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Books So Bad They're Good: Manuscript of Mystery [1]
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Date: 2022-10-29
No, that is not a snowman with a funny steampunk mustache and a ship-in-a-bottle on its stomach. Nor is the top part of the illustration the inspiration for the Pringle’s Potato Chip logo, although it sure does look like it (Wikipedia)
I recently unearthed some of my early writings, and boy oh boy, was it bad.
I’m not talking about the fanfic. Most of this was admittedly terrible — I literally had no idea of how to convey that a character was fidgety without describing every single motion in excruciating detail — but I was all of fifteen, still grieving my father’s death, and staying up late because it was that or lose my mind. I was more than happy to cut my teenage self some slack, especially since later chapters in my Epic Mary Sue Epic about a feminist captain who was determined to out-captain Captain Kirk actually showed some glimmers of talent. I’m sure that if a couple of early poems where a lovesick Willy Shakespeare lauds the delicate beauty of Anne Hathaway’s shell-pink earlobes suddenly emerged from a dusty archive, the result would not precisely join Hamlet or Venus and Adonis in the literary canon.
To paraphrase John Scalzi’s advice to young writers: your juvenilia is going to suck, period, so don’t get discouraged. It’ll get better.
What was really discouraging was not the fanfic, nor the high school short stories, one of which placed fourth in the Scholastic Writing Awards so clearly was at least competent. I’m not even talking about the poetry, most of which holds up reasonably well (the sole exception was a love poem to my first boyfriend, which was heartfelt, very sincere, and absolutely awful. And no, I will not publish it here. Trust me on this one).
No, the really bad part was my handwriting.
This should not have surprised me one itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bit. My fourth grade report card, which I still have somewhere in the dank, spider-infested chamber I laughingly call “a garage,” is a solid phalanx of A’s, A-’s, and B+’s for Language Arts, Math, Science, and even Gym...and then it plummets to C- for my first tentative attempts at Writing Like a Grown-Up.
Time should have fixed this — God knows my mother, who’d been raised on the Peterson System, tried her best to impart some semblance of order to my scrawl — but by high school my handwriting was so bad that my parents gave up and enrolled me in a summer typing course intended for aspiring secretaries and stenographers. I resisted — “I’ll end up as a secretary!” I yelled — but after they both pointed out that I would never graduate from high school if my teachers were unable to read my papers, let alone get into a decent college, I reluctantly complied.
That is why I spent the next six weeks in a classroom with no air conditioning and whining overhead lights learning the glories of home row, QWERTYUIOP, and how constantly repeating combinations like “fbf” and “sws” can hardwire the entire standard keyboard into one’s brain and muscle memory. At the end of the course I could type reasonably well — around 50 wpm — and soon I was typing my own papers, the short stories and poems I wrote for my creative writing class, and even a few of my mother’s graduate school papers when her sister Betty, a legal secretary who typed nearly 100 wpm with zero errors, was too busy doing her actual job to sneak Mum’s capstone paper into her machine. Soon I was typing nearly as fast as my aunt, if not quite as accurately, and by the time I got to college I was not only composing my own papers on the keyboard, I was good enough to type other people’s work for extra cash.
Alas, alack, and well-a-day, the same could not be said about my handwriting. It was, if anything, worse than it was in high school despite all those handwritten fan novels about Captain Mary Sue and her Epic Adventures, with a pronounced rightward slant and a tendency to scribble so fast I either misspelled the ending of long words or left out key letters. My fetish for using felt-tipped Flairs in either purple or green didn’t help, and by the time I’d discovered fountain pens, it was a wonder anyone could read a single word I wrote. It got to the point that my first-year history professor at Smith took me aside after midterms and told me that he had such a hard time reading my exam paper that he would have no choice but to mark me down a grade unless my handwriting got better, or at least more readable. “Try switching to a ballpoint, skip every other line, and only write on one side of the paper,” he said. “It can’t hurt.”
I took his advice, and he was correct: it didn’t hurt. I still wasn’t going to win any awards for fine penmanship, but he (and future professors) were able to confirm that yes, I had done all the work and read all the assignments once I began using ultra fine black ballpoints for anything I couldn’t type. My cursive was still badly slanted and I still sometimes skipped letters, but it was legible enough to grade, and that was all that counted.
Unfortunately, I didn’t follow my wise teacher’s advice when it came to my early fiction.
Oh, I’d given up on Flair pens — they were becoming increasingly difficult to find. plus they dried out too quickly to be useful — but I still used a fountain pen more often than not on first drafts, and of course I wrote on both sides of the page. The one saving grace is that the notebooks I used had much better quality paper than the blue books Smith purchased by the bale so the ink didn’t bleed through to the other side, but that only went so far. A lot of that early work is such a mess that I can’t figure out what in the name of Mother Mary Malone and the Seven Sleepers I was trying to say, and believe me, I’ve tried.
Fortunately for me, you, and everyone else, I’d acquired a lovely Remington typewriter by the time I graduated from college and went into the wide world. Soon after that I got my first personal computer, an Atari ST (aka a “Jackintosh”), and discovered to my great delight that I could type almost as fast as I could think, without the annoying *clack clack clackity click clack DING* endemic to non-Selectric typewriters. I compose exclusively the keyboard these days, even though I still scribble notes into those clever little Moleskine notebooks beloved of writers for at least the last century.
I really should get around to transcribing some of those old notebooks, if only for my own sake. I sometimes reread the contents just to confirm that yes, really, I have improved quite a bit over the past *coughmumblecough* years. It’s not easy to read, but hey, if paleographers can figure out what medieval scribes were nattering on about, I should be able to read my own handwriting.
I mean, it’s not as if I wrote in code, you know.
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