Plastic Men, or: Present Day Chris Reviews Middle School Chris

Having already written the blog post requested by Present Perfect, I now turn my attention to the one which WTFHIW generously bought through the Las Pegassist auction.  Here's the message he sent me:


On an article topic for you, Chris, how about this: Take a trip down memory lane by digging through your personal story archive and write a review of an old story of yours—be it years or even decades old—and take the opportunity to consider your own growth as a writer as you’ve both aged and gained more experience. The older the story the better, and if you stumble across one that you were particularly fond of back in the day but had practically forgotten, that’s better still.

Well, I found some of my middle school-era creative writing, and... well, let's just say it's a good thing WTFHIW paid up front and that I have a healthy sense of obligation, because I'm really not looking forward to sharing what I've unearthed.  Click below the break if you dare.

If we don't count school assignments, my creative writing hobby first began sometime in sixth grade.  Not coincidentally, that's around the same time I started playing AD&D--both are exercises of the imagination, after all.  My first forays into the hobby, as you might expect under those circumstances, were basically attempts to retell adventures that had taken place in our games, but I quickly expanded beyond that.  When I got WTetc.'s request, the first story that came to mind was an unfinished vampire novel I worked on for a few months in eighth grade--I feel obligated to point out that this was back before vampires were "cool"--but after raiding some old storage boxes, I found not it, but a notebook with a few short stories in it which probably dates to about eighth grade (I can't find a date on it, but it's got some french assignments in it that look middle school-y), which would mean I most likely wrote them when I was 14.  I chose from it the story in the most obviously finished state, and...here we are.  I'll write up the review in my usual format, though obviously it's not getting a star rating or anything.

Oh, and feel free not to click the link.  I typed out the story into a google doc (it was handwritten--even after I got into fanfiction in high school and started posting stuff online, I assiduously hand-wrote everything through to final draft status before typing and posting it, a habit I didn't forgo until ponies), and have carefully preserved all the errors, technical and conceptual, of the original, but I promise it won't bother me if you decide not to look at it.  Like, at all.

...Okay, here we go...

Plastic Men, by Chris

Impressions before reading:  Ohgodohgodohgod...

I'm not looking forward to this.  I suspect that's natural; I was a pretty normal middle-schooler, and "pretty normal middle-schooler" is not a descriptor typically associated with stellar writing.  Then again, neither is "pony fanfic author," so maybe I should try to stay positive.  This is clearly a second or third draft, so at least it should be coherent.

Zero-ish spoiler summary:  The "through her eyes" tale of an unnamed child in an unnamed country, in the midst of a war.

Thoughts after reading:  Let's start with what self-congratulation we can muster: the recurring motif of the star isn't bad, and it provides a level of narrative cohesion which most stories by young writers lack.  Also there aren't really that many spelling errors, for a 14 year-old working without spell-check!  Okay, so I hadn't quite figured out "explane" yet, among many other things, but I was a pretty atrocious speller in my childhood, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that my memories of going to dictionaries as I edited weren't entirely fabricated.  That said... well, it's a far cry from perfect.  

I can see a lot of similarities between this story and my ponyfiction, conceptually.  For one thing, I've always liked to experiment with different narrative devices--in this story, I was attempting to write from the limited perspective of a young child.  For another, I am and was pretty darn blunt with my morals--look at Letters from a Senior to a Junior Changeling for proof that I don't really go in for subtlety, at least when it comes to a work's central theme(s).  And for proof of that first comparison too, I suppose.

As should probably be expected, middle school me did those things pretty poorly, though.  While I was happy to see that, even at that age, my vocabulary was in good shape, I clearly had no idea how to mesh that vocabulary with a child narrator.  Trying to portray her (I'm going to give myself kudos for being a 14 year-old boy willing to try to write a female protagonist) as naive and simpleminded requires deft word choice, which was generally absent here.  Although words were generally used properly, there are some atrociously hackneyed phrases bandied about in this story; "my tears mixed with the ancestral rains of sorrow" physically hurts to read, even more so knowing that I'm the one who wrote it.

As for the bluntness of the story... I don't hate that it's an unambiguously anti-war story.  I could even handle the narrator's father's rants, in principal if not in practice.  But Plastic Men frequently strays outside of the scope of its narrator's mentality, essentially butchering the conceit in favor of demagoguery.  Add to that the lack of any serious portrayal of an alternative viewpoint (Mom is said to be a patriot, but the story never presents any character who even tries to justify the war, or the sacrifices it requires.  This may be comprehensible from a narrative standpoint, but it reeks of condescension, all the more so coming from a 14 year-old whose greatest tribulation was that nobody wanted to sit with him on the school bus), and even a message as uncontroversial as "war is bad" quickly begins to rankle.

That last point is probably the thing that bugs me most about my story, because it's obvious that I broke one of my present-day cardinal rules of storytelling: never use an emotionally charged event or scene as a story catalyst without seriously and honestly considering how your characters would respond to it, and without making a sincere effort to understand that response yourself.  There is a transparent falseness to this entire work; it's obvious that the narrator is nothing more than a convenient tabula rasa on which I could inelegantly try to project whatever emotion I was trying to evoke.  After glancing through the folder, this story wasn't even my worst offender on that front; I cringe to think that I was ever self-absorbed enough to believe that simply announcing that a character was crying ought to inspire a genuine emotional reaction--indeed, ought to inspire anything other than disgust with the author--in a reader.

In conclusion:  This story is terrible.  If I came across a ponified version of it while surfing FIMfic, I would react with scorn.  It would be easy to excuse it as being "just" something I wrote when I was young, but that doesn't hold water for me: there are plenty of middle-schooler ponyfic authors, and while it's true that most of them are as self-absorbed and unskilled as I was (no offense, most middle-school ponyfic authors), there are some out there who can tell a decent story without being condescending or preachy.

But in a way, that's also kind of comforting.  If I'm not yet a (insert your favorite author here), I think most people would agree that the stuff I've written in the last couple of years is worlds better than what I was doing a decade and a half ago, and that's with only intermittent writing practice during the intervening time.  That tells me that quality writing doesn't have to be the exclusive domain of those who have some innate gift for the craft; after all, if the guy who wrote Plastic Men can eventually learn to string a halfway decent story together, so can anyone.  And it does offer a bit of perspective on some of the more atrocious examples of fanfiction which dot this fandom.  Some of those authors are just arrogant idiot kids like I was, and while that doesn't make a bad story any better, it does provide a ray of hope; as long as there's a desire to improve, there's nothing that time and effort can't fix.