Nehaveigur

At high school, we had to write at least one long essay every week. I remember one assignment in particular: Write a well-structured adventure story. We were given 50 minutes. I started writing what came to my mind, which happened to be something about a boy playing in his backyard. Lifting a wooden board, he discovers a hole in the ground. He crawls in, and it turns out to be a large tunnel of uncertain origin. He commences to explore it.

At this point, the teacher notified us we had five minutes left to finish the essay. I panicked, since I had no idea how to finish the tunnel story. The only thing I could think of is that the boy finds a ladder that leads up. At the top, there is another trap door, he opens it, and is back in his own back yard.

I handed in the story as the bell rang. I was unhappy, because I knew I had messed up the ending. It was transparently half-baked and didn’t make sense.

To my great surprise, when we received our essays back a week later, I had received the to grade. My teacher pointed out my story as a wonderful example of how to write an adventure story and made me read it to the whole class. When I read the ending, there were some gasps, although someone also muttered “I don’t get it.”

I didn’t get it either, but I’m thinking of this experience often while reading or watching series. There is a lot of shoddy, rushed story writing out there, but maybe that doesn’t matter as long as people enjoy it.