My first "book" (8th grade)

That is all kinds of awesome

When my daughter was 8, I was off to my writer's group and she sent a book along for them to crit. The Butterfly Key (IIRC), where a girl finds a key that takes her through the portal into butterfly world...

That is so fantastic.

I'm impressed at how you were already on to original fiction, too. In 8th grade all I was writing was awful self-insert Mary Sue ElfQuest fanfic.

Lawl, mine was "The Sea Dragon Coloney" in 1998. So about fourth grade. I was convinced it was going to win a Pulitzer.

Is it wrong that I kind of want to read a book with that title?

hahahaha, yeah, I have one like that, too. My mom keeps it hidden in her room so I can't destroy it. I think mine was called Shienavorn?

Lol! Very cool! I never did get around to making covers for my stories. I wish I had!

In school we were given two projects (one when I was 9, one when I was 11) to write a story. The first one was completely open so I could make up my own story (which I do believe was along similar lines to Beowulf). The second one we were given a fantasy world and several plot points, but our characters and how we got there were ours to choose. It was called "Escape from Kraznir" I think.

I have the latter somewhere...

I filled up whole notebooks with stories about superheroes, giant robots, and evil monsters.

Ah, good times...

I wrote a terrible historical novel when I was 12. It had Byzantine ambassadors siding with Poles against evil Saxon invaders.

Stupidly violent, and I do mean stupidly.

I wrote my first "book" in sixth grade (45 pages handwritten in a notebook). It was terrible. The story itself wasn't so bad, but the writing was terrible. I didn't seem to understand I could use pronouns instead of starting every sentence with the character's name.

I guess I came to the game late, comparatively. I was 16 when I started my first serious novel, which was intended to be 'an eye opening space opera whose awesomeness would revolutionize the literary world'. Not that it wasn't absolutely terrible -- it was! I think the onset of age only meant that I could get more creative with ways to make it as horrible as I could, as I employed and then proceeded to blatantly misuse a wide variety of literary devices culled from my English classes.

I think I unintentionally committed every single crime possible, including starting with an character waking up, and then proceeding to stare at himself in the mirror as an excuse for unnecessary introspective philosophical exposition about how angsty his life was, and how no one seemed to understand that he was not an android like everyone else. I also got way over-creative with punctuation and font, and seemed to think that mashing my fingers on the keyboard to spew out symbol junk was a good way to convey emotion, as was changing the font and font size every few sentences. Oh, and let's not forget that I somehow also managed to justify to myself that ending and starting chapters in the middle of a sentence, as well as having chapters only a sentence long, was somehow a mark of good writing.

My best excuse was -- "but [insert famous writer's name here] did it!"

A story about a girl who found a door in midair while running from bullies and went through it to discover Candyland where troubles melted away and there was no more school.

Funny enough, it was written from a prompt we had to do on a standardized test in 2nd grade. We randomly got either a fictional prompt or a non-fiction prompt. I got the fiction one, and my life has never been the same since.

rwm4768 said:

Is it wrong that I kind of want to read a book with that title?

Click to expand...

Nope. So do I.