You Have to Start Somewhere

I was organizing some files today and I found a bunch of old floppy disks that I hadn't touched in years. After I hooked up a portable floppy drive to my laptop I popped a few of them in. Oh, the memories. These things are upwards of seventeen years old, and contain things I wrote when I was in college.

Most of them are school-related, term papers and scripts for short films and things like that. They're all awful. Reading them now I wonder how I ever passed anything in college. But those aren't even the worst things I discovered. There are other, older files on some of the disks. Files I remember writing, but I didn't actually remember. These are the chapters of the first book I ever tried to write. It was an attempt at a fantasy novel in the Lord of the Rings style, heavily influenced by Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. The documents were last saved on the disks I found in mid 1990, probably around the time I moved to Boston, but they were written years before that, beginning around 1987.

So what was my writing like 21 years ago?

Pretty freaking terrible.

What follows here is a pretty random selection. None of it is any better, and some of what I read was -- to my horror -- much, much worse. So why post it? To prove a point. It doesn't really matter if you're any good at it. If you want to write, just write. And keep writing. Even if you're awful, don't quit. Keep it up. Eventually you will get better. I promise.

So here it is, a never-before seen (and never to be seen again) excerpt from my truly awful first novel, The War of the Empires (a title I stole, by the way, from an episode of the British Sci-fi series The Tomorrow People):

The inside of the throne room was a beautiful polished ivory-white walled chamber similar to the stairs outside, it was decorated with sparkling jewels of immense size from all over Arulai many of them dating back to the time of Polarian. At the huge wall directly opposite from the huge double wooden doors that led into the room there sat an old wrinkled man with long snow white hair that glistened in the golden sunlight and a beard that stretched all the way down to his lap. He was clothed in elaborate jewelry and expensive white robes with a ruby studded golden crown that bore the emblem of a golden Phytor, a majestic bird twenty times the size of a man which lived in flocks in the forest lands of the far off Penninsula of Sithrica. The phytor had it's wings spread as if it was in flight while its scarlet ruby eyes gleamed like twin crimson stars amid a sky of gold.

Ed Wood, one of the worst and one of the most memorable writer/directors of all time once wrote "...just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."

Poor old Ed didn't get much right, but he nailed that one.