Young Writers Society

You know it. You love it.

Emergencey Bike Spys by Baby Stella, the year 2000.

(I bet there are people here who weren't even born when this masterpiece was devised).

When I was younger, like late elementary and maybe even early middle school, I always wrote stuff based off of things I read and watched. So I would make up new names and everything and change some stuff up in an attempt to be "original", but it would essentially be almost the exact same/similar plot. Or at least they all ended up being cliche. I cringe and laugh so hard when I go back and read the ones I can find. I thought I was some writing genius back then. Some examples of my earliest works are a Warriors fanfiction, a story based off of Avi's Poppy , and many based off of historical TV dramas. And it's kind of funny, but even then I had a thing for not finishing novel work. Shame on me. :/

So for the three year span I was in brick and mortar (K-2), I won the prize for best essays and potential and I got to do the young author thing. Even if I never get published for WHH, at least I still have two bound, hardcover stories that I wrote.
(yeah they didn't implement the hardcover thing till I got into 1st grade but I still have that wonderful ribbon from the first year)

In terms of other works, when I was in 5/6th grade, I wrote some Jack Webb tv series fanfic.
Then I wrote the first draft of WHH, a whole whopping 10k.

And now I'm back to rewriting WHH.

Some of my earliest work? A horrible story that lasted around 5,000 words and was based on two characters who fall from their old world into a new one with tattoos on their arms. Main character happened to have the power of teleportation and the other main character had the power of levitation. It was also incredibly cliche and anime-based, since that's most of what I knew at the time. I used to have it on the site--it was called I Am Encrypted, but I've since taken it down.

A story a wrote when I was 12 about a World War II bombing, through the eyes of a 5 year old boy. It is really sad, but ironic. I am having trouble conveying emotion to the reader in the stories I write. Yet my first story I ever wrote was very emotional. I am debating whether to put it on here or not.

My first "I'm going to write a BOOK" story, was about a girl that I think was running away from an arranged marriage (yeah, I know, so original) anddd he was chasing her I think (the story started out with them both on horse back riding at top speed) and they went on some adventures, hating eachother along the way. I think at one point they got handcuffed together with handcuffs that have about a metres worth of chain between them. And of course the ended up liking eachother because this is SUCH an ORIGINAL little STORY.

I never got passed the chase scene.

Besides school writing prompts and that one story with the elf in sixth grade that I will never speak of again? I think one of my earliest works was the first novel I wrote. It was called A Little Bit of Me, and it was a self-insert fantasy story that let me take my loneliness at the time and write something that was fueled by it. (Even though I've laid that story to rest now, the main characters of it - Mira and Kentaro - have become the main characters of my newest novel!)

I believe it was a story about a big duck and a little duck and it was called The Adventures of Big Duck and Little Duck. They were traveling from pond to pond. It was horrible, but I was about four.

So discounting the "finish the story" worksheets I did in second grade, where the bad guys were asparagus men from space, who were defeated by people eating them...

Poetry-wise, I had a poem about autumn, which I wrote for school in fourth-grade. It got published in an anthology of young poets, which I might still have somewhere. That was pretty much it until 8th grade, when I suddenly started writing poetry ALL THE TIME, mostly about nature. I probably still have most of it, because my grandfather was a writer and encouraged a "don't throw anything out" attitude and also we had access to stuff where I could kind of bind my own books. Just like spiral bound between cardstock, but still.

Novel-wise I think things took off around the same time? The very first thing was this painfully obvious like Pirates of the Caribbean AU. Not actually fanfic, really, like I think if I had written it yesterday and called it "fanfic" everyone would yell at me because the characters are nothing like their movie counterparts - I just named them Will and Elizabeth, and they looked like Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley. They were running around the moors in an unspecified part of ScotEngIreWalesLand with this guy named Yanno after the main character's dad in The Moorchild, because Who Needs Original Names anyway.

I don't remember what happened exactly, but they were trying to catch these wild ponies, only then for some reason there was some guy with a gun who was after either Will or Yanno. I still have that one, too, complete with handmade cover (I gave it to my parents for one of their anniversaries and then later realized how horrible it was and demanded it back), but I never look at it because it's totally cringeworthy.

The next one I wrote, which was more original (I think) and didn't have a bunch of characters named after popular characters in fiction, was called Queenstar. It was set in this fantasy world that was my main fantasy world (where all my high fantasy stories are set) until I started writing more like whimsical urban fantasy. This young woman, Andumiel, she became the queen of her country when her father was suddenly assassinated, and then there was a love story with this commoner but also an arranged marriage because That's How Royalty Does Things but at the same time she was trying and failing to avoid going to war with this other country...

...but it was only like 33 pages on the computer, so.

But that one actually had a lot of revision done to it, although none of the revised versions were ever completed. Sometimes I think about it, so maybe Some Day I'll go back over it and give it a more cohesive story and some serious rewriting.

Other than that, most of my early fantasy obviously drew heavily on both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. Not the plots so much (I've always always always been weak on plots) but the way characters were named and the worlds they lived in and so forth. I probably didn't really cure myself of that until I started writing more urban fantasy-type stuff, because that's a sufficiently different subgenre that my stories started sounding significantly different.

HERES A REALLY EARLY ONE. ITS NOT THAT GOOD SO DONT JUDGE ME MAN