I was trying to write a book about a girl named Melody and her best friends Raven and Buckley. They were elf-like things that lived in a magical land with a haunted forest and little critters like hopping foofs and whimpalopes. Some old witch queen lived in the woods, and Melody was actually the daughter of a singing wallow...making her extra special. Basically, Melody, like her name, was the one who had to play this magical flute built by the critters in the forest to lock the witch queen away for good so she couldn't work her evil voodoo on the village and turn them all in to slimy, ugly, scary things.
I created a map, plants and animals, and an entire race of people, but I didn't get past chapter 2 because it wasn't that great of a story. But, it did make history class better, and I realized in 8th grade that I had a thing for making up weird stuff. In middle school and elementary school, I wrote about mermaids, and how tadpoles turned into frogs, and about a cloud that "wasn't any ordinary cloud."
In high school, I wrote weird stuff in the cafeteria during lunch. My friends talked about things I don't remember, while I buried myself in-between blue lines of double rule paper that was meant for algebra homework or domain families or stochiometry.
What did I write? Children's poems.
Cold in A minor
Hickory the mouse had himself a spouse, and a mighty fine spouse was she.
She cooked the best pies, never told lies, and kept the house tidy and clean.
Now Hickory was the luckiest fella, for he had found himself quite the girl,
But his dandy life would be in strife, and end in quite a whirl.
Every night when the town was drifting through the sweetest of dreams,
Hickory's spouse was filling the house with sneezes that seemed to sing
He took his spouse to the doctor to see what this noise was about
It seemed his spouse had caught a cold, and it was playing Bethoven in her snout.
Oh what a terrible, horrible, dreadful, cursing thing this was!
Everyone knew the only cure was soup and a steaming tub of suds.
So she sipped her soup and popped the suds while listening to Minuet.
And lucky she that it would be she'd fight it without a sweat.
So every night she's tucked in tight and never sniffles a bit,
Whereas, the town below is troubled with woe and in a frenzied fit.
Now you see that it was she who passed along the curse.
Every bit of that town was troubled with frowns with a cold much worse.
That one was always my favorite.
Froggy Shoes
Gilbert the
frog, sat on a log
Eating black fly
pie.
When a toad came
along, humming a song,
Giving a wink as
he passed by.
Gilbert just
stared,though he wasn’t
aware,
For the toad was
WALKING by.
Not a crawl or a
hop or a big belly
flop,
And Gilbert
wondered why.
“Mr. Toad, how
strange, I’m positively
amazed!
How do you walk
so upright?”
“Why little frog
I wear shoes, as if it were
news,
And I keep them
knotted tight.”
When Gilbert
looked, his eyes were
hooked,
On the Toad’s
shoes of green
Laced so tight, he stood upright
Something
Gilbert had never seen
Gilbert then
tried, with all of his
might
To stand on his
two green feet.
But he slumped,
then hopped, did a great
belly flop,
Then landed on
his seat.
Sitting he was
sad on a green lilly
pad,
Not able to walk
upright.
When Mr. Toad
wrapped that lilly, around his feet
till he looked silly,
And used a vine
to tie them tight.
“There you are
my lad, now don’t you be
sad,
You’ve got
yourself some fancy shoes.
Keep them tied
tight,you’ll be walking
upright
As long as those
shoes you never lose.”
I wrote lots of these. I wrote about a brown cow that made chocolate milk, and about the origin of cheese on the moon, about a girl who sneezed away towns, and hills, and forests, and about a boy named Charlie who ran so much his legs couldn't keep up, and about a girl named Tinka La Tonka Tossel who had a flying hat...it flew away one morning, what do you think about that?
I have a knack for writing weird stuff. I think a lof of writers do. I can't imagine any writer starting with a story about a boy who works at a grocery store in a small, country town where he learns some hard lesson. I imagine a writer growing up would write a story about a kid at a grocery store that was magical and where tomatos sang and celery danced...I don't know. It seems natural to me that writers start off in this weird land, where they learn to think out of the box, and then as they grow up, they learn to refine the corners, tone it down some, and write some fictional story that doesn't include singing produce or flying cars...unless your story is Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings...in that case, you stay in your weird land and make magic that people want to read about.
I started writing a story called "The Strange Mr. Tisdel" a few years ago. It was good, but it was hard writing it, and I put it on the shelf until I can figure out how to go about doing it. I started "Hattie Mae and the Red Balloon" some time last year, and I haven't finished it yet. But as it is a children's book, it need not be too long. Thankfully.
Anyway, it's easier for me to write the kind of fiction that could be about real people and real places, and I just use some weirdness to describe, and reveal, and what not, but I love the things I wrote when I was younger. I like how my brain worked, and how it connected things without rules. I miss the freedome in writing like that.
I've learned that creating your own world is a lot harder than creating people and situations to live in a world that already exists.
But....who doesn't want to create their own world??
Exactly.
