My Writing Story ~ Part 2 + "Christmas Vacation"

In the last article, I wrote about my writing in my elementary years. Today, I am going to continue that series with how I began to seriously consider writing as a hobby in my teenage years. And first of all, down below I have written about how I came to writing this story.

I continued writing random short stories through junior high. In eighth grade, I met one of my closest friends, Triniti (she blogs at TAJ News Blog), and we corresponded through letters at that time. We mostly talked about books and in one letter I mentioned a play I wrote about the Civil War (the American one, not the Captain America one).

She replied with whether we could actually perform the play which we couldn't because it had too many characters to fill. But I told her that I would write a play for her family and my family to perform. I thought to a childhood game/story called "Spy Mission" that I played with a few of my friends. We would have agent names and run around with play weapons to defend our "bases" or playground structures. Eventually, the game took on a story with multiple villains, agents, and missions.

I already knew who would be the first two characters that my brother and I would play: Jeff and Carla. I asked my friend for the agent names she and her siblings wanted and I formulated a story about a Russian double agent that infiltrated a secret agent organization that conveniently had five agents which was the size of the cast. I ended up writing a few parts to this series, and two ("Operation Stanhope" and "Emma's Escape") were produced. Each play was about ten pages long.

Then I decided to novelize some of these stories, so I took the logical course of action and started writing the second part to my planned short story series. I decided to preface the secret agent stuff with murder mysteries since I had just started to read Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. I called this story "The Golden Bullet" and later "The Golden Gunslinger." I pantsed (writing without planning) my way through the whole story, even trying to anticipate what the first part of the story would be without deciding to write it first.

Until this story, I wrote everything in a notebook or on notebook paper. This story was completely written in my notebook first before I typed it. After I finished this twelve-page story with minimal editing (a bad idea in all situations), I finally decided to write the first part of this story which I originally called "The Secretary from Dallas." It was to be a Christian fiction and a murder mystery. I wrote one or two drafts in my notebook and then I started typing it on the computer.

I started writing this in November 2015. I wrote half of it and then edited that half and then I kept writing even though I changed the plot a million times. I finished writing the novel on November 3, 2016 during National Novel Writing Month. And that's when I knew that I really enjoyed writing and have been working away at it ever since.

I was considering of including snippets from my current WIP (Work in Progress), but I am going to write an article about this novel at the end of the month. Instead, I will write about my first story/script ever: "Christmas Vacation," and include snippets. Maybe I will write about more of my early stories. Remember that all of these characters are my stuffed animals.

Christmas Vacation

 

Summary: The Chirp family goes to Vermont for Christmas vacation.

History: This is the first script I wrote and it was written in collaboration with my brother who was writing a script called "The Bird's Christmas." These two stories were about the same family of stuffed animals.

Inspiration: I still don't know why, but before I wrote this script, I had a very strange desire to visit Vermont. It may have been the snow or the maple syrup, but I really don't know why.

Discrepancies: By discrepancies, I mean really weird things that I wrote. Here are some of them pasted below including my notes.

 

1. Besides the glaring misspell of Ya instead of yeah, Pepper has a short fuse. He got really violent after Speedy called him a "sleepyhead."

 

Speedy - The plane ride is 7½ hours. You will have plenty of time to sleep on the plane, Sleepyhead.
Pepper - Oh, Ya. (Starts punching each other)

2. I really went for the slang spelling for O.K. And they washed the dishes ridiculously quickly. When I was eight, I must have thought that dishes were that easy to wash since I had never washed dishes in my life before.

 

Snowy, Blueberry, and Speedy - Wait for us. We have to clean the dishes.
Ham and Pepper - O.K. (Water runs for 3 seconds then stops for 5 seconds and continues again for 5 seconds)

 

3. Fastest landing ever.

 

Flight Attendant - 10 minutes till landing.
Speedy - We’re almost here, Ham.
Ham - I’m going to miss home, but I know I’m going to have a lot of fun.
Speedy - That’s so true. You know, I…
Flight Attendant - We have arrived at our destination.



 

4. I find it striking that the postcard seller was conveniently leaving in five minutes just as Bluey said he would buy one later.

 

Snowy - There’s the postcard station. We said that we would send Elamus a postcard.
Bluey - Not now, after we eat. It won’t…
Postcard seller - Postcards, Postcard for a dime. Leaving in five minutes.

 

5. The background is that the kids are opening early Christmas presents. But the parents obviously love Speedy the most if they were going to buy him a $300 laptop. I wanted one of those. Why didn't my parents love me that much? Just kidding. :)

 

Snowy - It’s a stuffed bear. I’ll name it Brownie.
Blueberry - An Angry Bird set. It’s just like the one I saw at Toys 4 U!
Ham - A mini Laptop. Wow!
Speedy - A field guide about trees!
Pepper - A model plane set. What type? Wow! The Blue Angels!

 

Things I Loved: Since this is my earliest story, there are not a lot of things I could read without cringing. But there are some things that I think set a great precedent for my later writings.

• The stories about my stuffed animals has made its way into my WIPs somehow. One day, I will lengthen the story into a middle grade novel.
• Writing about vacation is relaxing in general. I don't take a lot of vacations, but one day I will make it over to Vermont and find out how accurate my story was.
• A huge precedent in this story is a Biblical message. The Chirp family had devotions and talked about the birth of Christ a little. It wasn't much and it was really random, but it paved the way for including Biblical themes in later stories.

I hoped you enjoyed those very strange snippets. At the end of the month, I will certainly include snippets from my current WIP, His Plan for Me. But next week, I will be writing about the importance of Thanksgiving. No quote of the week because of the snippets and the length of the article. Have a great week!