A year ago I wrote about my unfinished epic CLAWS which is a mash-up of Jaws and Grizzly, written when I was 11 years old and busily imitating everything I liked.
I finally went back and scanned the story using OCR software, cleaned up the stuff that didn’t translate (there was a fair bit. The OCR program either doesn’t like the font used by my old portable Smith Corona typewriter, my writing style as an 11-year-old or probably both), but left in all of the typos to preserve the “you are there” feeling of reading a story written by a kid who wasn’t going to let spelling stop him from unleashing his creativity.
It is one of the worst things I have ever read. It is the worst thing I’ve read that was penned by my own hand. At times when I was re-reading the story, I became convinced it was a parody. I fancied myself quite the funny guy even back in elementary school, so it’s a plausible theory, but in the end, I think it’s just terrible writing lapsing into self-parody.
There is a temptation to do an annotated version that would offer commentary, sort of like you get with movies on DVD/Blu-ray/holographic projection where the director tells you what he was thinking for each scene, but in this case, it would be more, “What was I thinking?” period.
An example of that would be the introduction of the character Jim Fuller, described thusly:
He came up to Jim Fuller, a tall negro officer.
This was written in 1976, remember, not 1876. My defense here is that a) my mom described blacks/African Americans as negroes and b) eventually I got to the point where I gently corrected her on it. She was simply reflecting her own upbringing and I was doing the same, neither of us realizing the word might have evolved into a derogatory term, though I came to discover this on my own.
For now, you may “enjoy” this unfinished tale by clicking on the zipped file below (inside is a standard ePub document but WordPress won’t allow direct uploading of ePub files. I feel bad because the extra step of having to unzip this just to inflict it on yourself seems a bit cruel). Don’t read it late at night because you could end up having nightmares (over how horrible it is).
As a fun (?) experiment I ran CLAWS through the Hemingway editor and it’s not as bad as I thought, which nicely demonstrates how the Hemingway editor won’t actually stop you from committing terrible acts of writing if you are sufficiently motivated/unskilled. It reminds me of the Homer. Sure, it’s a car and it does car-like things, but would you really want to own one (unless you were Homer)?
Here’s the Hemingway editor summary:
I was in grade 5 when I wrote this so was clearly aiming the story at my peers.
Dodged a bullet on the adverbs and passive voice tasked me even then. Some things never change. If there was an assessment to determine “sentences are painful to read” I imagine the website would have crashed.