When I was a sophomore in high school, I took a fiction writing course. This was to the lament of everyone involved. It was then that I learned that you have to like a genre in order to write it. I neither enjoy nor read fiction, and man, did it ever show.
My stuff was just awful. On this, everyone in the class eagerly agreed. God had blessed me with just enough talent to fully grasp the depths to which I sucked. Classmates felt sorry for me, albeit just the few who weren't conspiring to flog me to death so they wouldn't have to read any more.
One of my particularly vile efforts was about a group of interstellar travelers. We followed their lives as they spent decades and generations aboard a craft hurtling toward a distant radio signal. The blue planet grew in their windows until voila, they arrived. (BIG REVEAL TIME!) Why, it's Earth! Why, these weren't humans we were following at all! Why, the only thing that could make it even twistier would be if...YES! The Earth has been devastated by a nuclear holocaust! There's no one left! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!
Sharing that here is humiliating.
I would have gladly left this foray into fecal prose in the compost pile of my mind, but then along came the Battlestar finale. I cannot imagine a more scathing indictment of the show's writers than "I wrote exactly that my sophomore year."
