Beginning at the Beginning - not very original, but it's the truth

The school year had just begun, and I was in seventh grade, my first year in junior high school. English class was first period. It's the first day of a new class with a new teacher in a new school with a lot of new kids I had never seen before. Yikes! Who wants to relive that memory again?

But something amazing happened in that class. Mrs. Upham asked us to write an essay on any topic we wanted. The only guidelines were that it had to be two pages long, and it had to express an opinion. What could I possibly write about that I had an opinion on? That was a puzzler! Puzzler? That reminded me of the Riddler, which reminded me of the Batman TV show, which was a weekly staple in my house. The idea of a superhero TV show was great, except that I wanted it to be a serious show about serious characters and serious crime-busting. To a seventh-grader who took his superheros seriously, the campy Batman series, with Adam West in the title role was, well, silly, not serious. 

I had a topic on which I had an opinion. I wrote two pages about how ridiculous the show was, with the phony fight scenes that were punctuated with comic-book animations of Wam! Blam! Powy!, which covered the real action. All I needed now was a title. My best friend and I share a contempt for the show, although we never missed an episode. My friend's dad had once made a comment about the show. He said it should have been titled, "Fatman and Bobbin the Boy Blunder". That phrase stuck in my head, and it sounded so cool that I knew I had to use it in my essay. So I made it the title.

Mrs. Upham gave me an A on my writing assignment. It is always encouraging to start off a new class with an A. 

But then a couple of weeks later it was Back to School Night for the parents. I accompanied my mom and dad around the campus. We showed up at our designated time for my first period English class. When Mrs. Upham finished talking to another set of parents, she turned to me and asked me to introduce my parents. She then said the most marvelous thing. "Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, your son shows a real talent for writing." She showed them my essay with the big fat A written in red across the top. "The title of this essay is exceptionally clever. David obviously has an ear for alliteration." I had never heard the word "alliteration" before. "I think he should think seriously about writing more. The school is starting a journalism class next year. I would like him to sign up for that class."

From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I signed up for the journalism class, and I began to learn to write. I was in journalism for my last two years of junior high school and all three years of high school. In my senior year I was co-editor-in-chief of the Lakewood High School newspaper, along with co-editor Mimi McBride. (I had a crush on Mimi, but I'll save that story for another day.)

Another great influence on my writing life was my ninth-grade English teacher, Mr. Garvin. Most of the students dreaded Mr. Garvin's class. He was dry, humorless, and strict. But I loved his class. He taught me to write a term paper, research, take notes, organize my thoughts, outline, and edit. He also had an expansive vocabulary, and I thought it was totally cool to know words that no one else knew. I learned tremendous lessons from Mr. Garvin.

The other man from whom I learned much about writing and even more about decorum and organization was Mr. Eisenberger, my journalism teacher throughout high school. He was a pronounced conservative with graying hair and a debonair mustache. He wore a tie and a three-piece suit to school every day. He encouraged us to read the Christian Science Monitor as the pinnacle of professional journalistic expertise. I learned the Five Ws of the lead sentence of a good news story. I learned to write headlines, layout a page of newsprint, set type by hand, run a line-o-type machine, and meet a deadline. More importantly, I learned from Mr. Eisenberger how to work on a team and lead a team. 

All of that was many decades ago. Mr. Eisenberger passed away many years ago. The last time I saw Mimi, she and her husband owned a seafood restaurant in Long Beach, California. I have not seen or heard of Mrs. Upham since I left Bancroft Junior High School in 1969. I went by Mr. Garvin's classroom once while I was in high school just to tell him what an excellent teacher he was.  Yet I have never forgotten the influence these people had on my life.

I have been writing ever since that first day in Mrs. Upham's class. I did not pursue a journalism career, I tried teaching for a brief period, but ended up in software development and project management. Though I do not write for newspapers, I have written thousands of pages of technical reports, project status reports, and business requirements documents. I have written volumes of personal histories and journals. I published an article in a software business journal and a fiction short story for children. I have also written hundreds of pages on various religious topics. All of this preparation has finally brought me to point where I am ready to tackle a novel.

Funny to think that it all started with a simple, innocent act of plagiarism in a seventh grade English class. I have been trying to live up to Mrs. Upham's expectations for fifty years.