Suffer the children

In her July 6 post, Demented Michelle* told the story of a dickwad psychiatrist who told her she didn't have sufficient life experience to be a writer (she was a teenager at the time). This jogged my memory the way a swift kick will turn over a Suzuki Samurai. Here's my tale. Summer after 6th grade, I decided to write a novel. This would be qualitatively and quantitatively different than anything I'd ever done before. I would research this one (five minutes with an atlas to figure out the names of a few cities and rivers south of Moscow). For a change, I would have a plot (stolen from Edmund Cooper's 1971 novel The Overman Culture), a theme (be brave and you'll get the girl), and an exciting climax (stolen from the movie version of Crichton's The Andromeda Strain). The title of my magnum opus, which worked out to be about 114 handwritten pages, was The Control. In September, I handed the manuscript off to my 7th grade English teacher, who was cute, and she handed it off to her student teacher, who was not. This bothered me right from the start. See, I'd developed a crush on my English teacher, and I'd come to see my book as a way of expressing my feelings to her. Did I mention the climactic sex scene, richly realized in ways accessible only to a not-quite-seventh-grader? Hot monkey love, as imagined by someone who hadn't even had his first wet dream. The student teacher hung on to the manuscript forever. Honestly, looking back on it, I feel sorry for her. I really do. That manuscript was awful. She would have been well within her rights to say, "Doug, I feel terrible about this, but my dog ate your book." Instead, she made two mistakes: she read my story, and she gave me her honest opinion. She took me into a narrow room. Harsh light glared from the window behind her, placing her in stark silhouette. I remember her breath so well that my overly educated nose now recognizes it as tooth decay halitosis as opposed to sinusitis halitosis. She told me that I should be very proud of myself for writing such a long story. She'd never read anything nearly this long from any of her students. ("So what?" I thought about saying afterwards. "You're a student teacher. You've been at this, what, a year?") Then she lit into it. Mostly, she objected to my inattention to details. In the action-packed climax, for example, the hero and his girl roll down a hillside in an electric car. They're thrown free of the car. Unfortunately, the car's vacuum tubes have all burst, creating a powerful suction effect sustained just long enough to make the scene work. Yes, vacuum tubes. This was 1972, after all, and a futuristic electric car had to have vacuum tubes, BIG ones, and scads of 'em. Our hero struggles valiantly to help his injured girlfriend up the hill, away from the car's irresistible suction. Because, you know, if he failed, they might both get sucked into one of those tubes. The student teacher also had a problem with the sex scene. "I think this is something you should revisit when you're a bit older. There's a lack of experience here, and it shows. Painfully." Well, I'm not sure she said 'painfully', although I am sure it's true. Unlike Michelle, this crushing criticism did not put me into an extended block. I had way too big an ego for that. I figured the student teacher was a jackass who didn't know anything about science fiction and didn't know how to, you know, suspend disbelief. Besides, I'd already gotten distracted by school politics, and my plans to run for student body president quite eclipsed my writerly ambitions. I wonder if she really did put a chill on my muse. Throughout college, I never could finish anything I'd started. Then med school happened, and then residency, and before I knew it I was middle-aged. So here I am: I've racked up a few life experiences, gotten knocked around a bit by Fate. Now that I've had a few wet dreams, maybe I could write that sex scene. D. *Michelle: aren't you ever going to get tired of people calling you Demented Michelle?