A Look Back at My 16 Year Old Self

I was trying to organize my work area (a laughable concept according to my wife) when I found a couple of old notebooks containing a novel I attempted to write when I was a sophomore in high school. It is a glimpse into what seems to be the distant past. It also is exquisitely bad. Terrible, in fact, but it is a first step as a writer.

As many of you know, I have always been an avid reader. I had an idea that I would like to write, but never really acted upon it until a friend showed me a novel he had written. Dan Forsyth had written a terrific horror novel that piqued my imagination. I immediately began my own novel, Electric Land. In addition to awful writing, it had an awful title to boot.

I was 16 years old when I wrote this novel. In the intervening 26 years, I have greatly improved. At least I hope I have. I re-read parts of this writing to see where my mind was back in high school. I was a big fan of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Robert McCammon. That likely showed through in what I was trying to accomplish. For giggles, I've decided to include a snippet from the beginning of the book.

This is how we wrote in the days before there was a computer in every home.

So, if you're brave and can hold in the laughter here it is:

The lightning ripped through the darkness with the following thunder rolling across the night sky. A heavy downpour threw itself from the clouds and pelted the ground with its fury. Trees bent at crazy angles as the wind fought to topple them.

From inside the old cabin at the base of the mountain, they were safe until the storm ended. The group of high school seniors were having a party earlier in the day when the storm hit. The sudden downpour washed out the road back to town, and they took refuge in the cabin.

The cabin itself was a piece of work. It had been built back in the late 1800s by Clarkston's only millionaire in its history. He had it built for a young woman he was having an affair with. She became pregnant and his wife said he must take care of the girl.

For nearly nine months, Mr. James Clark hid his girl in the cabin. He owned most of the land in the mountains and had the area posted so no outsiders would discover her. Clark's visits to the cabin were frequent and often at night so as to not arouse suspicion in the village.

As local story goes, the baby was stillborn and Clark killed the girl. He went back to his mansion in town and withdrew all his money from the banks and disappeared. Somewhere in those mountains were the graves of a mother and her stillborn son.

Seventeen-year-old Eric Whire told the story while he and the other group of teenagers sat around the fireplace. Outside the cabin, the storm blew its fury. In several spots, rain seeped in through the roof and the cabin floor was gradually getting waterlogged. After being in disuse for some time, the cabin leaked like a sieve.

The whole group had heard the story. In fact, the whole town knew the story, but they all still liked to hear about it. Each time it was told, it got bigger and better. Every time it was told to an out-of-towner, a group of tourists would scour the area looking for Clark's long-gone money.

Okay. There's a tiny snippet from the very beginning of my grand masterpiece. Believe me, it gets much worse. I had no idea how to develop a plot or characters. The plot is thin to the point of having huge holes in it. As for the characters, they have no depth and do not grow throughout the story. Despite how bad it was, I still want to thank Dan for giving me that extra push to try my hand at writing.

I have two full notebooks of this nonsense. All of it is written in longhand. That's how we did it before there were computers in every pocket. Sure there were typewriters, but we didn't carry them around to study hall. It would take awhile to type all that into the computer. I'm not sure it's really worth it.