Hi – if memory serves as it should do, then first recollections of yours truly having written something half decent would surely spring from my final year at high school. Not so sure it was that good though, more than a little bit sickly would probably stand as fair and accurate. Something about the ‘joyous leaping of wild trout, spangled rainbows and waterfalls flashing like diamonds’ – more adjectives and similes than my English teacher could shake her stick at, but she loved it. Teachers and adjectives go hand-in-glove. Flowery descriptions were, and still are, much nurtured in high schools; allowing teachers brief escape from mundanity, a short walk amongst those weird worlds of literary euphoria.
One verb, two nouns and the rest, adjectives – guaranteed to get you up in front of the class. Threw my cringe glands into overdrive and despite my prayers for a sudden bout of laryngitis, I ended up with my back to the blackboard and about-faced to thirty spiteful fellow scholars whom, by this time were quietly wetting themselves.
The opening line began with ‘Splash!’ This, I shall put down to personal naivety, though at the time I regarded my staccato-like intro as a good, action-packed gambit to ‘grab the reader’, though which part it was meant to grab, to this day boggles the mind. That’s when the snorts came and our normally well-behaved fourth year class of ’63 degenerated into a scene from Orwell’s, Animal Farm. However, words is words, even the dreaded adjective is entitled to a public showing; though now, to a wiser me, less is definitely more. So my first attempt at fiction, along with all its splendiferous adjectives and pretentious similes will be left where it belongs – buried in the past...
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