You Have to Start Somewhere Part II

The last post contained a snippet from the first novel I ever tried to write. It's probably one of the best passages in that atrocious mess, but it's still pretty bad. I wrote it when I was about 15 years old. In those days I was working on pure exuberance. Some grammar school English composition classes and a year or so of high school represented the sum total of my formal study in the art of writing. Needless to say, I was unpolished. I was wordy, undisciplined and convinced that the best writing was overflowing with adjectives and adverbs. I was also reading a fair amount of pulp fiction and comic books, which only reinforced all of those wrong ideas and bad habits.

Once I got to college, as a journalism major at first, my wrong-headed ideas suffered a serious smack-down at that hands of one professor after another. My ego took a beating, but my writing got better. After a while, I realized that my first attempt at a novel was so bad that it simply couldn't be saved. It had to be abandoned.

It wasn't long though, before I dusted myself off and tried again. The result was something I called "The Curse of the Warlock." It was still an attempt at a Lord of the Rings-style epic, and was still heavily influenced by Kull of Atlantis and Conan the Barbarian, only now blended with H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker.

And it was still pretty bad. Better than what I wrote when I was in high school, but still not publishable -- although I tried, over and over again until I eventually came to the realization that my second novel was also destined for the scrap heap.

So here is my second "clip" -- a fragment of a chapter that I wrote sometime around the mid-90s, just after I graduated from college.

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Slick condensation slowly dripped from the top of the cold granite window frame, carried away in the cool breeze. Gray-white haze hovered like a lingering spectre over the royal port city of Thudaal as the faint lapping of waves on the nearby shoreline soothed the city to sleep.

The icy glow of the double crescent moons cast little light upon the slumbering metropolis as the faint sound of beating wings became barely audible. Through the thick haze, roaming atop the marble towers, a dark, solitary figure floated menacingly. A silent predator hunted for his kill....

...Then, swooping again like a bat from the shadow, Kha'Ralost plunged his sharp nails into two of the guards, heaving them across the room. Their larynxes dropped to the sticky wet floor as the Warlock turned his hell-red eyes to another. The blade landed hard on Kha's iron gauntlet and a spear deflected harmlessly away from his chest. The wielders of the weapons were quickly dispatched by the ferocious Wraith, his fangs tearing mercilessly into a crushed skull.

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As I pointed out the other day, even Ed Wood recognized that the trick with writing is to just keep plugging away. You might not be good at it when you start (and it's probably better for you if you don't realize just how bad you really are at that point, but that's another story) but if you keep it up, you will get better.

The snippet above is better than what I wrote when I was 15, but even then, at about 22 or 23, it was still far from good. But I wasn't about to quit.