Everyone knew better.

The police called it a suicide, but everyone knew better.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The room was tiny and with the door closed it had no light, natural or otherwise.  A desk sat in the middle, once probably stately and elegant but now notched and dented with years of careless use.  On top lay a thick book, flipped open to a page in the middle.  Leaning closer, I could make out a list of names - some scratched out, some circled, all with a price next to them.  Kalen, £350.  Aliastra, £475.  A sad Jaled, who only cost £120.  Did the boy know that’s all his life was worth before he died?

A man sat in the chair, slumped over.  He had blondish hair and scruffy beard at least a week old.  His face was slack, the skin loose, like an ill-fitting mask or a stuffed toy with the insides pulled out.  Deflated.

I had come to kill this man, but found him already dead.  A knife speckled with blood was still clutched in his hand and a river of crimson trailed down his shirt.  It looked like a suicide, and I wanted to believe it.  The things he’d done.  The lives he’d stolen and then sold.  The people he’d killed without ever getting his hands dirty.  You would think it would weigh on him.

But he was a Drogoi.  They didn’t have souls.  They would kill their best friends in a brawl over a mug of ale and sleep the deep, restful sleep of someone with an unburdened conscience.  I had seen them destroy their own homes with their families still inside in a fit of pique.  One Drogoi that frequented the Rusty Nail told me he had killed his sister when she refused to service him.  Then he sold her body to his friend, a well know deviant with a love of cutting things into smaller pieces.

This man, this trader of flesh, had not been crippled by guilt and then taken his own life.  So who had beaten me here to kill him?

She liked to burn things

She liked to burn things, but once the fires started they never stopped.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It hadn’t started out as something she wanted to do.  The first time had been an accident while camping with her friends.  Jenna was in charge of lighting the campfire for Smores and Beth, an experienced camper, “supervised”.   Beth needled her incessantly about this being Jenna’s first time camping and that she didn’t know the right way to do anything.  As her anger rose, she felt her cheeks flush and her hands go warm.  Then the sticks she had been arranging sparked to life, the fire jumping quickly outside the fire pit’s stone ring.  Beth had to rush to stamp out the fire before it spread to the forest around them.

Jenna sat bewildered for a long time.  She couldn’t puzzle out how she had done it or why she had enjoyed it so much.

Power.  Over time she realized the fire represented freedom and power.  Something wild, hard to contain.  Not subject to the rules she was every day.  Get up, go to school, homework.  March, obey, be good.  Be quiet. 

Fire raged.  Fire fought.  Fire got what it wanted.  And now fire came from her.

When her life got worse, on days she couldn’t handle her mother’s drinking, her father’s endless avoidance, and the lonely wails of her baby sister, Jenna trudged out to the forest behind their house and sat in a clearing.  She breathed in and out, letting the flame rise to the surface of her skin, enjoying the tingling in her palms.  She looked at her hands and considered letting the flame inside her loose, burning everything to the ground – her life, her family, the whole uncaring town.

So ... yeah.

So, I turned 39 in March.  And I vowed I'd write a book before turning 40.  I am serious about this resolution, so I've started taking steps towards it. 

I started a small writing group with four great people (plus myself) - we meet weekly at the TRL from 6-8 on Fridays.  It helps keep me motivated and inspired, and I love the feedback I get from the super smart members of the group.

I also have started doing nightly writing prompts.  Just five or ten minutes every night has gotten me used to writing daily, as well as becoming more comfortable with writing imperfectly.  I have always been gripped with indecision about how to phrase things, and an anxiety about the words coming out all muddled.  I know that you can edit things afterwards, but that didn't make me feel better about it.  Forcing myself to churn out 5-10 minutes worth of writing a night has helped ease the fear, and now I'm much more willing to just write whatever comes to me and worry about editing later.

So I decided to show you some of these.  I'll post the prompt first, then a line, then the edited version, and lastly the original version, for those curious about how things changed.

Here's the first one.

She was convinced that she could fly, that she flew at night, and she continued to be convinced of it, though she stopped speaking of it as she grew; in fact, she ceased to speak at all.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At first it was just the mornings.  Jesse looked withdrawn and sad, her shoulders slumped over her bowl of cereal.  I asked her why she was unhappy, but she always ignored me.  Then I tried to engage her with jokes.  I’m not a funny guy and my jokes were terrible.  I guess I’m not surprised she never laughed. 

And then one day I gave up.  I stopped noticing that Jesse didn’t talk.  Though I never admitted it, I liked her silence – it made her an even better listener than she used to be.  I would talk to her for hours, tell her all my secrets, knowing she’d never spread them around.  Sometimes I’d even make up outrageous stories to test how extreme a secret she was willing to keep.

And then one night I woke up from a nightmare, and Jesse wasn’t in the bed across from me.  The crescent moon hung heavy in the sky, painting the world outside our window in cool blue-grays.  I crept into the hallway searching for my strange, quiet sister.  She wasn’t there.  I crept down the stairs slowly, avoiding any sudden movement that would wake our parents sleeping in a room just down the hall. 

The front door was slightly ajar, and after passing through I was careful not to shut it all the way.  The click of the lock would be too loud in the still night.

Jesse sat on the porch, legs curled up underneath her.  She was looking at the pigeons dozing on the telephone wires strung high above the sidewalk, her head tilted back, and hair brushing her shoulders.  Her eyes were dark black pools when she turned to me and said, “I can’t reach them.  My wings aren’t working and I don’t know how to fix them.” 

The longing in her voice made my chest hurt.  I didn’t know what to say to the first words she’d spoken in months.  When she turned back to the birds, I could see something bunched under the thin white fabric of her nightshirt.  The moonlight cast its shadow on two tiny perfect wings, folded up against her shoulder blades. 

  

Original version:

At first it was just the mornings.  Jesse looked withdrawn and sad, her shoulders slumped over her bowl of cereal.  I tried to ask her why she was unhappy, but she always ignored me.  Then I tried to engage her with jokes.  I’m not a funny guy and my jokes were terrible.  I guess I’m not surprised she never laughed. 

And then one day I gave up.  I stopped noticing that Jesse didn’t talk.  Though I never admitted it out loud, I liked that she didn’t talk anymore – it made her an even better listener than she used to be.  I would talk to her for hours, tell her all my secrets, knowing she’d never spread them around.  Sometimes I’d even make up outrageous stories, testing her, pushing the boundary of just how outrageous a secret she was willing to keep.

And then one night I woke up from a nightmare when the crescent moon hung heavy in the sky.  Jesse wasn’t in the bed across from me, so I got up and crept to the hallway to search for her.  She wasn’t there.  I snuck down the stairs slowly, trying to avoid any sudden movement that will wake our parents, sleeping in a room just down the hall from the one Jesse and I share.

 

I’m careful not to shut the door all the way.  I was worried the click of the lock would be too loud in the still night.

There on the porch sits Jesse, legs curled up underneath her.  She is looking up, eyes trained on the pigeons dozing on the telephone wires strung along the sidewalk.  Her eyes are dark black pools when she turns to me and says, “I can’t reach them.  My wings aren’t working and I don’t know how to fix them.”  The longing in her voice makes my chest her.  (has actual wings).

Blerg.

Why?  Why do I have such a block against something that is my absolute dream to do?   Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, drops the following wisdom in its pages:

There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't and the secret is this:  it's not the writing part that's hard.  What's hard is sitting down to write.

Pressfield knows what he is talking about.  Until today, I believed my writing had always been terrible, even during the years I wrote with at least some frequency.  Imagining the amount of work required to bring even my best writing up to snuff felt overwhelming.

Today I popped a few chunks of text from back then into The Writer's Diet testing website, and surprisingly found everything within the ideal "lean" category.  Apparently, with practice I can get better at writing?  Who knew?!

Pretty much everyone.  For some reason, I keep believing that no amount of practice can lift my deplorable prose to a readable level.  I can't let writing continue to feel like such an overwhelming process.  I'm going to try a new protocol in the hopes of amping up how often I write and for how long.  Each day, I will write one tiny story, or a snippet of one.  Just a paragraph would be enough, more if I feel like it.  And I'll post my snippets here every few days, in an attempt to remain accountable to this new plan.  Working with The Writer's Diet testing site, I will show the transformation of my tiny paragraphs into more polished story snippets.

Here goes!

A rewrite of Tobias Wolff

It's been a hectic week, and I did a terrible job of fitting writing into my daily life.  I did manage to finish several pen pal letters, scrawling in brightly coloured inks by the flickering light of my poor wired bedside lamp.  Still, I was supposed to finish the story for last Friday's writing prompt by today, and I definitely did not.  I'll have to finish it this weekend.

Until then, here's a piece I wrote last year for a workshop I took at Ryerson.  The teacher had us read Tobas Wolff's short story Bullet in the Brain, and asked us to rewrite the final portion of the story.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

            Anders did not remember the infinite days of his youth spent hunting in the woods for pirate treasure.  He returned with broken pieces of glass smoothed by river water, moss covered stones, and colourful feathers left behind by mountain birds.  Each night while his mother tucked him, he would tell her fanciful stories about the origins of each extraordinary piece.  She would perch on the edge of his bed and listen, seeing the glass pieces with new eyes after hearing her son insist that they were crystallized teardrops of the River God, sad because winter was coming and would soon muffle the river's song with snow. 

            Anders did not remember the day he climbed onto the roof of his childhood home wearing cardboard wings covered with the feathers he had collected in the forest.  He ran along the rooftop, whooping with excitement as he felt the air rush past his face.  Anders came to the edge of the roof and without hesitation flung himself into the sky.  His heart lurched when he flapped his arms furiously a few times and then realized his arc was leading him downwards instead of up.

            Anders did not remember the month he spent in the hospital, his arm so badly broken that it required metal pins to set it.  His mother never left his side, always making comforting excuses for his father's absence.  He did not remember seeing tiny flashes of light dancing outside his hospital window at night, fairies come to entertain him through the long, lonely hours.

            Anders did not remember the many evenings he spent in a quiet park near his dorm room, studying in the solitude of a circle of rocks where he was convinced the King of the Elves held court once a month.  Gone from his memory were the philosophical arguments he had had with the wind in that very glade, one of which inspired his PhD thesis – Magic in the Real World: The Role of Superstition in the Age of Technology.  Gone too was the day shortly thereafter when he decided to become a book critic, bursting with excitement about all the stories he would read.  He did not recall the years that followed during which he made a name for himself as a gentle and fair critic, one that illuminated the wonder in even the most subtle plots.  The years flew by, and at this moment of death, he did not remember struggling to make mortgage payments, or his wife being infuriated when he took their daughter out to hunt for forest gnomes long past her bedtime.  Nor did he remember the years after that when he struggled to make child support payments to an ex-wife who soured the mind of his daughter with bitterness and the sentiment of harsh practicality over hopeful wonder. 

            In his last moments all he remembered was the sun in his hair, cool water on his hands, and bending over the bubbling river as he fished for its tears.

um ... hello.

After just one post of semi-creative writing put up over on my Kind Words Stationery blog, I knew it wasn't a good idea to mix stationery store entries with creative writing ones.  So, here I am.

I honestly don't expect anyone to read this blog.  In fact, I'm kind of hoping they don't.  If I knew people were going to be looking, I might not find the courage to post here.

I've loved writing my entire life.  I was telling stories and dreaming up tall tales before I could talk.  I distinctly remember drawing a picture with crayons in which an ant was having a lengthy conversation with the sun, who was talking back to the tiny insect.  I drew small word bubbles and filled them up with my messy scrawl.  I remember looking at the picture the next day and still being able to read what each word bubble said.  It was an epic conversation about the ant needing help to move her colony to another location, out of the way of an oncoming river.  The sun was negotiating terms.

A few years ago I found that picture and was surprised by what I saw in the word bubbles.  Nothing even approaching English.  Although I could clearly remember reading the words in the bubble the next day, and even the week after I originally drew the picture, it was obvious from looking at it now that I had drawn it in the time before I knew how to read or write.

That's what stories are like for me.  They're blood, they're the air I breathe - necessary and natural.  I think the feeling is pretty common.  I'm fairly sure storytelling is a base human drive.  But does that mean I know know how to write well?  Can I craft words that translate what I dream up each night onto a page?

Absolutely not, but I'm hoping that by practicing here I'll get closer.  If you read writing suggestions from major authors, every single one of them stresses that the only way to get better is through lots of practice.  They suggest making writing an everyday part of your life, even if what you write is brief.  That's what this blog is for.  Even if I end up doing rough drafts by hand, knowing I have to post here every other day will give me a reason to focus on writing at least three times a week.  It seems from experience that I need that push.

Deep breath, Simone.  Let's do this.