Carni-thingie

Following a conversation I've been having with someone, I've been prompted to troll through the vast, seaweed forest that is my memory and write about my first completed piece of work, or the first time I've ever felt like a writer.

This of course presents its own set of problems, because I can't for the life of me remember my first completed piece of writing. I mean, I know I was in second or third class and involved some form of digging, but other than that its a blank. I think I won third place for a poem on fire-safety in sixth class...don't think I still have that on file, but I won a book voucher which I immediately spent on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

So what are the firsts that I can remember, and can I remember any particular feelings attached to them? Hmmm. The only two that come to mind are the second poem I posted online, and the story "Shadows Crawling."

Should I post them? Who knows? I mean the guidlines were to write about them and the internet, being an abstract entity is unable to offer any guidance. I've always taken it that "write about" means reference as opposed to post... I think I'll just post a link to red can and let you crazy kids do the rest of the work.

Red Can
http://www.writingforums.com/showthread.php?t=48544

I've only just realised that I have 58 poems posted online. 58. Christ, I thought I only had ten or something like that...

So...onto the whole "feeling like a writer" tangent. Short answer, I don't. Longer answer, I've never really considered myself a writer, though I couldn't tell you why. Maybe its a lack of confidence, a fear that accepting the fact would make writing work and consequently less appealling. Who knows?

All I know is that I started largely as an attempt to get a few things out of my system, and that my first attempt ended up as a long string of highly cliche, meaningless prose. So of course, good old me took it bit too seriously, and when someone else suggested writing about a common object in an interesting way, I thought "why not?"

So, common object, and I was wracking my brain for about a day over this, before I just thought, can of coke. "But you can't put coke can in a poem" said I, so after many seconds of intense thinking red can was born.