So What Have You Written? · 8:43am Jan 25th, 2018
Oh, you know, just things.
When I first started writing for pony, it was not the first time I wrote fanfic, nor was it the first time I ever wrote. The earliest things I can remember writing, though, are fan fiction pieces. Most of it is gone. There are gazillions of words scattered among moldy scraps of paper and clouds of electrons and broken binary that will thankfully never be reassembled. Some of it was tame and dreary. Some of it was dirty and experimental. Some of it was cherished and then quickly forgotten. The rest you can probably find on the internet somewhere. I love and hate all of them, including my original work I plan on releasing to the general public for profit. It's weird how it turned out that way.
Back when I was a wee lad in the era only 90s kids remember, I was a huge fan of dinosaurs. I watched every single entry in The Land Before Time franchise with religious regularity. I played the Sega Genesis Jurassic Park game and actually thought it was good. I went to the natural history museum like it was a hobby and just wandered around the dinosaur exhibits even though I knew them by heart. More importantly, I read about dinosaurs. Every trip to the library ended with armfuls of books on dinosaurs, most of which I didn't get around to reading. But read I did, and the genre didn't matter. Fiction and education, Dinotopia and National Geographic articles, I devoured them. I read scientific journals on dinosaurs before I even knew how to do long division, even though I had no idea what the hell any of it meant. But I read them. I didn't just look at the pretty pictures, I tried to understand. And in trying to understand what was written, I learned how to how to give someone else understanding through writing. Without a doubt, those days were the most important for my nascent writing career.
But the most important book I ever sat down with, by far, was Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker, a famous paleontologist whom you may remember more for his hippy beard than his belief that Tyrannosaurus Rex was an active predator--which, to be fair, was downright heretical at the time. I met him in person long ago, soon after a head injury that necessitated stitches at the hospital, so I don't remember much. But I do still have the drawing he made for me of what was then known as Brontosaurus, renamed Apatosaur by scientists who hate fun because the first name sounds cooler. I was so grateful for that free drawing that I went out and got his book.
Raptor Red is an interesting title. It's not the best book you'll ever read by any stretch of the imagination and I highly recommend it. The story revolves around a female Utahraptor, named Red due to the distinctive red mark on her snout. It follows about a year of her life and all the hardships a giant reptile might have endured back then, and is narrated by an omniscient narrator telling us her primitive thoughts. And damn if it didn't grab my imagination like nothing else.
See, this was the first time I had been exposed to an alien world. Up to that moment, my library consisted of children going back in time to visit pirates and ninjas, of Socs and Greasers, of frittering the day away solving mysteries. But in Raptor Red I had to grapple with understanding a creature that wasn't even human, in a world 80 million years removed from mine. A time of monsters and instinct, blood and mud. A world where the beauty was as vast as the brutality. And I loved it!
I freaking love dinosaurs.
Red's struggle for survival, her search for family and motherhood, the great journey through a savage and untamed land... it opened my eyes. I was enthralled by themes of lost loved ones, of battling to the death against giant monsters, and other things kids ten and below at the time didn't even imagine, at least until they saw Optimus Prime die in the Transformers movie (which on reflection just pissed me off more than made me sad). For the first time I had a story on my hands that didn't try to teach me something, in the manner of an adult trying to control the behavior of a child. It did not point along a predestined path of morality all children must obey. It did not attempt to relay heavy-handed fables or tell me the world only existed by a certain set of American values and anything outside it was evil and ugly. It most certainly did not try to make itself marketable or accessible; who on Earth would even consider letting a third or fourth-grade child read a book about ancient beasts murdering each other to survive?
It was the first story I ever read that dropped me into another world and said "Here it is" without pretension or prejudice.
I've been in love with "other worlds" ever since. I enjoyed Animorphs, but I only loved it when it got batshit insane later in the series and introduced freaky alien planets and god-like entities. I loved history, but I obsessed over alternate history. "Star" didn't get a reaction without "Wars" at the end.
So anyway, I wrote a story about dinosaurs during a school project, attempting to create this... "new world" thing. I created nonhuman characters, an Allosaurus who inexplicably adopts a Stegosaur when it hatches in her nest. I went for the melodrama of the two inevitably having to separate because, well, they're different futzing species, and I was actually proud of it. I ripped off the writing style and tone of Raptor Red wholesale, and the story was as primitive and horrible as a fourth-grader's writing could be. But I did it. I did something weird and stupid and different from the entire rest of my class, who wrote about things like the mall or trees or buying a puppy. I liked it, so I wrote some more absolute garbage about a ripoff of Jurassic Park and various other train wrecks. But as I did, I realized something. I wasn't just writing words. While everyone else was just plopping graphite onto paper to fulfill the obligation of the school experiment, I was exploring. I was trailblazing. I was hacking my way through the detritus of my mind and forming bright new trails, leaving brand new neurons behind me that burned like stars as a reminder where I've been.
My classmates wrote about what they knew. I wrote about dragons nobody had ever fought.
I mean, I'm being unbearably pretentious, but when you realize you have something special, you damn well hold on to it and pet it and call it the most special thing you've ever seen, and my love of writing was (and is) special to me. I also didn't meet anyone who loved writing and reading in the way I did until well into my teenage years, so I managed to cultivate a special kind of egomania around it in my literary isolation. I mean, people actually got freaked out by me because I read the actual original version of The Jungle Book instead of, like, the latest recommendation from those Scholastic book catalogues (which I still absolutely loved, mind you). I brought books well above my grade level into school just to try and impress everyone else. That particular behavior continued well into high school.
It didn't work, obviously, because I was literally the only one who cared, and I sure as hell didn't get any of the girls I thought were cute to look my way by going "Hey, so, you ever read George Orwell's 1984? Let me explain it in excruciating detail." But this became a kind of freedom, because I didn't care that I was the only one who cared. I just wanted great writing that took me to weird landscapes and I wanted a lot of it.
Anyway, dinosaurs. They were my first alien landscape. My first "other." My first glimpse into beings of another realm and another time, who endowed this meager planet of intelligent, self-destructive monkeys with the kind of mythical grandeur the Greeks and Hindus in all their classical oration could only dream about, attempting to shackle the sheer wonder of an entirely different existence to legends of cyclops and river monsters. Dinosaurs are the mythical era come to life, the proof that humanity itself is just a blip of a bleep on the radar, the long-lost terror of ancient memories vanishing with the final echoes of distant thunder. All because of that gosh darn Raptor Red book.
Dinosaurs introduced me to the idea that writing isn't exercise. It is a mode of transportation.
It wasn't until middle school I really grabbed a hold of that steering wheel, put the pedal to the metal, and drove.
Then I became a furry.
I wonder if you'd like this movie: i.imgur.com/QpcvlXk.jpg
Theres going to obe a part two of this blog, right??
Redwall was one of the cornerstones of my childhood. I started reading the books sometime around 3rd grade and they'v stuck with me since. Just last year I reread Mossflower for the umpteenth time. Long Patrol is due for another revisit.
Thanks for sharing some of your background! I found your school experience very relatable. Reminds me of when one of my english classes had us read The Pearl and afterwards the teacher gave us the assignment to write our own chapter into the book. Before then I had only ever written research papers, essays, and other such rubbish. This was the first time I was asked to write actual fiction (and fanfiction at that). I had a blast with it. The teacher went out of her way to tell me it wast the best writing she had seen from me that entire year (which probably didn't mean much but it still had an impact on me). For the first time I saw writing as something that could be fun and cathartic.
You've peaked my interest in Raptor Red so I'll have to see if I can find a copy of it somewhere nearby.
How are we almost the same person as a small child?
Dinosaurs are the greatest thing.
Man, Redwall. I still have all the books up through... I forget which, but whenever I stopped reading it. I sometimes think I should go back and reread them, I have fond memories of the first half-dozen or so, before the formulas started being quite so obvious. But I'm afraid, like The Dragonriders of Pern and especially Xanth, which I was reading at the same time, I'll find out it actually really sucked and my life was built on a lie or something. :C
Man, Dinotopia was the shit.
4781422 I know that pain with regards to the Xanth books. They were my introduction to the idea that fantasy could be funny but god they don't hold up.
Looking forward to more of this Red.
4781508
I mean, I know Xanth eventually became garbage, it's just a question of "how long was it before I noticed?" Dragonriders is what I'm really afraid of rereading. ;_;
Then I became a furry.
i.imgur.com/BeeIH6L.jpg
http://archiveofourown.org/works/4362098/chapters/9897446
dinosaurs.
s'pretty great.