I'm going to follow up on yesterday's entry and talk about the first story I wrote that really gave me some confidence in my abilities to make people laugh.

Just a couple days after my 15th birthday I attended a summer camp for young writers at Duke University for two weeks.  Overall I remember it being a pretty good experience.  There were a variety of classes you could sign up for and we lived in a dorm, so it was sort of a preview of what college would be like, although not exactly the same.   You can't exactly have a bunch of minors running around all over the place completely unsupervised, although I don't recall feeling constantly monitored either.  I feel like we were given a little bit of free reign.  I made a few pretty decent friends there, but I lost touch with them almost immediately.  It was hard to stay in contact with people who didn't live nearby back in those pre-internet days.  I wonder if anyone from that camp went on to be a famous writer or if any of them are here on Wattpad these days?

Anyway, I'm digressing a bit here.  One of the classes I signed up for was basically a short story writing class.  I don't think there was anything specific about it genre-wise other than it was fiction.  It was kind of like a college sized class of maybe 12 kids plus an instructor.  From what I recall during the first week we worked on writing a story and then at some point we traded our story with another person in the class and we all read somebody else's story silently at the same time in the classroom.  

I had decided to write a comedy story about an inept private eye.  This was around the point where I had vowed to overtly borrow anything and be as original as I could be.  As luck would have it I sort of accidentally borrowed something when I named my detective John Shaft, completely unaware that was the name of a private eye character in a series of films from the early 70's.  That was a little before my time and I hadn't seen them or heard of them as far as I know.  It's possible I may have heard the name somewhere and unconsciously used it.  Or it might have been a complete and total coincidence.  I'm not sure, but I know I didn't intentionally steal the name.

Anyway, I wrote my story and I thought it was pretty funny, but I didn't know what anyone else would think about it.  So the day came when we traded stories and were reading them to ourselves in class.  So you've got 12 people sitting around a table silently reading and all of a sudden the guy reading my story started cracking up laughing.  He apologized for disturbing the class and everyone went back to reading and then he started laughing out loud again.  I took that to be a good sign, although it was probably annoying to other people in the class who were trying to concentrate on the stories they were reading.  The guy kept laughing throughout and when he was finished another guy asked if he could read my story, which was pretty awesome since we were technically only required to read one story.  So the second guy started reading it and he starts busting up laughing.  By the time he finished it, a third guy asked if he could read it and he started laughing throughout as well. 

I've gotta say making people laugh is a good feeling.  That definitely gave me a lot of confidence and also probably played a big role in cementing humor as sort of my go-to mode of fiction writing.  

Towards the end of the camp I got asked to read an excerpt from my story at some sort of banquet thing.  I don't know exactly what it was.  I know there were a lot of adults in the audience and I think they were kind of dressed up, so I'm not sure if it was officially connected to the camp or if it was some kind of university function where they were just showing donors a sample of what was going on at this camp that was being held on campus or what the deal was.  I didn't really care.  I just went up to the podium and read an excerpt from my story and I managed to make a roomful of adults laugh multiple times.  I felt like I really had something on my hands there.

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of that story and I don't know if any surviving copies of it exist anywhere.  I originally wrote it out by hand and at some point I typed it up, but that was many, many computers ago.  I even wrote a few sequels to that story, but I don't have any of them either.  I don't really know how well that story would hold up now.  I only remember a few things that happened in it.  I'd like to think I'm a better writer and hopefully funnier now than when I was 15 years old.  Plus humor doesn't always age well.  Still, I wish I had a copy of that story for posterity's sake, if nothing else.  It would be fun to see if my 15 year old self could make me laugh now.  I hope so.  Based on the reactions I got at the time, I think there's a decent chance of it.