Because I was dumb, okay?
That’s not really true though, is it. There is a lot more to the story, but I had so many different answers to that question over the years. Because I firmly believed it’s my fault.
I was a bright-eyed teen, drunk on all the amazing fantasy stories that had only just begun appearing in our local print. And I loved writing. I would come home from school and write short stories based on all the random ideas I got throughout the day. A few of them were inspired by Linkin Park songs, so if anyone needed a visual of who I was as a teen, there you go. Healthy dose of teenage angst and an absolute overdose of black eyeliner.
It was fun though. Not the eyeliner part I mean, the writing. I wrote for fun, I wrote for friends, I wrote for random message boards that have since been purged and never made their way to archive.org. Thank god. Some of my coworkers are still searching for my Harry Potter fanfictions to this day, ever since I made an off-hand comment about being THAT kind of a teen.
At one point, my lit teacher, who was probably my third biggest fan (sorry Mr. B., nothing can compare to the passion of a devoted Draco Malfoy fangirl), encouraged me to submit some of my short stories to a local competition aimed at kids and teens.
And so, I went ahead and scoured my computer folders (aptly named Writing\New\Newer\Asfsfsfsf or something along those lines) for a suitable story. There were no Dracos and no Linkin Park lyrics in most of those though. I loved crafting my own worlds. Epic struggles between dragons and rebellious humans who tried to escape their scaly overlords. Forbidden romances between cursed gargoyles and tree spirits. Many of them might not have been very original, but looking back, I think young me was pretty cool. She painstakingly searched for the right word to describe just how much the poor gargoyle suffered under his curse (spoiler: a lot).
For the sake of brevity, I will skip to the climax of this tragedy — the competition went terribly.
You see, out of all the kids that went there, only me and one other contestant wrote fantasy. All the others, kids aged ten and up, had something to say about their heartbreak, their vacations at their grandparents or liking apples. I’m not saying me and the other guy didn’t. We just did it in our own way and that might have included dragons. Or elves. Or xenomorphs.
The sole judge would recite her feedback and I sat in anticipation of what she had to say. Not because I wanted praise, but I viewed her as an authority figure that could tell me if my characters sounded like people. If my plot made sense. If my sentence structure sucked ass (because my sentences are like days in the office. Long. Haha. Am I right. I work from home, I wouldn’t know).
“Did someone make you join this competition?” she asked, looking at me in a way that already told me the criticism I was about to receive was harsh.
“Not really, I mean kinda, my teacher enc-”
“Well, you shouldn’t have,” she cut me off. “Why do you write this fantasy nonsense? There’s no point in writing it, fantasy has no art to it, and no future.”
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
Was what I should have said. But I was in my mid-teens and under the naive impression adults know better. Another spoiler alert: sometimes, they don’t. Source: me, the adult, who is painfully aware she doesn’t know better way too often.
Had it been current me, I would not have accepted that answer. Because, in my day-to-day life, if I gave that kind of feedback, my boss would probably come to personally throw me out of the window (it’s okay, I live on the ground floor).
It’s not — this product feature sucks ass. It’s — what parts of the design aren’t working? Why would this be difficult to incorporate into our architecture? Have we thought of end-users? Do we have data that…you get it.
But I didn’t have the experience, or the mouth, or the right dose of not caring I do now. So, I just choked back tears. And nodded.
The other guy received similar “advice”. We should just stop writing fantasy. It’s the worst genre. Take stock of our talented comrades and write about the villages our grandparents live in, but only if it’s to address social issues. Or stop writing altogether.
I think that was the reason I composed myself enough not to cry. Because, as shellshocked as I was, I sat there thinking ‘but I don’t want to read that.’ There are people out there who do, but I didn’t. I still kind of don’t. So why was I being asked to put words on paper, if the only thing I could pour into them was letters? Not my passion, not my daydreams, not my beloved gargoyle buddy who deserved better?
So, I stopped writing.
And it wasn’t until now, in my thirties, when I started realizing what a load of bullshit that whole situation was.
Because it was that, wasn’t it. Who, in their right mind, decides to judge a children’s writing competition, only to take that word in its harshest sense. The one that involves fictional death penalties.
You write about werewolves? Straight to jail. You write about armies of icebenders? Straight.to.jail. Spaceships? Believe it or not — jail.
Well, someone who, despite publishing a lot of books and presumably setting foot outside of their grandparents-with-social-issues infested village, lives in a very small world.
I don’t think I fault the lady for her behavior, I mean, I don’t even remember her name and, at a risk of making her my Voldemort, I never plan to go back and look.
She distributed feedback based on what her small world consisted of.
She just wasn’t lucky enough to meet people, who would plant seeds of something different and exotic in it. She just has apple trees, I guess.
The one person I faulted for the whole thing for a long time was me. The poor somethingteen year old me, who went back to school, head hung in shame. Who, with the fakest and widest smile known to mankind since Mouth of Sauron graced the big screen, said to Mr. B.: “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”
I think Mr. B. wanted to hug me, but it wasn’t a thing teachers did at our school, so he did his own version. A more meaningful one I could not appreciate at that moment.
“Well, I still expect to be the first person to receive a signed copy of all your books.”
I kept coming back to this whole thing during the time I briefly taught an <unspecified creative> class (for children aged 7 and up). Let’s be honest, kids sometimes come up with ideas that are hard to get behind. I love their passion, but turning ‘Poop the Superhero’ into a viable story wasn’t on top of my curricular priorities.
You know what I did?
I let them run with it. What are his superpowers? What are his motivations? How do we make sure the citizens he’s saving aren’t scared of him?
Lucky for me, a series of DEFINITELY NON-MANIPULATIVE questions ended up being enough to have less fecal matter and more heroism in that particular instance. I did have to ban topics involving bodily excretions afterwards though. (Did they find workarounds? Of course they did, they were seven. Everything turns into potty humor at that age.)
It just took me a bit longer to apply the same benevolence and kindness to myself. (I should let that sink in. I was ready to accept sentient poop before I was ready to accept myself.)
Last I heard, Mr. B. wasn’t doing that well. In my mind, he’s still the same dorky guy that always wore suits and claimed he pranked me into rapping by making me repeat a joke I just said super slowly.
That’s why I took the baby step of making this Substack. I think I have to start writing again.
I’m worried Mr. B. will retroactively take back the As from my writing assignments if I don’t deliver all those signed books he feels I promised him.
I mean, worst case scenario, I could probably print out some of my LinkedIn posts and sign them. Mr. B. would appreciate fresh views on metrics just as he appreciated my gargoyles.
Fuck that lady though.
P.S.: Let me give a shout-out to
this time. His Microdosing prompts are such a pressure-free way to get your brain going. Writing a novel is hard, saying why dentists are the scariest thing on this planet in sixty words is…well, still hard, but you can probably do it on your company-paid coffee break.
I don't know how I stumbled across this stack, very different influences I think, from the stuff I write, but man! I found a lot of parallels just in the rhythm of this piece. It's also just such a cool testament to the genre I'm almost tempted to go read loads more of it! Great work haha
It's always the "weirdest" teachers who support the creative children the most. I had a smiliar one like this in high school. But everyone hated her because she was "too quirky". Instead of hating her, though, I became friends with her and to this day I still cannot stop thinking about her and the way she influenced my writing. I started a printed magazine and she supported it, she told me about several books and comptetitions that changed my perspective, and so on.
Just like you had a Mr. B, I had my Mrs. B (actually, her surname starts on B, or at least did before she married a rich german guy and fled our country, lol).
So, let's continue writing and on top of that, we can make our former teachers proud!