My last semester at college before I dropped out, I was totally burned out and was trying to get myself excited about school again. So I took an extra elective instead of one of the core classes I needed as a 'treat', something I could have fun doing and that I'd look forward to. It didn't end up working out but I don't think I'll ever forget a couple of the 'creatively written' madness that everyone wrote. Since it was a base-level class without prerequisites, anyone could sign up for it and the talent displayed ranged from professional quality to truly atrocious.
On the Truly Atrocious side, my favourite contributor was a kid called Zack. He was a freshman and extremely, supremely socially awkward (almost one of the most awkward people I have ever met, and trust me, I've met some reeeeeeally socially awkward people). He was also immature, not terribly bright, and very arrogant--a combination that made him insufferable to talk to or deal with, and being as socially unaware as he was he couldn't understand that his input wasn't wanted in every conversation around him or that someone was uninterested in talking to him. (In before someone yells 'AUTISM!!'--he probably was but that isn't the point.) As a special bonus, he had terrible hygiene, and body odour so offensive that you could smell him no matter where you sat and on one particularly potent day a girl threw up.
He wrote several stories over the semester but the one that stands out in my mind was his first offering. It was the story of some samurai warriors (as written by an underinformed Japanophile) who shipwrecked on a lost forest island and become embroiled in an ongoing 'war' with the island's other inhabitants, cowboys and a tribe of Indians. The samurai had random Japanese words for names, the cowboys all given 'Billy the Kid'-type western-movie nicknames, and the Indians all seemed to have white-bread Anglo names. There were dinosaurs involved in the story, too, but I honestly don't remember how he fit them in or what purpose they served other than to turn up at the end and kill everyone with a combination of eating everyone and some weird random dinosaur kung-fu moves. I swear this is the whole story. His spelling and grammar were terrible and the whole thing was written really badly--every line of dialogue was emphasized with a long line of question marks or exclamation points (or both) and written in all caps.
If it were a parody of the adventure/fantasy genre, then it wouldn't have been this funny--heavy-handed, but a decent effort at ragging on cliches--but the fact that he was absolutely, totally, COMPLETELY serious about the whole thing and his earnestness came through in the way he wrote made it just so much worse. I'm usually loath to laugh at young writers whose technique is unpolished, but this wasn't unpolished. It was just plain BAD. And oh, it was glorious and beautiful and I wanted to start a religion around it. I seriously lament the fact that I never saved a copy for myself because it truly was a shiny golden turd. I'm glad we didn't read the stories in class (we emailed them and read them at home), because if we did then the laughter would have spoken for itself. No one could find anything genuinely nice to say about it other than a few token remarks about it being 'an interesting premise' and having 'potential'. No one was mean and the criticism was worded very carefully and very gently, but you could tell he was just totally shocked that we weren't fawning over him. I get the impression that he might have been, ahem, 'special' and that because of this any piece of work he produced was excessively praised and fawned over. He thought he was Michael Crichton. This with his arrogance (he really thought he was the shit--rather than just smelling like it) was a wonderful combination and the experience was probably pretty shocking to him. It was a long fall to earth.
He wrote other stories (including one where a guy gets his ass kicked by a group of kung-fu high school girls), but this was his greatest piece of fail I've ever read. It's even worse than Twilight.
Almost everyone else in the class was average to reasonably good, but one of my absolute favourites and one of the best-written was called 'Skeletons in the Closet'--I can picture the face of the girl who wrote it in my head but for the life of me I don't remember her name. It might have been Liz but I really don't know. It was a first-person story and the narrator was a woman whose husband has just been declared legally dead after being missing for five years. Then you find out it was her third husband and the story of her three courtships, three marriages, and the three husbands she murdered was amazingly funny dark comedy. It wasn't even in-your-face and deliberate (like mine is), but the subtlety combined with the almost disturbing calm nonchalance of the narrator made it eerie and hilarious at the same time. At the end, knowing that declaring her last husband dead would be the end of it, she reveals the skeletons in her closet--she's kept all three of them. she kisses them all on the head and welcomes them all home. IT WAS SO COMPLETELY TWISTED. But fabulous. I no longer have a copy of this one, either, but it remains one of my favourite short stories ever. Wherever that writer ended up, I hope she's still at it. Because it was genius.
Obviously it was more than just a handful of people in the class so there were a good many others over the semester but these two are the ones that stand out the most. Maybe I should look into the community college here and just take a creative writing class. It might be fun, and who knows--maybe I'll find the next Golden Turd.
On the Truly Atrocious side, my favourite contributor was a kid called Zack. He was a freshman and extremely, supremely socially awkward (almost one of the most awkward people I have ever met, and trust me, I've met some reeeeeeally socially awkward people). He was also immature, not terribly bright, and very arrogant--a combination that made him insufferable to talk to or deal with, and being as socially unaware as he was he couldn't understand that his input wasn't wanted in every conversation around him or that someone was uninterested in talking to him. (In before someone yells 'AUTISM!!'--he probably was but that isn't the point.) As a special bonus, he had terrible hygiene, and body odour so offensive that you could smell him no matter where you sat and on one particularly potent day a girl threw up.
He wrote several stories over the semester but the one that stands out in my mind was his first offering. It was the story of some samurai warriors (as written by an underinformed Japanophile) who shipwrecked on a lost forest island and become embroiled in an ongoing 'war' with the island's other inhabitants, cowboys and a tribe of Indians. The samurai had random Japanese words for names, the cowboys all given 'Billy the Kid'-type western-movie nicknames, and the Indians all seemed to have white-bread Anglo names. There were dinosaurs involved in the story, too, but I honestly don't remember how he fit them in or what purpose they served other than to turn up at the end and kill everyone with a combination of eating everyone and some weird random dinosaur kung-fu moves. I swear this is the whole story. His spelling and grammar were terrible and the whole thing was written really badly--every line of dialogue was emphasized with a long line of question marks or exclamation points (or both) and written in all caps.
If it were a parody of the adventure/fantasy genre, then it wouldn't have been this funny--heavy-handed, but a decent effort at ragging on cliches--but the fact that he was absolutely, totally, COMPLETELY serious about the whole thing and his earnestness came through in the way he wrote made it just so much worse. I'm usually loath to laugh at young writers whose technique is unpolished, but this wasn't unpolished. It was just plain BAD. And oh, it was glorious and beautiful and I wanted to start a religion around it. I seriously lament the fact that I never saved a copy for myself because it truly was a shiny golden turd. I'm glad we didn't read the stories in class (we emailed them and read them at home), because if we did then the laughter would have spoken for itself. No one could find anything genuinely nice to say about it other than a few token remarks about it being 'an interesting premise' and having 'potential'. No one was mean and the criticism was worded very carefully and very gently, but you could tell he was just totally shocked that we weren't fawning over him. I get the impression that he might have been, ahem, 'special' and that because of this any piece of work he produced was excessively praised and fawned over. He thought he was Michael Crichton. This with his arrogance (he really thought he was the shit--rather than just smelling like it) was a wonderful combination and the experience was probably pretty shocking to him. It was a long fall to earth.
He wrote other stories (including one where a guy gets his ass kicked by a group of kung-fu high school girls), but this was his greatest piece of fail I've ever read. It's even worse than Twilight.
Almost everyone else in the class was average to reasonably good, but one of my absolute favourites and one of the best-written was called 'Skeletons in the Closet'--I can picture the face of the girl who wrote it in my head but for the life of me I don't remember her name. It might have been Liz but I really don't know. It was a first-person story and the narrator was a woman whose husband has just been declared legally dead after being missing for five years. Then you find out it was her third husband and the story of her three courtships, three marriages, and the three husbands she murdered was amazingly funny dark comedy. It wasn't even in-your-face and deliberate (like mine is), but the subtlety combined with the almost disturbing calm nonchalance of the narrator made it eerie and hilarious at the same time. At the end, knowing that declaring her last husband dead would be the end of it, she reveals the skeletons in her closet--she's kept all three of them. she kisses them all on the head and welcomes them all home. IT WAS SO COMPLETELY TWISTED. But fabulous. I no longer have a copy of this one, either, but it remains one of my favourite short stories ever. Wherever that writer ended up, I hope she's still at it. Because it was genius.
Obviously it was more than just a handful of people in the class so there were a good many others over the semester but these two are the ones that stand out the most. Maybe I should look into the community college here and just take a creative writing class. It might be fun, and who knows--maybe I'll find the next Golden Turd.
It may be worse than Twilight....but is it worse than "My Immortal?"
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