The girl’s pen hit the paper as the clock on the wall struck the hour after midnight. All was silent but the scratching of the nib and her slow, heavy breathing as her mind flashed with a thousand crazy ideas. Creativity seems to strike at the most peculiar moments, she thought as her mind and her hand raced each other to complete sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. When inspired, it will take much more than the prospect of a six-thirty start to restrain from acting upon one’s calling. So she continued.
Her bedroom was always a wonderful companion when it came to writing; it was always perfectly still and never bothered her with inconvenient distractions. If only ideas were like that, she thought as the clock ticked on towards dawn and another school day. Her heartbeat quickened as her excitement mounted– this was going to be the greatest story ever written. No one else in her English class would even begin to fashion such an plot line – the drama, suspense and twists and turns would be too much for them. The girl smiled as she re-read what she’d written. Surely, she concluded, surely nothing in the history of literature was as good as this.
The teacher sighed as she approached the bottom of the seemingly endless stack of paper. Only a few left before she could go to the school canteen and get some well deserved caffeine. What a relief!
The girl fell asleep at quarter to three in the morning, drained of energy, but satisfied. The Greatest Story Ever Written was completed and ready to hand in. She pulled the covers over her shoulders and closed her eyes, thinking of the fantastic characters she’d created and the authentic settings that had sprung into existence as if from nowhere. These moments, she reminded herself, were the reason she wanted to be a writer.
The last paper! The teacher looked at the name and title scrawled across the final page. The girl had named it ‘The Greatest Story Ever Written.’ She rolled her eyes, exasperated. Grudgingly, she began to read the first paragraph. As she read past the first few sentences, her eyebrows sank lower and lower and her teeth began to grind together. When she reached the end of the untidy scrawls she felt a low anger lurking in the pit of her stomach. She pulled out her red pen furiously and started making corrections. Why did some kids have to be different? What she had just read didn’t even vaguely meet the guidelines. Not at all.
Four hours later the girl awoke. After a few moments she remembered about The Greatest Story Ever Written, and her eyes widened with excitement. She leapt out of bed and stood in her pyjamas next to her desk, stroking the four sides of A4 upon which it was written. With a refreshed mind, she wondered whether her English teacher would ‘get’ it, but cast the thought away as she carefully folded it and put it into her school bag. Her face split into a grin as, for once, she actually felt proud of herself. What an amazing feeling!
“What I mean is,” said the teacher, trying not to spray biscuit crumbs everywhere, “She must know it’s not an acceptable piece of coursework. God, kids never seem to grasp that these things actually get sent off to examiners.”
Her co-worker nodded in agreement, “They just don’t think, a lot of ‘em. Like they need to be told word for word what to write like four-year-olds.” She sipped her coffee, “You tell ‘em and tell ‘em over an’ over to put in the bloody metaphors and similes, but do they ever? Do they heck!”
“And then you’ll get one who just likes to buck the system. Thinking it’s big and clever to write something stupid and different like this one.”
The other teacher rolled her eyes and flicked cigarette ash out of the window of the staff room. “I don’t know why we bother sometimes. They don’t listen. But it’s their fault if they choose to muck up their futures, not ours.”
“You’re right. She’s a bright girl. She could easily pass with an A, if only she knew what was best for her.” The school bell rang and both teachers sighed, getting up. It was time to give the most ridiculous story ever written back to it’s writer.
It was time. The girl waited impatiently at her desk whilst her teacher handed each story back to its author. Come on, she thought, I want to read my comments! The teacher scanned the class, looking for the owner of the story that she held in front of her.
“Ah, Megan,” she smiled, “Very well done with this, really great effort!”
Megan smiled as she received her neatly typed up story from her teacher. At the bottom of her sheet, in green pen was a huge A*.
“Well done!” whispered the girl, who was sitting next to Megan. Inside, she felt a tiny bit annoyed. A*s were reserved for stories that were the greatest ever written, like hers.
“What’s it about?” she asked, glancing over at her friend’s paper.
“Oh it’s about a girl who gets kidnapped,” she explained, “I didn’t think it was that great, but Miss wrote that it’s got really good metaphors and similes, so I suppose that’s something.”
Metaphors and similes. She’d forgotten about them. But things like that didn’t matter when it came to truly original ideas. Surely.
The teacher slammed The Greatest Story Ever Written onto the girl’s desk without a word. She picked it up with anticipation and noticed that it was covered in red circles where she’d made a spelling or a grammatical error. Oh well, she thought, I suppose as a teacher you have to correct mistakes. She turned the page to where the teacher’s comments were. As she read them, her face fell.
“Lots of mistakes here, but good try. You can do much better than this, and I hope you’ll consider re-writing it to achieve your target grade. The story is not appropriate to be sent to examiners, I think you know why. You are a good writer; try to think of a proper plot line and I am sure you will excel. Use more metaphors and similes.”
Underneath the scorching red comments was a big, fat, ugly, F.
On her way home, the girl splashed her way through the puddles in the street in fury. She glared up at the dismal sky and had to stop the tears that were building up inside her from falling. It wasn’t fair, she had thought her story was the greatest. She had thought it would win awards. She had thought...but it didn’t matter now. It wasn’t the greatest. It wasn’t even a tiny bit good. It was a fail. She knew it shouldn’t bother her like this, but she couldn’t control the despair and rejection that was ripping through her body. She had thought it was good.
The Greatest Story Ever Written ended up in the bin, where it belonged. The girl sat quietly at her desk that evening to think things through. Maybe she had been wrong to hand in a story like that. How arrogant of her to believe she’d written a masterpiece, when all it was a stupid idea that had been original in all the wrong ways. She sighed and picked up her pen and wrote a brand new title, ‘The Dark Night’. It was going to be about a murder, and she’d already thought of a good metaphor to describe the stars. When she was finished, she frowned irritably. She couldn’t help it.
She ended up getting an A for the whole of her English GCSE. As she celebrated with her friends, she thought it funny that she’d once received an F for a story. How she’d improved since then! Wasn’t it good that she’d learnt the proper way of doing things?
The Greatest Story Ever Written was forgotten and never seen again. Now, perhaps it lay crumpled somewhere, a scrap of originality amongst a heap of litter and rubbish. It could be washed up on some beach, half embedded in a Chinese takeaway wrapper, or left at the bottom of a rubbish truck soggy with rainwater. Or maybe it was just in the wrong place. It is possible as one can never be completely sure, but you might have just finished reading it.
mwahahaha