My First Novel

Like everyone I’ve ever seen answer the “when did you start writing?” question in an author interview, I wrote a novel in grade school.

Now, I’ll be fair – this wasn’t my FIRST novel. First came a story Grace and I wrote together, trading a notebook back and forth, each writing a paragraph, supposedly. Grace wrote less and less, until she was just handing me the notebook back because she wanted to read what I wrote.  I… don’t even remember what that one was about. Time traveling kids with pirates?

BUT then I started a novel on purpose, for reals, for serious. It was to be an autobiography. (It is a special sort of person who feels they have a right to write an autobiography when 10.)

Loose-leaf, three hole folder with those foldy tabs.

Naturally, I decided to add a fictional side-plot in my life, that I was a secret agent working for an alien Agency that travelled through the universe and multiple dimensions doing good.  I named the novel “A” because 1) Science Fiction novels have weird titles like numbers and they are eye catching. 2) I thought coming first in the card catalog might be an advantage.  And so my secret code name was “Agent A”.  (I even wrote in it that I chose the name because I wanted to come first if there were any alphabetical line-ups of agents.)

I found it recently, cleaning out my closet. I read it, and was CHARMED by little me… such a CHILD.

I also found the next draft. My classmate Kimberly Smith gave me a typewriter in sixth grade and I edited and transposed the novel onto half-sheets of typing paper, carefully margined.  I drew in decorative capitals at the starts of chapters and centered a page number at the bottom of each sheet. I suppose I thought I would bind them into a book, somehow.

I left NO spaces between punctuation, and the spelling was TERRIBLE. Still, I could see how I had improved the story from the first draft, adding more adventures away from home and less “waaaaah I am forced to wash dishes sometimes that is child abuse!”

Then there was the third draft of the novel.  This was produced in High School. I showed my freshman english teacher my half-sheet version and she explained to me about putting spaces after comas and periods, and wrote me a pass to use the computer lab to write.  Through most of high school I was a de facto computer lab aid as I went every free period to work on my novel.  I wrote and polished it diligently, sometimes staying after school past 9 or 10 at night and having the janitor shoo me out. It was my hope to submit this novel for publication before I turned 18.  I was pretty sure that turning 18 would make me ‘over the hill’ and no longer a promising young writer.

However, I resolutely refused to mention my age in my cover letters – my work should stand on its own merits!

Having read the other two, I eagerly turned to this.

It is AWFUL.  A horrifying shade of awful.  There’s something MEAN and UGLY about my first-person character.  I’m repulsed by her.  Then again, I remember being pretty repulsed by myself in high school.  The spelling and grammar are much improved. The manuscript is properly formatted. I put in more secondary characters.  I am tempted to burn it so no one ever sees this glimpse inside my teenage ID.  And strangely, the plot is flatter – I got rid of some of the whimsical cliffhangers and more unrealistic things from the earlier drafts, and in so doing, got rid of half the fun.

WHY is my more skilled version so much worse than the less-skilled ones?  I don’t know.  Maybe you have to learn before you can truly suck.