This is a first draft, unrevised exerpt of a short story I started a whle back and never picked back up. It was written in about the time it takes to read it, and has it's weak points, but also I think, some promise.

Anyway, here is a bit of it. Let me know what you think.

*edited to fix the opening paragraph as per your suggestions. Thanks.

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I remember the smell of burning leaves in the air and the sound of a dog barking in the distance as I entered the path through the woods.

I was sixteen years old and taking a shortcut home from school. It was late October, and the cool autumn air carried a dry wind that cut through my clothes and chilled me to the marrow. The acre and a half of undeveloped land between two houses on this residential street weren’t exactly woods in the strictest sense, but to us kids in middle class suburbia, they may as well have been Sherwood Forest.

When my cousin Mike and I were between the ages of nine and thirteen, we used to play in there. Some days we were knights on a mythic quest, other days we were outlaw cowboys running from a posse, and on some days we were the crew of the Starship Enterprise, beamed down to a strange planet whose ecosystem was eerily similar to that of Earth’s, but was populated by much more exotic and sinister alien creatures.

That’s one of the main differences between young boys and young girls. Girls play with dolls, have tea parties and play dress-up, their fantasies even at that age grounded in a sort of reality, prepping them for marriage and motherhood.

Boys have adventures.

Mike was my fellow adventurer, an explorer with a vivid imagination and an unquenchable thirst for action. Together there was no imaginary foe we could not vanquish, no unexplainable mystery that we could not solve.

We played in there so much over the course of those few years, that we affectionately named the place “Abbott Forest”, after the old man whose house sat at the west end of our playground, and who, more often than not, chased us out just as our adventures were beginning to get good.

So to say that I knew the place well would be an understatement. I knew it as I knew my own reflection in the mirror, having wandered it’s boundaries a hundred times or more saving fair maidens, shooting sheriffs and their deputies, and making out with imaginary green skinned women who had never experienced love, let alone the macho intensity of a starship captain on a five year mission to bed a female member of every race in the galaxy.

So on this particular day in October, I felt no trepidation upon entering Abbott Forest, and started along the well worn path that led straight through the middle of the woods and would end in old man Abbott’s back yard just three houses down the street from mine.

I remember an instant feeling of nostalgia as the smells of the place surrounded me. Memories of my cousin flooded my mind and brought a smile to my face as I surveyed our old stomping grounds. Ten feet to my right was the tree that Mike and I had carved our initials in with a pocket knife he had stolen from his father’s fishing tackle box. The rope that we had hung from one of its branches still dangled there, covered in mildew, worn and frayed from years of swinging into the scenes of a hundred crimes, tossing batarangs or shooting webs from our hands to capture the bad guys.

As I continued on my way through the woods, I came upon the fort that we had built one summer. To call it a fort was overstating it a bit, as it was actually just five pieces of plywood hammered together with about a hundred rusty nails, but to us it was a sanctuary. I can’t tell you how many hours we spent inside that shaky, crooked mess, reading comic books, sneaking cigarettes, talking about Katherine Lynch’s boobs and how much bigger they were this year than last. Mike would write stories and I would illustrate them to candlelight, and then we would read them over and over and laugh our asses off at some clever bit of dialogue or some ridiculously drawn caricature.

I saw my first naked woman in that fort. Mike had found an issue of Playboy under his older brother’s bed and snuck it out of the house down the back of his pants. He called my house and told me he had something special to show me and to meet him at “the cave” as we called it. I vividly remember the smile on his face when he opened up the magazine and let the centerfold fall out. We were both transfixed by what we saw. In those days playboy centerfolds were shot in what you might call a more “artsy” style, nude, but tasteful. No close-ups of the female genitalia back then, no sir. Miss July stared back at us, lying on some strategically stacked bales of hay with a come-hither look on her face, and wearing nothing but a pair of cowboy boots. We hung her up in a place of honor in our little cave.

As I approached the fort that afternoon, I found myself wondering if Miss July still hung there, and decided I would go and have a look for myself. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the structure leaned a little more to the right than it did years before, but for the most part it was very much the same as it was back when we used to inhabit it. Where we had once hung a flimsy plywood door on hinges, there was now a musty tarp covering the entrance. I remember feeling kind of proud and thinking how cool it was that some other kid or kids had taken to playing in our old fort, and had apparently liked it enough to make some renovations. I felt like an elder statesman who had passed along an important piece of history to the next generation of adventurers.

I was still smiling at that thought when I kneeled down and lifted the tarp. What happened next changed my life forever.

I feel like I've played in your woods now.

You could end it there, just before the last sentence, and it would pretty much be a complete piece. Just a tweak at the end maybe or one more graph on the "nostalgia" theme, a summation if you will.

Very vivid descriptions! It really introduces the place and the character well.

I do have a technical suggestion about the first paragraph. You start in the middle of the story and then flash back. Somehow in this case it feels like just starting at the beginning would work better--describing the woods and the adventures in it and THEN getting into what happened at age 16. Just a suggestion. Flashbacks are useful, but not always necessary.

Thank you both for your comments.

D.L. I am thinking about your suggestion, and I completely see where you are coming from. I will definitely consider that revision. I think my initial idea with the intro was in trying to make it sound more naturalistic...more like I might start telling a story to someone if I were sitting down sharing a drink with them.

Of course, I see far more weaknesses in these few paragraphs than you pointed out to me, so thank you for being kind.

Well, it would be worth trying as an alternative, anyway. In this case it's only a small rewrite.

I write some of my stories in that sort of first-person voice as well. But I have either begun at the beginning or gone to more trouble in the setup. Usually the former. I can't really articulate why, but it seems more right for some kinds of stories.

1. You need to continue writing this story.

2. I agree with D.L.'s comment about structure.

3. This is good writing, Chris. My first comment is mostly selfish in nature. I want to read more of this piece.

4. It's "working class hero CRAP," not "shit." =)

Thank you Frank.

I agree with D.L. as well as to the structure issue.

I am flattered by your compliments on what I considered a throw-away piece. Perhaps I judged it too harshly.

And I have changed my avatar appropriately. Which irritates me because Jaws is my all time favorite movie. I know every line back to front, and have myself corrected people on that very error.

It's very well-written. Just about every paragraph got me to thinking about some adventure from my own childhood.

I agree about the structure. Part of the blame is my own lack of reading comprehension, but I found myself a bit confused midway through over when the "present" was in the story and had to read back to figure it out.

You're all wrong. Start in the middle.

The first line of this story is, "Mike had found an issue of Playboy under his older brother’s bed and snuck it out of the house down the back of his pants."

Honestly, that's your opener. A few trims to that paragraph and the story could theoretically open like this:


Or some such.

That doesn't mean the stuff before it should be tossed - there is some vivid imagery there, a nice sense of nostalgia that I like - just that the "Mike..." line pulls you right into the scene in a major way. It's a great hook. You're telling a tale of adolescent boys and revisiting memories of those times, and that line spells it out in a way almost any male reader can identity with and any female reader can understand. It says, "here is what you are in store for." You bring us back to our own youth, and then set us up for the major shift you hint at in the end.

(I was briefly going to suggest “I found myself wondering if Miss July still hung there” as an opener, but “Mike…” is more effective, I think. Still, the “I found myself…” arguably puts you even more in the proper place and time.)

With some restructuring, the stuff prior to that can be used within the story without a problem. Shouldn't be hard to find a spot to use most of it. If you're revisiting the site as an older boy, surely you'll be thinking of what you used to do there?

I do not agree with starting at the "beginning," i.e. when you were a younger kid. I don’t think a chronological narrative would be the best choice for what appears to be at the heart of this story: revisiting years gone by, and a revelation of some sort (?) that changes your life going forward. (That's assuming, of course, it goes on from here.) If the story is very much about looking backward and forward at your life gone by and your life to come, you want to start right in the middle and look back.

With a short story, you don’t want to spend a lot of time on setup. Just get right into it and fill in the past as needed within the narrative. Your first line or three should drop the reader right in the midst of the story you want to tell. Set the tone right from the word go. That’s why I break ranks with the previous structure suggestions. In this case, I think you need to get to the “revisiting” point right away. Tighten up the transitions to make clear when you’re shifting through time and you’ll no longer confuse Monk.

That’s my two cents, at least.

Anyway, on the story itself: Wonderful. Goddamn did it ever send me back and make me think of my own time romping around in the woods and having “secret” spots with friends and all the rest. It’s obviously a very personal story to you. That comes across. Even better, though, is that it’s just the sort of personal story that can touch other people, too. Far from self-indulgent, there is a near universal appeal here. Very nice, Chris. You're certainly correct, there is good promise here.

I think I found a way to restructure the opening paragraph in a way that I think works better and allows me to take the story in the direction I wanted to without having to rework the sequence of events. I also think the correct opening sentence was in there, it was just in the wrong spot.

Anyway, I think it's better:

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Before:

One day when I was sixteen years old, I took a shortcut home from school. It was late October, and the cool autumn air carried a dry wind that cut through my clothes and chilled me to the marrow. I remember the smell of burning leaves in the air and the sound of a dog barking in the distance as I entered the path through the woods. They weren’t actually woods in the strictest sense, just an acre and a half of undeveloped land between two houses on a residential street, but to us kids in middle class suburbia, they may as well have been Sherwood Forest.


After:

I remember the smell of burning leaves in the air and the sound of a dog barking in the distance as I entered the path through the woods.

I was sixteen years old and taking a shortcut home from school. It was late October, and the cool autumn air carried a dry wind that cut through my clothes and chilled me to the marrow. The acre and a half of undeveloped land between two houses on this residential street weren’t exactly woods in the strictest sense, but to us kids in middle class suburbia, they may as well have been Sherwood Forest.

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What do you think? Better? Worse?

Better.

Yes, definitely better.

Bumped.

Because Frank liked it.

High praise indeed.

Agree.