After the discussion turned towards fanfiction on one of the other threads, and folks pointed out they started getting into writing through fanfiction, and then I read this quote from Naomasa... It made me laugh so much (coz it's trueeee). I then vividly recalled how utterly god-damned awful my own fanfiction was, back in the day, and I can't find a thread (I searched, mr mods! I tried) that REVELS in how bad we used to be as writers. The purpose being that in doing so it helps give us perspective, and we can now pat ourselves on the back for how much we've grown as a result. It doesn't have to be fanfiction, just the worst examples you can think of :- from the worst plot, character, story/character-arc, theme - you name it, it's fair game - that you've ever done. If you've got excerpts, great, if not (like me) then we just have to wing it and describe as best we can what made it so utterly, utterly hideous. ---------------------------------------------- For me, it was about 1999/2000, and internet fanfiction was very, very new. I joined the Trek writers guild and set up my Star Trek fanfiction. The pilot episode told the story of my Captain and his starship getting pulled into the future by the last, desperate ragtag group of humanity left. The borg had destroyed everything, and their last gamble was outfitting my Captain's starship with all the best technology, borg and otherwise, from 200 years in the future. They sent it back so the Federation could defeat the borg, and stop their future from happening. This meant my starship came back and KICKED ASS! Every episode. Every situation. Fleets (okay, I exaggerate) of ships would brush up against its hull and disintegrate like dust on the wind. It had transwarp, it had super transphasic unstoppable torpedoes, it had chronotronic phasers, it had unbreakable shields... (Actually, I think I'm doing my younger self a disservice there, the shields were broken a couple of times ... to add drama!) ...It was the Rey Skywalker of starships. You never saw borg crap their pants before until this thing hove into view. This, of course, meant the story and the stakes died really quickly, really easily every episode. So the longer it went on made it gravitate towards the crew... Its Captain was a super, really humble guy. He didn't try to get the babes like Captain Kirk. ... they just kinda gravitated towards liking him, regardless. How was that HIS fault!? I even wrote in Julian Bashir so that the Captain himself came off as a far cooler, sexier brit. If it had gone on longer, god only knows how I would've handled the ship going into borg space and defeating their entire empire on its own. The one defence in all of this was that I made it the most multi-species crew you could possibly imagine. My one redemption was it told a story of many different people from different backgrounds working together, like my favourite Star Trek, DS9. Okay, your turn!
I wrote about love when I knew nothing of it, and all my little romances were creepy, misogynistic things till I learned that the male behavior was actually horrifying and decided I'd be better at writing science fiction with some sensual things thrown in.
Here is the first stanza of a poem I wrote in high school. In ages past, when lands were vast, And Elthorn was in flower. Somebody-whose-name-I-don't-remember rode in all his glory and his power. I remember a friend of mine and I sitting in class trying to work out a word to rhyme with "buns" but I don't remember how it fit into the poem.
Some friends and I were working on a sort of shared-universe thing (like Thieves' World) back in high school. All I remember was that my story started with a dude in a long cloak, standing on the edge of a cliff, in a storm, reflecting on how the storm-tossed waters mirrored the storm in his soul, and then cutting to a flashback from when he was a child. Also, lots and lots of unnecessary apostrophes because fantasy. Aran ba-V'Nith lived in a city called something like De'Qande or whatever. Makes me want to vomit just thinking of it.
I went back and read over some of the old, old writing --2009 old -- and found a horrible little vampire story about a halfling named Seraphim who had a threeway relationship with the leaders of her vampire crew. I was a deprived little Mormon girl, I tell you what, man.
I burnt most of my high-school crap. It was pretentious garbage unworthy of the paper it was written on. Wrote an entire short story while trying my first joint though. That one I saved for the laughs. It was about some idiot guy and a magic sponge that absorbed everything around him. Because he was an idiot, the notion of an all powerful sponge didn't register, so he ended up using it for petty things. Story goes bonkers after he absorbed the girl he liked or...something. It's sitting in one of the boxes I haven't unpacked.
In all seriousness, I've never been tempted to write explicit fanfiction. But my Rufin stories are set in a world that is implied to be Jack Vance's Dying Earth setting, although I never specifically state that. I don't use any of his monsters, locations or magic system, but the stories are written in a copycat style to Vance's work. I think of it as a tribute to one of my favourite authors. Is that fanfiction?
Not sure it was the worst, but the memory really sticks out in my mind. In fifth grade my teacher assigned us to "write or story" or something like that. I can't remember. I do remember I thought I had to be deep and mature for it to be good so I wrote a story about a mom who hated being a mom. My teacher about lost it and wrote all these concerned comments over the entire thing. Pretty sure my parents got a call. Fun times.... Actually now I'm beginning to understand why my dad showed up at school to read the class a book. Proving I had normal parents.
Okay I just laughed my a** off. I remember writing a fanfiction about the anime Soul Eater....don’t know if any of you know it...because I was pissed off how the girl protagonist always got shoved in her face how she was the weakest of the bunch. Suffice to say it turned out she then dominated all the boys and men, all the time (I think I had some kind of inferiority feeling). She was always right, she always won and while doing that she seemed, of course, completely immaculate, no hair out of place. It was so far away from anything realistic that it makes me cringe in hindsight!
A few years ago I stumbled on an ancient notebook, containing within it a short "story". I have no way of knowing exactly how old it is, but it can't possibly be less than 14 years old, as the notebook was found in my childhood home, which I vacated at 16. Thing is, at 16 I was too experienced a writer to have written that tripe. This has to be from when I was just starting to write in English, so... Let's call it 12-13. Anyways. I don't remember the "story" exactly, but it was Sci-Fi, very short, riddled with poor grammar and an irreverent approach to spelling. There was no characterization, no plot structure, no nothing. The main character was part of a military expedition gone to fight evil aliens, for... reasons, presumably. But oh no! The main character's previously unmentioned brother has been brainwashed into working for the evil alien overlord! Shocker! Get a load of that plot twist. And the good guys win but Brother makes a dramatic escape, because of course he does. The story ended with MC swearing to travel the stars and free his brother bla bla bla bla. It's so bad. I hope I never rediscover it a second time.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to all my old writings. I do recall some pretty disturbing and violent stuff, LOL! This was back in the day when I thought 20 Pages was a full novel. No character development, setting development, and some strange plots. I would love to share some, but I feel some of it may be too disturbing to share, LOL. And really messed up for a kid to write, since I recall being in junior high or Middle School at the time. For some of it. A lot of my earlier comics around that time consisted of me and my band of friends going on adventures and fighting the "forces of evil" akabThe kids at school I didn't like, LOL. Funny enough, one of those bad guys became one of my friends and his character became a good guy in the comics. He found it amusing when I told him and even wrote a paper on it for a class using it as an example of something. I never thought to ask him. The characters were crudely drawn Edit: aww shit, this just reminded me of a fanfic I apparently wrote/drew (comic) . It involved the game Basewars. Basewars was a Nintendo baseball game, where the athletes were Androids. Anyway, the character in the story was a robot who dreamt of playing and idolize the Android players. my character in the story owned a Basewar team, and the robot was his assistant. If I recall, he does get to play, can't quite remember. It was an assignment for a Middle School English class. Edit: also in that same class, I wrote a story about a cat stalking a bird.
Everything that I don't actually apply myself to. (Wait that means my entire written library is a plethora of the badness spectrum.) Just depends on what you define as 'bad', cause even I can't lay claim to my once favorite title, cause I have read a few books so far that make most look like Dickens or Shakespeare by comparison.
Haha, don't worry, I think a lot of us have disturbingly violent and sexual stories from our youth. The type of thing a certified therapist would shakily point at and use the term "budding psychopath" and in some cases "psychotic".
I was a deprived little baptist girl once upon a time and I'm still writing indulgent sexual fantasies that make no sense in reality You know, things like southern vampire men emerging from the woods, telling me-- uh, i mean my characters, that they're the devil and spanking them into a sexual stupor. Clearly Christianity doesn't really understand what it's actually doing to children.
I don't know, it's pretty bad. I drew a comic on Valentine's day, of heart shaped characters, it was a boy asking a girl to date him, and when she rejected him, he kills her on her own front porch. Her father was inside and was totally cool and understanding about it, and tells him to leave. Just thinking about it makes me laugh at how dumb it was. You might think, maybe I got rejected by a girl, but this was not the case. I had a female friend you could consider a girlfriend. So this was just my weird effing mind. I also drew a comic of the fatty and skinny jokes
I wrote in some RPs that were cringy. Wrote a Pokemon fanfic called "Seven Days Aboard the Gold Lapras". Umm...My first story I remember was a story I wrote in third grade called What you Can't See Can Kill You...and it was a Predator ripoff. Wrote a KOTOR fan fic. A lot of the fan fic stuff I did was depressingly well-written...more than they deserved. Most of my early stuff was highly derivative. I did write an original story call Kronos Calico about a German special agent. Came up with that when I was in single digits. Think James Bond/Chitty Chitty Bang Bang-ish. A bunch of shit poetry/doggerel. I mostly just conceptualized stories without writing anything down, though. -SIN
I been sayin it all along. Funny what triggers a memory that you thought was buried. My brother and I were taken by a missionary couple at 7 & 8, and they told us that our Mom had been taken to hell and we should go with them to stay safe from the devil. I hate evangelism from the depths of history to the infinite future. Maybe I should write a bad story about it. Back to OP, though. I have yet to see anything bad about the stories described here. Bad writing is a mechanical problem that can be fixed with tools. Any story can be saved if you reshape it and sell the notion to the reader. All stories start out stinky, but can't be bad if they don't make it to the end, on the paper, with another pair of eyeballs rolling over them. Bad can be funny. Bad can be sick. A bad story can be part of a story about a bad story. Irony. Satire. Farce. Dream sequence. Visions. Keep it all, like tools in a toolbox...
I started writing a Castlevania fanfic a long time ago and never finished it; it was a great concept, but I never had the chance to revise it because my hard drive got infected, so it remains in a state of "Bad" until I can get the files off of the drive and put them on my Linux system.
I'm being all reflective and existential. How you are, then? Were you when? How've you been? Uncle Ben? Barbie and Ken?
