More Personal Archaeology

[osprey_archer]

The next leg of Sorting Through All My Stuff has involved sorting three boxes of papers (artwork, schoolwork, old stories, etc), which is now… one box of papers, which is a significant decrease but still Many. I kept only a few representative samples of my drawings, but when push came to shove I couldn’t bear to get rid of my old writing. My precious juvenilia! Would future literary researchers ever forgive me for recycling it??

Actually, they’ll probably struggle to forgive the fact that I kept so much material. “What the hell kind of eight year old writes and illustrates this many picture books and KEEPS THEM ALL?” they will weep.

Things I have found!

1) The Treacherous Journey, a novel (well, okay, chaptered short story) that I wrote in the third grade about a girl escaping from the Nazis. I can neither confirm nor deny that it was heavily inspired by Number the Stars. My proud parents took the printout down to Kinko’s and had it bound like A REAL BOOK and that was one of the shining moments of my life, and I may now put it on the shelf with all my other books.

The heroine is missing a hand, because apparently I have been lobbing limbs off characters for as long as I have had characters to lob limbs off of.

2) On that theme, I also found a picture (in gel pen, no less) of a fairy girl with a pegleg. Who is she? What is her story? This one has no writing attached, so who can say.

3) Multiple picture books, including one about the Rolocs, which is “color” backwards, because the Rolocs are basically crayons in the form of people. This sounds like it ought to have an earnest message about prejudice but in fact the Rolocs spend the entire book frolicking: having a three-legged race, enjoying a picnic (of which there is a stunning overhead shot), and climbing trees.

4) I also have one and a half copies of a picture book about a teddy bear gymnast. Apparently I finished the first and decided to copy it out by hand (both words and pictures) like some kind of medieval scribe.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Your art was so *good*--you thought to do things like the aerial shot! Did you keep up with it, if only for your own pleasure?

That's so interesting that missing limbs was a preoccupation for you from forever. Any armchair psychologizing about why? ... I mean, a thing could just be an interest without a particular spark. Kids like/are interested in all kinds of things. But that's an interest that has the vibe of arising from a concern or possibly a fear. (For comparison, I was concerned with famine from a young age... although you won't find evidence of it in my juvenilia, such as remains.)

[osprey_archer]

I'm sorry to say I did not. It's too bad, because I was pretty good, but I think at some point I realized that I could be really good at either drawing or writing but probably not both... Of course "being good" is not the only reason to do a thing.

I feel like I should have a good story about a classmate or family member with a missing limb, but as far as I can remember this arose out of thin air. Maybe there was a book that kicked it off, as Number the Stars kicked off an interest in the Holocaust?

Hanne's missing hand came about because I realized, vaguely, that I maybe didn't know enough about Judaism to write a Jewish protagonist - an epiphany that I possibly should have had about the Dutch and indeed the whole of World War II - and I knew that the Nazis also persecuted the disabled, although actually I don't think that amputees were on their list. So Hanne might have been the beginning of the amputee thing rather than an outgrowth on it.

[asakiyume]

That realization that maybe you don't know enough! I remember learning about the children of migrant farm workers and thinking I would write a story about them--this was maybe in third or fourth grade? And then this uneasiness hit me: all the things I didn't know and couldn't even quite imagine. I had heard about how they didn't get to go to school, always, and how they moved around .... and I just was struggling to wrap my head around what their day was like, and it occurred to me I needed to read books from the nonfiction section of the library to figure this out, and it all seemed very daunting.

I'm laughing at your realization that maybe you didn't know enough about Judaism but not expanding that outward to the rest of it. I think that's part of why writing fantasy was so appealing to me--it took me a LONG time to realize that fantasy actually required research and knowing stuff too. I did a good deal of sailing on everybody-knows (hah!) knowledge of faux-medieval stuff.

[osprey_archer]

A couple years ago I started toying with the idea of a novel set among tramps during the Great Depression, and I did do some research for it, but I ended up running into the same uneasiness you describe about the children of migrant farm workers: it's just so far outside of my lived experience that even with research I don't think I could do it justice. I might keep it as backstory for a character but I probably won't set a whole story on the road.

And yes, the daunting-ness of the nonfiction section to a third or fourth grader! I did "research" for The Treacherous Journey, but it definitely consisted of reading children's novels about World War II/the Holocaust, which I clearly thought made me an expert on all that.

[oracne]

If you archive your literary papers anywhere - and I think you should - the juvenalia are something archives like to have.

[osprey_archer]

If nothing else, some of this stuff will give the archivist a hoot.

[ellenmillion]

These sound amazing and you must at least document them digitally for posterity. (I have not been able to throw out any of my early writing, including the terrible, terrible MLP fanfiction and the Belgariad self-insert, and "Muff the Kitten" wherein our author/artist was just learning about quote marks.)

[osprey_archer]

I've posted some photos of the drawings over on Twitter. CLEARLY the whole world has just been waiting for this glimpse into the underground kingdom of the teddy bears!

I think there's a law that ALL child authors must write a cat story, because I did too. Mine was SuperButtons, a superhero cat based on my best friend's cat.

[silverusagi]

I KNOW there are boxes and boxes of my old stuff that I have yet to unearth at my dad's house. It's there... waiting or me. I do need to weed out the repetitive stuff at some point, and just keep a representative sample.

[osprey_archer]

It's amazing how much stuff piles up! It's super interesting going through it all, but I have to confess there are times that I wish I had weeded more thoroughly when I was younger...

[copperfyre]

These are all so great! And I’m super impressed both with young you and also that you managed to keep all of this!

[osprey_archer]

It's just been sitting in a box in my childhood bedroom, waiting for the day when I finally got around to sorting it all!

[luzula]

I didn't really write as a kid, but I did have a lovingly crafted secondary world that I planned to write a portal fantasy about? But I never did, I just made up the language for it and made up the various different very essentialist peoples among which my teenage girl protagonist would do map exploration. (The People of the Wind! Who had brown hair and blue eyes and could do a particular kind of magic! Or something, I don't remember the actual different people.)

[osprey_archer]

Is it necessary to write a STORY? Is it not enough to lovingly craft a secondary world with its own language and maps on maps on maps?

The story is probably necessary to get other people interested in the world, but the secondary world did fill many happy hours and provided a convenient escape when I got bored in class (with the bonus that taking notes about worldbuilding look exactly like taking notes about actual classwork), so it served its purpose, really.

[calandrahunter]

"2) On that theme, I also found a picture (in gel pen, no less) of a fairy girl with a pegleg. Who is she? What is her story? This one has no writing attached, so who can say. "

I'm going to assume she's a pirate, because I bet fairies would make excellent pirates.

[osprey_archer]

She doesn't look like a pirate, but perhaps she is in disguise? She's casing out a city in order to sail in with her pirate friends and steal its treasures later...

[calandrahunter]

Scouting is always a good idea!