A long time ago when I was a kid, if you can imagine, about the age of seven or eight. It gets a little foggy when thinking back towards the seventies. Joe Cool from Peanuts and the Mickey Mouse Club were all the rage. If you don’t know who Joe cool is, you might want to look him up.
Even at an early age I wanted to be an artist. Any spare time I could get my hands on I would spend it drawing. From time to time I might have done a little daydreaming, per se, that might of turned into a doodled of something in my notebook in class. I was pretty good not getting caught by the teachers. I loved everything about pencils: how many shapes, sizes, colors, etc. It gets even odder, I absolutely loved the smell a number two pencils after being freshly sharpened. I still do to this day. What can I say, I'm easily amused. At home it was hard for me to get my hands on a pencil sharpener. My parents would let me use a sharp stake knife or something bigger to sharpen them with. It was a different world back then. My classmates were quick to notice my love affair for pencils. When I would borrow there's before class, they when surprised when they got it back with the eraser gone. I was more into drawing Spider-Man, Batman, Red Sonja, or some form of a scary monsters then to try come up with a story.
The first steps I took learning to draw was to actually trace an image. Over and over again until I was satisfied with the results. In modern terms this is call muscle memory retention. But at seven, I didn't know that. Then without tracing, I would attempt to draw the superhero and try to get it as perfect as possible. As before without tracing, over and over again I would draw the same image until I thought it presentable.
Fortunately my father worked a side job on the weekends in a bookshop. At the time, if a comic book was not sold they had to tare the cover off and put it into the trash. What a travesty. Every now and then he would bring some home. Among the superhero comics there would be The Unknown Soldier, The House of Mystery, The Witching Hour, Midnight Tales, or The Unexpected which had a tad more adult content than a seven year old probably should have had in his hands. Back then I didn't try to read comics as much as I fell in love with the images within the pages. At an early age, I knew images could tell a powerful story. So I stuck with drawing.
There did come a day when I though it might be cool to write a story for a comic book. At seven I was thinking, how hard could that be. My parents had a Royal typewriter and gave me permission to take care of it. I was beyond excited! I pulled out a table with metal collapsible legs in the upstairs living room and a chair. I set a stack of blank typing paper down right beside the typewriter. My parents taught me how to roll the paper in and set the margins.
Now for the first time I was set to be an author. In the beginning as any author, I would sit at the table looking at a blank page. How long, I don't know exactly. I would try to peck out a title. When nothing would come to mind, I would type random keys. A word here, a word there. You could say I was practicing typing, but in reality I was lying to myself. Page after page of random characters found themselves on a page. It looked like Martian gibberish than anything else. The more I tried, the more frustrated I became. Compared to drawing I felt like I didn't have the tools to become a writer. So, what was I supposed to do.
Well, I did what any seven year old would do, “plagiarize!” Before jumping to conclusions, I had good intentions. If you were wondering if I knew what the word plagiarism was back then, the answer is a resounding yes. Like with drawing, I would pick a story line that I thought was interesting and took the same approach. Instead of picking a Batman or even a Red Sonja comic book, I would choose more of the adult titles like The Unexpected, Midnight Tales, or The Witching Hour for the source of inspiration. With each bubble of dialogue I would create a new paragraph and type it word for word as if I was practicing drawing a stroke. I did this time and time again, but unlike with drawing I still wasn't able to create my own story-lines. There is not a word in the english dictionary, that could describe the frustration of a seven year old. So, I continued developing my drawing skills.
The following year I was enlightened by an odd english teacher. Not odd in the way she looked or acted but how she taught. She gave us a enormous project that started the day before October. The premise was to create the scariest story imaginable and have it completed by the end of the next month. Like this would fly in today’s school system. For the first time I took this seriously. At home I and went through my comics again and tried to find some form of inspiration. By using them as a crutch, I only found one thing, more failure.
Meanwhile, sometime during the first week of October my mom bought an vinyl album to played for trick-or-treaters for Halloween. Walt Disney Studios produced an album called Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. On the back cover it read, “Turn Your home into a haunted house with these spine-chilling, heart pounding, hair-raising sound effects. They’re perfect For spicing up parties. welcoming trick-or-treaters... or listening alone in the dark!” If you are wondering how I remembered all of that, it’s not because I have a mind like a steal trap, it’s because I still have the album. Remember it gets a little foggy. I absolutely loved this album. I played it night after night. One of the soundtracks I’d liked most was the was the “Mad Scientist’s Laboratory”. Listening to all the electrified sounds of pumps and bleeps set my mind raging. I would imagine myself outside the haunted house and as the record played the sound effects, I would meander through the house in my mind. I’d picture what the night creatures looked like and as the sounds progressed I imagined how the grave was dug to put somebody in.
I found a copy of it on YouTube if you like to listen to it.
Then, it finally hit me like the back-end of a shovel on the top of my head. I finally determined what the scary story was going to be about. Can you guess? Okay, I'm transparent. It was about the haunted house. Then all of a sudden came a horrendous problem of how to move through the story, or should I say, try to find the narrative. I couldn't just say this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and oh by the way, this happened. Time started to run out and I had one week to finish before the deadline was upon me.
One thing that helped in retrospect was to look at other peoples work in progress. Seeing how they constructed their story-line was immensely helpful. From reading them, I found that I was missing an important ingredient - characters. So for the first time I placed myself into the story. At this point it felt like for the first time I was getting somewhere with writing.
After reading my story a few times, I though that the story was lacking something. So I added my best Friend “Tom” into the story. In a way without realizing it by put myself and my friend into the story-line it became more personable. The story ended up as our adventure as we walked through the haunted house. When I was done with writing it, like when I tried to draw a superhero, I would start writing the story from the beginning and improve upon it as I went along. That in itself was a valuable lesson learned.
When it came time for me to receive my grade, I received a passable grade. I wished I could say that I be came a writer after that. But that would be a lie. I went to what came easy, drawing. But that’s another story in of its’ itself.
Click on the YouTube link to listen to this article.
