In Second Grade, our teacher said we would Make Books. She had a special book stapler, and a collection of wallpaper samples we could pick for our covers.
First we would write out our stories and count the words so she could determine how many pages to give us – we would of course put in an illustration on every page. We could do poems. She gave an example to us of a poem about a rainbow.
Roughly half the class wrote poems about rainbows.
I elected to write something EPIC. It would be like the movies I watched on Super Host on Saturday afternoons. In fact, I’d just seen one with Japanese kids getting kidnapped in a flying saucer and encountering a giant hatchet-headed monster that came out of the ground! It came RIGHT OUT OF THE GROUND.
I named my story “Jimmy’s Planet” and dashed off the first draft so fast my hand and arm cramped up. I was the first kid in class done, and by the formula we’d been given my story was at the maximum ten pages long! As I proudly awaited praise, my teacher frowned at what I’d handed her and said, “The letter J curls the other way on the bottom.”
A minor, fussy edit! Clearly, my genius was greater than that. I nodded and mm-hmmed my way through several other unnecessary grammar corrections and rushed off to fill my ten glorious pages.
Here is the story:
One day, Jimmy decided to build a rocket ship. He dreamed of going to a planet with no schools. He mixed peanut butter and orange juice for fuel. [I got the food-into-fuel idea from a children’s book where Bugs Bunny made a rocket ship. In hindsight, Bugs mixed hot sauce and jalapeños and this was a more sophisticated joke than I understood.]
The rocket landed on a strange planet. Jimmy saw two green-haired girls. [Their hair was green because adding one weird attribute makes someone an alien! Star Trek taught me that!]
“Are there schools here?” He asked.
“No,” they said. “There are no schools on this planet!”
Jimmy was very happy.
But then the planet shook! Trees sucked down into holes and the ground opened up. A monster came out! It had a head like an ax.
Jimmy ran back into his ship. Good-bye green haired girls!
[Crap, I still had four pages left! I had gotten excited describing my monster’s appearance and put four sentences on one page.]Jimmy learned there is no place like home. Even with schools.
I love you, home.
[I drew a picture of Jimmy rushing into his mother’s arms – ugh this nauseated me at the time even, but the story needed to end and I respected the tastes of the masses!]The Very Very Very End
“I want to write books!” I proudly told my teacher as I handed in my masterpiece. “I’m really good at it!”
She smiled sadly. “Girls are better writers in school. I guess because you spend so much time passing notes. But it’s boys who go on to become writers. They’re just better once they grow up. Isn’t that funny?”
Neener neener, Mrs. Freeman! None of the boys in my second grade class are professional writers now!
Looking back, though, I was just as biased. Why was my main character a blonde boy? Did I have him meet twin alien girls because even in my own first story I only saw myself as a secondary character? Why did I draw my kids like they were from the sixties?
And most humiliatingly, did I have to be so derivative?
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