Examining My First Story

The recent fairytale challenge on Vocal had me digging deep into my computer’s memory to find a story that I wrote almost twenty years ago. It was a short story about a young girl who finds a coin in her washing machine on a very hot summer day. She makes a wish on it and it comes true; the temperature drops by twenty degrees! With a second load of laundry, she finds another coin in the machine and makes a wish on that one as well. That second wish is for an awesome thirteenth birthday.

I got the idea after someone did a poor job of checking pockets at our home. When I was hanging up the clothes, I too found a coin at the bottom of the machine. I made a wish on it; obviously nothing happened. But it gave me the creative spark that I needed to write that little literary piece. I dug it up after all those years because I was going to use it as a sort of “rough draft” for my Vocal submission.

As I printed out the paper and started to read my childhood words, I cringed. The plot was thin, character development was non-existent, and my vocabulary was lacking sophistication. Surprising, that little story of mine made its way down to the Illinois Reading Council’s Young Authors Conference. My mother submitted the manuscript and it was selected. How, I could not figure out. Despite the fact that I was only ten or eleven when I wrote it, all I could see as an adult was how “bad” it was. Ultimately, I scrapped the idea of working with that material at all and simply used the idea to formulate a completely new document. I tossed that old story aside.

Then another challenge on Vocal popped up and I planned to write for that one too. For it, I grabbed one of my favorite children’s books and reflected on how it shaped me to be the person I am today. I re-read it and I was shocked to see how simple the story was. The plot was easy to understand, the characters were not overly complex, and the vocabulary was age appropriate. Don’t get me wrong; the book is fantastic. It has a beautiful message that resonates with me even as an adult. But there was not as much “stuff” to the story as I was expecting.

So I grabbed my old story again and I re-read that as well. It was in that second reading, this time through a much less critical lens, that I realized that my story was not “bad” at all. It was what it was: a children’s story. It was not a literary masterpiece, but that was not what it was meant to be.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized something else. Each piece that I have written represents a snapshot in time. While it can be compared to other works I have written, each piece is unique. Yes, you can look at my plot complexity, my character development, and the linguistic range of my words. Yes, you can look at how much I have grown as a writer. But in reality, each story is as I intend it to be. Some pieces are meant to be intricate behemoths, while others are modest works. Where a particular piece falls on this range does not determine if it is “good” or “bad.” Rather, I have discovered that the quality of work is determined on the execution of its content. That is something I have to remind myself of each time I put pen to paper.