Every good writer was once a bad writer. I would not be so bold as to suggest I am a good writer now but I have ample evidence that I was, at one time, a very very bad writer. It is an awkward thing to look back at my writing from the late 90s and early 00s. I was going through an extraordinarily angsty phase at that time so a great deal of my writing was psychotic, florid and overwrought. I don’t know how much my writing has evolved from that point but I certainly hope it has. Stroll down memory lane with me.

The year was 1996 and I was pretty sure that telling a story meant describing every single detail and every single moment. Adjectives and adverbs were my dearest friends and I could not resist the urge to tell, well, everything. Here’s an excerpt from a story that I have no recollection of writing. I don’t even know what the plot is but I do know that it involves a woman who is involved with the BDSM scene. I can’t read this without laughing.

Critically she went through her wardrobe, and decided on a faded pair of Levi’s, a well worn pair of chaps, and a leather vest. She added a heavy silver bracelet to her left wrist, and slid her dogtags over her head, and she was ready. Anne shook her braids out, picked up her motorcycle jacket and toy bag resting comfortably by the front door, and headed out. During the drive to the dungeon, she mentally reviewed the players on that night’s guest list, hoping that some new blood might show up, to give the night some spice. Pulling into the adjacent parking lot, she took note that all the “regulars” had already arrived, and a small cluster of people were standing outside, smoking, gossiping, and waiting for someone to open the space. Sighing heavily, Anne slowly approached the group, but after the necessary greetings, she slid away, and leaned against the side of the building, lighting a cigarette. From the muted tones of the group, she knew that her “attitude” as it were, was being discussed. Her standing as an excellent and well -respected top was secure, but the “I stand alone” impression that she left, rubbed people the wrong way. It wasn’t that she felt superior to the others…it was merely shyness, and a certain amount of self-protection, that kept Anne from wholly absorbing herself into the familial atmosphere of the group. Besides… she was nice enough, and when she was scening, no one dared question her personality quirks.

OMG WTF?

That same year, and it was a busy busy year for 22 year old writing me, I decided to write a story about a prostitute who hooked up with a John who wanted her to wear a wedding dress. I think, knowing what I know of my ridiculous 22 year old self, that I was trying to make a statement. You might note the wild economics I invented for a street hooker. She was a classy ho.

Ivory cautiously stuck her head inside the car, and eyed the back seat. A wedding dress of white crinoline and lace, lay across the gray leather, with a bouquet of roses nestled in the corner. “This is different,” she muttered.

“I’ve booked the honeymoon suite at a downtown hotel. I want a wedding night without the hassle of legalities. You, will be my bride.”

“How long will this take?”

“I expect I’ll require your services for no more than four hours. I’ll take a few pictures, we’ll consummate the relationship and you’ll return to your little life.”

“I charge two grand for special requests,” Ivory answered, suddenly bored with the whole thing.

“That’s fine. Get in, I don’t have all night.”

Ivory coughed, disguising her surprise. “I want the cash up front.

The following year, I wanted to get in touch with my blackness so I endeavored to write a story about someone from the projects. The levels of WTF and racism in that statement are many but I was having some kind of identity crisis and my favorite part about this story is that it contains every cliché possible and then veers into the territory of a sociology textbook. I must have watched some kind of 70s movie about the “ghetto” and then gone to my African American history class before writing this abomination.

Benson Heights… the housing projects where I grew up. After twenty-five years of neglect, the city had finally decided to tear it down. I remember the days of my youth; hot summer days spent playing hopscotch on the burning pavement. I remember every window thrown open in vain attempts to escape the stifling heat. Laundry lines spanned the buildings, and at all hours of the day there was something going on. Back then, I hadn’t realized how miserable my surroundings were. As a child, innocence made my neighborhood a paradise. As an adult, cynicism spurned me to move far away from Benson Heights. I distanced myself physically, but a piece of my soul never left. I always told myself I should go back to the old neighborhood, but I never was very good at following through. There was a major deadline at work, My daughter had a soccer game. And now, with no excuses left, there was no neighborhood to go back to. I should have known that this was going to happen. City officials wouldn ever actually try and solve a problem, so instead they sought to destroy four blocks where the problem lived.

Goodness. I can only sigh.

1998 was interesting in that I turned to writing about suicide. Of course. Brett and Michael are two buddies sitting on the hood of the car shooting the shit when one of them decides to bare his soul and confess that life has no meaning. The ending was quite dramatic:

Taking a deep breath, Michael jogged several feet away from the canyon’s edge and stopped. Closing his eyes, he began running, running so fast that his chest burned. He pushed past Brett and dove into the canyon, his arms falling to the side as he opened his eyes and stared into his fate. There was no fear. There was no panic. As the wind rushed past him, Michael could hear Brett screaming, but he felt only peace from deep within his chest out to every inch of his body. The ground neared and Michael began to laugh… really laugh, for the first time in his life.

It’s okay to laugh. I am laughing too. Do not mind the tears.

Another popular theme for me that year was sexual trauma. I actually think this story might have been published but I can’t remember. It was called The Scent of Strawberries and it was all about this girl with a dead mother who was in a bad situation with an older cousin and so she would always hold on to the memory of picking strawberries with her mother when her cousin was being inappropriate with her:

I was supposed to be his Princess. Later that night, I heard a soft knock on my door as I lay in bed, staring at the moon. My tears had long since dried, but a dull bitterness sat in my chest. Brian slowly approached my bed, and I could hear him stumbling and cursing as he tripped over the vagaries of youth. He sat on the bed and began stroking my hair, pulling it away from my face. I could smell the alcohol on his breath, and despite the warm night air I shivered in my thin nightgown. Princess, he whispered. Princess, I am so sorry. Wet lips grazed my chin, and suddenly I felt scared. This was different. I wrapped my fingers around the edges of my blanket, but he pulled it away.

Many of the hallmarks of my writing are evident. Wet lips? CHECK! Fraught emotion? CHECK! Staring at the moon? CHECK! Do writers ever really change?

In 2001, I wrote a story about a couple of nuns. I truly have no idea what that was about. It was a sex story, of course, and included this fantastic line:

Mary Agnes held Mary Catherine’s intense gaze although it unnerved her. Her right arm tingled. As the wave of sensations flowing through her body crested Mary Agnes covered her mouth with her left hand and let out a pierced wail that echoed throughout the spare cell.

Please just direct me to hell now.

At 26, I was still not afraid of adjectives. By God, I was going to describe a thing until I had squeezed every ounce of description from it.

I also wrote a novella entitled Love and Other Anti-Depressants in 2001. I thought it was the most clever title in the history of clever titles. I used an epigraph by Robert Louis Stevenson. I hate epigraphs, but in 2001, apparently, I thought they were very necessary. Each chapter had a title such as “Nomadic Wanderlust” or “The Semantics of Honesty” or “Social Angst.” The plot revolved around a young lesbian who was a pathological liar and art restorer but who had a side business as an art forger who fell in love with a butch truck driver. I never finished the novella, which sits at 109 pages. Here is the glorious last line I wrote:

Maybe it was a survival instinct she had picked up over the years, but there was a strange tension between Camille and Seth, and the entire time Camille had sat mere inches away from Max, she had been unable to look Max in the eyes, and Max knew that when someone couldn’t look you in the eyes, something was seriously wrong – another of her ****’s pieces of wisdom.

I don’t know why I redacted whatever character **** represents. I am just mortified by all of it.

2001 was another very busy year. In addition to the above nonsense, I wrote a short story collection for someone I was dating. It was a terrible, terrible relationship where I loved more and wasn’t loved enough and I thought if I could just write the most beautiful love stories, this person would love me the way I wanted them to. I printed and bound this stupid book and wrapped it and presented it on our anniversary and I might as well have just carved my heart out of my chest and put it in a box. Now that I’m in the middle of my thirties, I am fully convinced that everyone, and writers in particular, should be placed into stasis for the duration of their twenties. It’s best for all involved. Each and every story in this collection was about a woman who was in love with an indifferent man. I was not just content to beat the dead horse. I had to write about the beating in excruciating detail. I will admit, though, that some of the stories were pretty sexy and sometimes they were a little angry. I can see I had a glimmer of sense, just not enough to make rational decisions. That would come later, thankfully. I cannot share any excerpts from this magnum opus. The shame of it is just too much but sometimes I go back and look at those sad, sad stories and think, “Relatively speaking, I am awesome now.”

I spent most of 2002 writing stories about women and their therapists. My writing may as well be a timeline. Here’s a bit of a story with no title. I wrote for 3,896 words and apparently just stopped and moved on to something else.

We were at once close and distant. You share a certain brand of intimacy with someone when night after night you watch each other’s shadowed forms cringing and crying silently and eventually surrendering to the inevitable. But it was an intimacy we could only share in the dark. When morning came, we would stare at each other like strangers, until the distance became to painful to bear and we went about the day’s business. My therapist suggests that we coped with an unbearable situation as best we could, but accepting that would be for me, taking the easy way out and that’s not something I am very good at. Sometimes I think I force myself to suffer for all the things I could have and should have done.

It’s like my writing was getting worse before it could get better, just like all bad things.

That year I also wrote a spec script for a Will & Grace episode because I wanted to be a TV writer:

Jack walks into Will’s room holding a teddy bear. It is late at night. He sees Will in bed with another man. The teddy bear falls to the floor.

JACK: Good Golly Miss Molly! Will Truman has finally put the “sex” back into homosexual. Salts. I need my smelling salts.

It was a good thing I didn’t quit my job or anything.

In February of 2003, I wanted to write a story about cheating. I called the story, “Infidel.” That’s as far as I got.

The last truly excruciating thing I wrote was my master’s thesis, a short story collection entitled How Small the World. Only three of the pieces were ever published. The rest are probably redeemable with a lot of work and I don’t know that I have the energy. I was playing around with the idea of interconnected stories so there’s an architect and his mistress and her stripper lover and the architect’s bitchy wife and his eventual divorce lawyer and her heroin addict sister and the lawyer’s eager husband and their difficult first year of marriage and then her pregnancy and then the architect building his dream home alone. There’a a lot going on in that book not the least of which is the liberal application of clichés. In A Little Bit of Nothing, Candace, a heroin addict, moves in with her lawyer sister and her conservative husband and as she gets high in her room, she reflects on a vacation in Spain. Of course. I’m fairly certain I got all my information on how one shoots heroin from a Dateline special.

Expertly, she tapped the already filled syringe with one finger, as she wrapped the tourniquet she had stolen from the emergency room when she sprained her ankle while having sex with Peter the Mathematician in his too small shower, around her left arm. She felt a tingle between her legs as she slowly slid the needle under the skin just above her inner elbow, and slowly depressed the contents of the syringe into her eager and quivering vein. Sighing, she leaned back and removed the tourniquet and remembered running with the bulls in Spain when she was nineteen, doing a year of study abroad. She remembered the throngs of people and she remembered the sound of hooves of against the narrow stone-paved alleys and the feeling of chasing a little bit of nothing. She remembered the rush and her heart pounding so hard that she thought her chest might explode and she heard her sister’s voice calling her name, which was odd, because she didn’t remember Ursula being in Spain with her. Slowly, Candace opened her eyes and tried to focus on her sister’s form standing above her.

So you see, when you’re feeling bad and want to feel worse, all you need to do is look through your hard drive and enjoy some awkward nostalgia with your former writing self. Later today, I will post one of my worst stories in its horrific entirety. You’re welcome.