I wish they’d given it back.

When I was a young, I loved to write. As you can tell, I still do. One of my aspirations as a child was to become a writer. Most of the writings that I did as a child were done based on assignments that were given in school. The ones that I made in school that were good enough that my teachers chose to keep them. Those were not the days of computers where, I could just print an extra copy for my teachers. Whether or not my teachers had copying facilities, making a copy never occurred to them, because with them keeping my originals, I never saw them again.

Though I never got those papers back, I can clearly remember some of my best writing.

My first major piece of writing was based on a fiction series that I got read when I was in 7th grade. While most people at that time were reading series like The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the Bobbsey Twins, I was reading, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. I was so involved in Tom Corbett and his crew on the Polaris: Roger Manning, Astro and Captain Strong that I decided to write a parallel novel. I wrote similar stories that took place in the same time period. I can’t remember the name of our space ship, but I piloted in the Control deck, and I cast my friends Steve and Jeffrey to run the Power Deck and Radar deck. After I wrote a few chapters in my book, I decided to share it with my 7th grade English teacher. My teacher loved it and had me share it in class. I think my friends liked it, though they weren’t Tom Corbett readers. Unfortunately, I never got my copies back and I stopped writing the story.

When I was in 9th grade, my English teacher Miss McCallion taught us how to write stories from different points of view. I decided to take the story, “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell and re-write it with me as a character in the story. Due to my influence, the main character, Sanger Rainsford, accomplished what he did in defeating the evil General Zaroff. I did similar work later on as a character in “Treasure Island” guiding Jim Hawkins around to become the hero. Again sadly, none of those pieces of writing were returned to me.

As I got older and out of high school, my writing took a different turn. Instead of taking existing stories and putting myself in them. I used my creative writing talents to take existing conditions and created “What if scenarios”. It was great therapy. One story I wrote was about what would happen if my father became president. I managed to pick on every one of my parents habits. It was never shared publicly and had an interesting reaction when my family read it. The only person who liked it was my father.

I still aspire to write and be published. I’ve written some non-fiction pieces for newspapers and magazines, but my goal is to write a greater piece of either fiction or non-fiction. I do have 33 years of self-reflective writing that I did throughout my teaching career. I’m in the process of re-reading all of those journals. Who knows in what direction my writing will next take.