Proof that Commander Fowler is Human!

Introduction

So, as a reviewer, I've heard it thrown around that if someone is bad at writing then they simply don't have the ability to ever become good at writing.

Ladies and gentleman, I am here to challenge that fallacy.

Seriously, this attitude fills me with so much rage. For starters, who the hell are you to say that this person can never develope the capacity for talent at writing? I mean, it is one thing for someone to write a review that says that someone needs improvement at writing or that the story itself has no potential, but there is no way you can say that someone will never have the opportunity to improve their writing if they practice and get instruction.

Also, I feel that is extremely hypocritical. If we're honest with ourselves, even the finest of writers at one point wrote some subpar material. I will demonstrate the point with some of the early stories I wrote that I'm going to tear apart below. I wrote all of these during middle and early high school, and looking back I'm surprised that I ever got published for anything. Be warned, some of these stories are borderline offensive in how awful they are. I hope you guys will still respect me as a writer after I reveal these travesties.

The Jake Twogun Series (Fifth-Sixth Grade)

While I had conceptual ideas for many a story when I was younger than this, Jake Twogun was the first story I ever thought about longer than a session of recess on the playground. The whole idea was essentially the same as an Alicorn OC Human in Equestria fic, but crossing over with the Star Wars universe instead of MLP.

Looking back, this should be considered a war crime because of how much I bent Star Wars lore- and logic in general- over a barrel. The stories followed a young boy, Jake Twogun (The name had nothing to do with possessing combat skills and was never explained. I just thought it sounded cool.), who was an orphan that lived on the mean streets of Columbus Georgia. Cue the self insert tropes. He was a free spirit that was picked on because no one understood him and he had no family or social class. Jake was sleeping by the Chattahoochee River one night when he saw a shooting star up in the sky and wished on it to be taken far away. Subsequently, the star crashes none too far away and is discovered to be a star fighter. The pilot is missing from the fighter and as Jake climbs in, he is locked into the cockpit. The flight computer takes him to Coruscant, the last coordinates uploaded.

There he is initially captured due to suspicion of him being a spy, but convinces the young Queen Amidala (Correct me if that's spelled wrong) that he just came by accident. Of course it is contrived romance at first sight and she frees him, telling the senate he is an ambassador and to be treated as such. What follows is the average Gary Stu saves the universe fic, including him becoming a Jedi Apprentice to Space Samuel L. Jackson Mace Windu. He fights a villain that was a friend at his old school, but turns out to have been a secret sith apprentice the whole time. At the end he has made friends with all of the main characters of that universe, gets the girl, saves the world, and goes back home to Earth, free to come and go as he pleases.

This whole thing was awful. I mean, when I was twelve it seemed like a good idea, but so did sticking my pencil in an electric socket. Bad original characters, terribly out of character Star Wars characters, plot that went nowhere quicker than M. Night Shyamalan's career, and overall a piece of burning tripe. There were supposed to be another two stories that followed this one, mirroring the timeline of the prequel trilogy, but luckily I abandoned it after my first year of middle school. The worst part was how delusional I was about it too. When I was young, I dreamed of being two things: a member of the military, and after I mustered out, an actor. I actually thought these stories would be made into movies and that I could play my self insert. <sigh> Poor, naive kid.

The Adventures of Holmes and Tex (Seventh-Eighth Grade)

During middle school, a longtime acquaintance of mine who liked to draw decided we should make a comic about stick figures. Now, in my defense, the unnamed world of this comic was already all but Wonderland with the OPest of characters. The aforementioned artist's self insert literally had almost every girl in the comic vying for his... personality every episode, and in addition to his harem he had a magic, massive pencil that could create or erase anything in their universe. However, my character somehow was even worse.

His name was Holmes, and he was a member of the Spartan II program that made it out of Reach and went on to become a mercenary. He preffered using a bow because it looked more badass, always wore a red bandanna, had a gruff, manly beard, and was essentially the greatest of soldiers, with a young boy named Tex as his sidekick that was good with guns meant to be my little brother. Admittedly, Tex was actually a character with some potential, but that was wasted by making him essentially serve as the Spike of the comics.

Adventures may have been a better story than what I had previously written, but somehow Holmes was actually a worse character than Jake Twogun. You see, while Jake was a gary stu, at least he wasn't obnoxiously overdone in a visual or personality sense. He was just a kid with force powers. Holmes on the other hand looked like a rejected concept art of the lovechild of Master Chief, Marcus Phoenix, and Rambo. There was no originality or fun to his design whatsoever.

Eventually, we all lost interest in the projects as a moment of self awareness hit us that these characters just werent fun after they had essentially hacked the universe. However, my bad writing was only beginning.

Credo Nulli (Seventh-Ninth Grade)

As a little background, I went through a pretentious agnostic phase in early high school, so while this isn't the worst idea I ever had, I am still very embarrassed of it purely because of how much of an asinine pride project it was.

The main story was all but lifted from Assassin's Creed II, a game I was deeply enthralled with at the time. It followed a young man named Vincenzo Otori, who was leading a normal life with his father Pietro, a merchant, and his older brother Roberto, live a simple life in Venice. Suddenly, armed bounty hunters assault them. Vincenzo and Pietro find that their father is ninja-level good at combat, dispatching many of the combatants. Due to their help from the local blacksmith, a friend of their father's, they narrowly escape with their lives.

What follows is essentially a road trip throughout renaissance Italy and France. The plot essentially is the recounting of what would happen if you crossed Underworld with Assassin's Creed. The story of Cain and Abel in the Bible leaves out that the mark Cain was given turned him into the world's first mythical monster, and all werewolves, vampires, et cetera are his offspring. They are hunted by a pseudo-religious order of paladins known as the Knights of Abel. A third group known as Credo Nulli (Latin for "I believe in nothing") sought to defy God's natural order by going all Grey Warden and drinking the blood of the monsters to gain their abilities and become supernatural assassins and monster hunters. For this reason, all three factions want to kill each other: the monsters want to devour the humans, the paladins want to exterminate the imperfections causing the darkness in the world in the name of God, and Credo Nulli wants to kill both of them to bring balance to the world.

The story itself showed a little glimmer of promise if I had been challenged to hammer it out a bit more and take some of the parts ripping off Assassin's Creed out and replace them with original ideas, but this story instead was condemned due to an uninteresting protagonist, a needlessly convoluted plot, and most importantly a smugly pretentious attitude that it was getting some deep philosophical message across about how religion was idiotic and everyone was an idiot except for the obvious self insert. If you can't tell, I was quite the asshole at this point in my life. Over all, I dropped the story and its doomed sequel after simply loosing interest.

The Rebel March (Ninth Grade)

This story was a turning point for a couple of different reasons. First of all, it was the first project I had ever seen completely to entirety. Granted this was only a nine page short story, but it still was the first thing I have an actual final draft for.

The story was a what if scenario of an alternate universe where the North and South of the United States had merely been locked in a stalemate for decades after the beginning of the American Civil War. Not unrealistic enough for you? Let me add in that the technology jump is massive. I'm talking Gauss rifles, cure-all medical gel, hovercraft tanks, and other crazy stuff out of an Isaac Asimov novel.

Crazy premise aside, this was the first story I wrote that I think could be worth a damn with some slight polish. very few grammar errors, the characters were actually believable, if a little bit archetypal, and even in the insanely strange alternate universe, if it were explained such as massive leaps forward in technology from Nikola Tesla becoming more prominent, could be interesting.

Again, the Achilles heel of this story was that it believed it was saying more than it was. Taken as just a scifi military action story, this has merit, but it keeps heavy handedly ladling on the message of war being pointless and how fucked we are as a species and other stupid misanthropic nonsense (My pretentious agnostic phase was accompanied with a simultaneous pretentious misanthrope phase).

The second reason this was a turning point was because it was the first time someone had ever given an opinion of my writing that wasn't just kissing my ass. My English teacher gave me quite a critique when I showed her. At first I was really hurt that she didn't like it and angry that she wasn't being fair, but the more I looked the more I realized she was right. When I went back and apologized for calling her critique wrong, she said she saw a lot of potential for a good writer if I had more practice and offered to be my mentor. Five years later, I have learned an immense amount about both life and literature from her. I owe just about everything I know to her, and have even begun the cycle anew by teaching others how to improve. However, here's the point in all this talk of bad fiction:

Conclusion

My point is simple. I have written some terrible, terrible things in my time, but I did get better. So, this is giving two separate messages to two separate messages.

First, to the audience, go easier on some of the new writers. Now, this may seem hypocritical from someone who has a reputation for destroying subpar fictions in reviews, but while I don' hold any punches back on a fic, I do at least try to stay civil in terms of not directly insulting an author or their writing potential. Remember, even the J.R.R. Tolkiens of the world have to start somewhere.

Second, to the new authors, the only reason I ever got better was because I was willing to take time to practice writing and polish a story, find a mentor to learn from, and take the criticism. Do those three things and I can guarantee you will see your writing improve. Remember to have thick skin and not get offended when your story is challenged by criticism, but keep your ears open to listen for ways you can improve and apply them in the future.

Well, I've gotten my point across and I've been standing on this soapbox so long that my feet are starting to hurt. I hope this hasn't made any of you think less of me as a writer. See you folks later.