May 29,2006
I didn’t see Star Wars when it came out in 1977. I saw it the following summer at
a drive-in theater. I got the novel for
Christmas that year and, though I had always been a voracious reader, up until
that point, I had only had the patience for short stories and comics. So Star
Wars was my first novel.
This was fourth grade and, the
previous year, my teacher had sent home a letter to my mom telling her that I
had a real talent for writing. She (the
teacher) even bought some little comic book ink stamp things with blank word
bubbles to encourage me to write. I
think I was mostly unaware of all that praise and subtle encouragement, but I
was beginning to develop a serious interest in writing.
On a side note: That teacher now
lives right down the street from me. Or,
rather, I now live right down the street from her since she’s been here since
Jesus was an infant.
Anyway, by my fifth grade year when
my Star Wars mania was at its peak,
my interest in writing was heightened by the announcement of the Young Authors’
Fair. I decided to write a wholly
original space epic.
Fast forward for a moment to the
present day. We are having tons of work
done on our basement and things on the garage side are a mess. Because of this mess, one of the rubber tubs
full of writing-related stuff has been opened and nearly dumped out. There in that box, is the space epic from
fifth grade. It is typewritten (my mom
did that) and bound (in the style of the Young Authors’ Fair) in contact paper (brown
wood-grain contact paper) over cardboard.
Throughout the story, there are parts that have been covered with
White-Out and corrected by pen. The
story is forty-one pages long (not including title page and illustrations) and
features 16 chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue. At the end, before the “About the Author”
page, there eight pages of illustrations, rendered in what appears to be
colored pencil. The title of this grand
epic is SPACE ADVENTURES.
The story is set in the 55th
century (the “universe date is four-forty-four and one point two” for those of
you keeping track) and begins “…on a small planet known Lak,” where “a man of
twenty-two years, who was six feet and two inches tall, and had a muscular
build and black hair that was parted, walked into a rocket port” to purchase a
ticket to Zale.
By the top of the second page, this
man , Mark Smith, has foiled an attempted robbery and received a reward of one
“Zanoi”, which, we are told, is a lot of money.
So Mark sets off for Zale on a “cargo and passenger cruiser” called the Flant, piloted by Captain James Rogers
and his green, reptilian, cyclops co-pilot Tway. Along the way, the ship is attacked and
captured by Space Pirates. Captain
Rogers hides his crew and the 25 passengers, only to ambush the boarding
party. In another wholly original twist,
they dress in the uniforms of the pirates so they can move about undetected on
the pirates’ ship. Many firefights and
much carnage ensue.
Eventually, the heroes encounter the
main villain, Captain Comet. He is
captain of the pirate ship, Pirship.
(Am I good with names or what?) Captain
Comet “…was a husky man wearing solid black clothes. His left hand had been replaced with a
special metal hand. His right eye had
been replaced with a large gray one. His
nose and mouth were only metal breath screens.
He wore a large black glove his right hand and he wore a large utility
belt. He had rockets on his back, also.”
I didn’t read the whole thing
again. (I mean, it’s forty-one pages for
Christ’s sake! And that’s not even
counting the illustrations!) But,
skimming through it, it seems that: Captain Rogers is killed and some other
character pretty much seamlessly takes his place. There are more firefights, more bad prose,
and a McGuyver-like bit where Mark turns a light into an electro magnet to
disable the “electro alarm” in a crawlway.
There’s another main villain—this one named Super Skull, but he doesn’t
really do much. In the end, Mark goes
through a black hole and ends up in the galaxy of Micron where he becomes a
member of the Space Force and marries “a beautiful red-haired girl” named Cindy
Matthews. Mark, of course, went on to
have many more adventures.
Re-reading this (or skimming through
it), I can’t help but laugh.
My attention to detail was absurdly
developed, particularly when it came to describing the spaceships and the
clothing of the villains. Remember the
nearly homoerotic description of protagonist Mark Smith mentioned above?
Then there’s my prose. Things like: “quick as a laser flash could
shoot” and “I saw a room with a good, good lock on the door,” are just brilliantly
bad. But my favorite bit of all is this
bit from Captain Rogers, following the death of his co-pilot and best friend,
Tway:
“I hate the idea that my best friend, Tway, is
dead,” sobbed James. “Oh, well. I’ll get over it. I hope!” he added sadly.
That raw emotion in that scene makes
me tear up a bit even now.
Just before the Young Authors’ Fair,
everyone in my class had to read their stories aloud. No one else had a story longer than four or
five pages. What’s more, no one wanted
to listen to a story longer than two or three pages. People were bored with Space Adventures almost immediately—though I can’t imagine why—so I
started skipping through it and editing on the fly. Even with the instant edits, no one was
particularly impressed with my story and it didn’t open the doors to an
exciting writing career in place of junior high; however, reading it aloud
before the class left me with one solid memory.
As I mentioned earlier, my mom typed
the thing from my handwritten manuscript and, along the way, she made some (okay,
many) mistakes. Most of them were
corrected but, as will happen, she missed a few. Most of these mistakes were really minor and
didn’t throw me off too much in my verbal presentation. Then I got to the line where the hero disarms
one of the bad guys. In my typed
version, the line read:
“With a swift motion,
Mark grabbed the bun belonging to the guard who was about to handcuff him.”
Fortunately, I didn’t actually read
the line as typed. I caught the mistake,
but I started laughing and never fully recovered. It was fifth grade and buns were fucking
funny. But they were also dirty so I
couldn’t tell anyone what was wrong. I
didn’t want to have to explain to the principal why I was talking about buns in
class. But I couldn’t stop laughing. If anyone had been paying attention (This bit
of interstellar grab-ass happened on page 33 and I think even the teacher had
nodded off by that point.), they must have thought I was a fucking lunatic.
But my point (and, as Ellen Degeneres
says, “I do have one”) is that I think this experience put me off writing
longform stuff for quite a while. The
next couple of years, I submitted only short story collections to the Young
Authors’ Fair and, for a while, that’s all I would write. Eventually, after reading some damn good
novels in high school, I came round to writing longer pieces again. By the time my interest in epics was
rekindled, I had developed an intense love for short stories and the art of
streamlined storytelling. That, I believe,
is why my novels tend to be on the short side and my short stories are barely
stories at all. I’m a short story writer
trapped in the body of a novelist.
I sometimes think that, perhaps, if
that fifth grade class had gazed me in rapt awe as I rambled on and on about
space pirates and laser battles, I would be writing deeply complex novels of
distant worlds and alien cultures instead of twisted novellas about a
one-handed ex-con living in a trailer park.
But there’s more to it than that.
I love the construction of fictional universes and I can go into great
detail about the minutiae of Star Wars,
Star Trek, and the Marvel
Universe. Furthermore, my own writing
(most of which takes place in the same small, southern town) is full of intricate
details that flow from story to story.
In my head (and, to some extent, on paper) Winnepesaukah County is just
as richly constructed as the Star Wars
universe.
I think the reason I’m so attracted
to the redneck denizens of my own little world is that the characters there
could very easily be real. The people I
write about are people you might actually meet at work, at the store or in the
park. And, for me, that makes them all
the more strange and frightening. I just
need to learn to write fewer scenes involving bun grabbing.
