I would spend until my final year of high school trying to sculpt a Rodan out of this lump of scatological matter, often putting much better ideas on the backburner for it (although I did finish a nifty-for-the-time novella about a girl who bought a cursed secondhand prom dress that gave her special powers but leeched her life force in the process).

I wrote my first book when I was about eight, and wrote one or two more every year until I was twelve or thirteen. They were all about farms, and at each farm would live a little girl who was conveniently around the same age as I was at that time. There were three or four different series, although none of them made it past book two or three, and they were very list-y (describing in detail every animal on the farm as it was acquired and so on). I think they were usually around thirty-some pages, and we always took them to Staples and got them bound when I was finished with them.

By the time I got to high school, I wanted to get down to serious stuff with actual *gasp* plot. I wrote a lot of first chapters, and some second and third ones, but always got frustrated or ran out of things for my characters to do. It wasn't until my freshman year of college that I made it all the way through a real, solid draft, and that was thanks to lots of outlining and the motivation of NaNoWriMo.

Oh, and I just caught sight of this little gem:

When I was about 10-11 I wrote a story about two super heroes known as The Wonder Twins.

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My cousin and I grew up pretending that we were two super heroes known as The Wonder Twins. I don't remember James Pond and the French carrot, but they may have been involved at some time or another.

BRDurkin said:

Unfortunately, a lot of my early, early work has vanished. It was all pen and paper (and Commodore 64).

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Amiga 500 here. Represent!

The earliest story I can remember writing was when I was about seven. It was about two girls who go shopping with one of the girl's parents. I specifically remember them buying a cat for a dollar (I wasn't that familiar with prices at the time!) but not being able to get ice cream, so as revenge they decide to steal the mother's pearl necklace. It was a bizarre story, and I think I was trying to make the girls antiheroes, but seeing as I was seven, well...

fadeaccompli said:

I remember the poem I was proudest of, from when I was...seven years old, I think? Maybe eight.



I wrote quite a lot of doggerel at that age, but by god, that was my masterpiece. I still think that for seven years old it's not bad.

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That's fab, Fade. I love it!

In third grade, we had to write a song that would be a commercial for a product. I loved my dog a lot, and we were buying a lot of Mighty Dog right then, so I came up with this gem:

(to the tune of "Oh Christmas Tree," eh?)

"Oh Mighty Mutt, Oh Mighty Mutt, dogs love your meaty taste...
They'll eat it all, they'll eat it all... there won't be any waste.
It only costs a quarter now,
It'll make your doggie go bow-wow,
Oh Mighty Mutt, Oh Mighty Mutt, dogs love your meaty taste..."

Springs said:

My cousin and I grew up pretending that we were two super heroes known as The Wonder Twins. I don't remember James Pond and the French carrot, but they may have been involved at some time or another.

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Oh that's just hilarious, you made my day xD.

This is fun!

My first story was when I was seven or so and was about Bert and Ernie. Ernie forgot about Bert's birthday and had no money so he ended up stealing pigeons (which Bert loves) from the pigeon store. This did not make Bert happy.

My mom read this story over the phone to my uncle who is a writer as well. I was so proud of it! lol

I wrote a novella in my first year of Lycee (yes, I went to french school). It was set in the prehistoric age, and the MC was lied against, his fiance stolen, and he was banned out of the village. Then he came back for vengeance hahaha. So silly.

Anyway, I wrote a lot of poetry too. But then I moved to the US after Lycee, and stopped writing (as I was learning English) until now. Now I write in English, instead of French.

Sadly I have lost all my early writing (am sure I have posted about it here before though, on threads past).

When I was about six or so, I used to copy out the beginning of Enid Blyton books and then write my own story.

At about nine I was writing about American/Russian astronaut conflicts. Weird.

At ten I remember doing some fictional account of Christopher Columbus' cousin, exploring the world and finding strange islands, that went on and on for the entire final year of my time at primary school.

As a teenager I remember simultaneously working on three books at once, one about twin mice, destined to fight each other (inspired by Brian Jacques), a teenage-focused thing called Thirteen, and another named 'A Girl Called Hate' about someone who had powers from the stars and was accidentally killing classmates (inspired by Christopher Pike).

Really wish I had more than memories of them, but they were all done pre-PC. Even the teenage stuff was written on an Amiga and I lost all the disks.

I mostly wrote poems when I was younger. My mum's got a box of poems I wrote between the ages of 6 and 9. They're not too bad, apart from the occasional questionable rhyme.

When I was 8, my friend and I co-wrote a story called 'White Horses' which I seem to recall being about a girl who gets transported to a magical faerie realm. I don't remember a great deal else about it though.

When we got a PC (I was 13, I think) I started to write stories. My first was a Final Fantasy style epic adventure. I think it was about 30k words and there were a lot of battles against monsters and things being set on fire.

Needless to say, I don't think it was very good.

A couple of months back I went through my old childhood stuff and I found a bunch of papers and notebooks from even as far back as when I was as young as 7, hardly being able to write at all, the letters F and E looks like hairbrushes, lol. The papers were stitched together into something that was supposed to resemble a book and I can even remember doing this. I guess you can say I was born with the dream of publishing books one day...

Well, anyway. Inside these sheets of papers I found a number of, needless to say, bad poems and flash fictions. A whole lot of them were Christmas poems and poetry about running chickens. Running chickens. Yes. Don't ask me why because I don't have a clue myself, lol.

I also have a memory stick somewhere full of writings I did in my teenage years. Where the memory stick is located now though is a completely different question. Hopefully I'll track it down someday.

My first serious attempt on a novel or something (frankly don't know what it was supposed to be) was when I was 10-11. A children story about a giraffe and elephant on the run. Quite adventurous and not bad at all the way I remember it, and I actually intend to some day try to write it again and perhaps try to get it published. I honestly think it has potential.

Do I want to post any of my early work though? No. Simply because it's all in Norwegian and I'm not keen on translating it. *lazy*

Three pages of a Love Boat fanfic when I was 10. Excuse me while I look for a hole to put my head in.

When I was a kid I wrote a lot about animals; usually talking ones. Well, the stories were predominately about talking dogs, cats and horses. Good thing I can't find them anywhere, otherwise they'd be kindling for a fire. They were that bad.

I don't have a copy anymore, but I remember my first short story was what got me into writing to begin with. In second grade we had to write a story from one of two first sentences we were given, and I chose the one about taking a shortcut through a graveyard at night.

My MC was a girl with a dog and they ended up getting chased by werewolves and the dog had to protect the girl. The next day it turned out one of the werewolves was her classmate. My teacher had it published in the school newsletter.

Everything I wrote after that for a really long time was basically a giant ripoff of all the horse novels I read back then. Saddle Club, Pony Pals, Thoroughbred...oh, little me.

Now I write queer YA fantasy. Huge difference, I'd say.

My mom once showed me a story book I made when I was 8 or 9. I didn't remember making it at all. It was a ghost story; loner kid teams up with a ghost to torment the tormenters. Write what you know, I guess.

I am pretty sure that my ex threw out my notebook (yes, I was one of those "notebook" kids) full of teen angst poetry and stoned mental meanderings. I still have one binder full of bad poetry, short stories, disembodied scenes, and plot outlines, but only because it was mixed in with my old school stuff so he didn't realize what it was.

Hip-Hop-a-potamus said:

I was obsessed with Nancy Drew. My mom had a bunch of the old 1940s editions on war paper, and I read them all and then bought the rest myself, one week at a time with my allowance.

My first was a Nancy Drew ripoff that I worked on for about 2 years (from ages 8-10), with hand-drawn illustrations and everything. I still have it!

Wish our scanner was working, I could at least scan some of the pix I drew. Someday...

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I still have a four chapter "Nancy Drew mini-mystery" I wrote in 5th grade. And I have a terrible poem I wrote in 3rd grade, about my pet cat:

I had a cat,
Smokey was her name,
Whenever she started a fire,
It would begin to flame.

At 12 I won second prize in a writing contest. I remember nothing about the story except that it was really fucking terrible. Like, really, really, really fucking terrible. I thought I'd destroyed all extant copies, but my parents have threatened to dig it out.

Amazing how many of you guys were able to write complete stories at such tender young ages. I was too flighty to stick to one idea, with only one exception.

Atlantis said:

When I was about 7 or 8 maybe I wrote a short story [...] It was 5 pages or so typed on my dad's lap top.

When I was 12 I wrote my first novel called The Perfect Prince. It was 185 pages, hand written, in coloured pen on blank paper, each page a different colour.

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You finished a 5 page story at 7 or 8? See, this is what I'm talking about! Kids with more fortitude to see a story through to the end than most older people I've known (including myself).