How Are You Going to End It?

I’m confident in my writing. I’ve been doing it since I first wrote “The Racers” in Creative Writing short-term at Wayland Academy in 9th grade.

What? Are you saying you don’t know short-term? I’ll be honest, I’m not sure that’s the name. It’s what we called it, then. You had fall session, then a couple weeks off for Christmas and New Years, then when you returned, you had this little period of basically auditing a class.

Two weeks of required school for no credit, but all the stress. I picked creative writing, and the other one I remember was a building class. It was something like shop, but with kits and glue. Not saws and lost fingers. I remember only a little of that class, and it’s not the name. When we got to fly the kites we built the first day, that was pretty cool! Then I pulled a Rick, and my next project was way beyond my abilities. Just a thing I did.

But in creative writing, we had daily exercises, every couple days we had a quiz or something else that was graded. But the main thing was the Journal. We had to write like 6 pages a day in that thing, and the teacher would check, make a mark, and hand it back, to most folks.

I’m sure there were some that cheated, no one was really trying too hard. Just copying the same line over and over to fill a page or three. Even bribing someone else to do that. I didn’t do that. I wasn’t either rich or rude enough, I guess.

These classes were long, over two hours every day, each. and we all did 4 classes, though I can’t, for the life of me, remember anything about the other two I signed up for.

What I wrote, I just stole from my fantasies. I always wanted a go-cart. I’d poured through the classifieds in Boys Life, sent away for plans, found out I’d need to save for months to afford the parts. (I considered selling a kidney, but in pre-Internet days, that didn’t go far.)

So, I wrote the story of a family that raced go-carts together, and solved crime, as you do. I had scenes where they rode their go-carts on a highway and zoomed under the tail sections of semi-trucks, because why not? They chased bad guys, were chased by the same, and always won in about 5 pages. It was called “The Racers”.

I even adorned the cover of my journal with a logo. Multi-colored stripes going diagonally across the front, and a person on a go-cart driving under it, so you only see the front wheels poking out on one side, and on the other the back of some blonde guy (of course) just going under the stripe. Back then, I had the confidence all kids have with art. If you don’t think you will be judged, you just draw. (I miss those days.)

My teacher even read mine, didn’t just check and mark, she’d take it to her desk for a little while. Not just mine, I’m not that special. She’d do it with a few. But the marks I got were editor’s marks. Missing words, punctuation that could be better, a different verb here, a crossed-out adjective there.

And I just kept writing. At the end of the two weeks, I got my A, and the teacher asked me, “How are you going to end it?”

I had not considered that. It was just a thing I had been doing, not something I meant to keep doing, but her question made me think hard.

I had become a big reader there. In free period, I tackled Dune by Frank Herbert, and if you didn’t know this already, that’s a tough hard science fiction novel for a 14-year old to tackle as his first non-comic book. A lot of glossary terms that you NEED to understand to get to the next chapter.

By Christmas I had finished it, and moved on to the sequel, Dune Messiah. Ooof. But from that I intuited story structure, and when I was asked how I’d end my story, which has ended up being a good 45 pages of hand-written text. (Probably a good tweet) and I could see that in all the episodic nature, there was an ongoing story that developed.

So, I kept thinking of this as I went to all my classes, on my runs with Cross Country practice, even when practicing banjo.

One study period, I didn’t read, I had my journal with me, and I started writing. It was considerably easier this time. I had thought so much about it that last month or so, that it was all prewritten, in a way. This has become my pattern, I do ruminate a lot about something, then, in a burst of writing, I finish what I have been thinking about on the page.

Well, usually, I’m literally writing this on the fly. I haven’t thought about that period for any length of time in ages. But I knew I needed to write something, and here I am. Writing something.

Well, that session, I finished about 10 pages, then I left, and on the way to my next class, I entered that teacher’s room, and left it on her desk.

At the end of the day, walking back to the dorms, I saw her sitting on a bench outside. She had my journal on her lap and I went over to her. She told me that was a good ending, but it seemed unsupported by previous action, plus there were quite a few grammar issues to address. But she said it all with a smile, and I felt great about it.

I wish I could remember her name. She wasn’t one of my regular teachers, just someone brought in initially to teach Creative Writing during Short Term. I only knew her for those two weeks, but forty years later I still remember the question she asked me.

I didn’t do much more writing after that, I did correct what she mentioned needed attention, but just for me. I didn’t see her again. Hey, I was at a boarding school and on my own for the first time ever! I had to rebel and follow a lot of passions, not just writing!

But I do look back at those days, and though I don’t have that journal any longer, I know that’s when I gained the confidence in my writing.

So that’s where it started. Not with a contest, or a publication, or even a grade. It started because one teacher asked me how I was going to end a story I hadn’t planned to finish. Ever since then, I’ve been ending stories, writing songs, outlining novels, and occasionally throwing myself into writing contests just to see where they take me.

This page is where all of that ends up. Contest entries, parody lyrics, stories, unfinished ideas that eventually became finished ones. They won’t necessarily appear in the order I publish them. They’ll appear where they belong in the timeline of my writing life.

I hope you enjoy the journey.