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Writtin' Thread

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allison:
Thanks for the praise on my last piece. As I said, I really don't write a lot...and it's nice to hear that I'm not awful!

--

Emily turns off the television. There are no lights on and without the blue glow of the screen, she is in the dark. It’s refreshing, because she can't see a thing and for once, she isn’t evaluating herself and everything around her. She is alone in her mind and it’s perfect. She is sick of calculating every move, losing sleep over stupid things, pretending to have it all together when all she wants to do is cry. She’s sick of wanting to cry, because weakness is not acceptable. She's never been allowed to be weak. She remembers the only comforting words offered to her. "Things happen. Life goes on."

So she tries to go on with her life. Routine is the best way to make it seem all right. Predictability is her last defense, and she’s sticking to her guns. Some people drink, some people exercise, some people write stories to get away from their demons. Emily has never liked alcohol, or running, and was never very good at poetic imagery, so she just pretends.

Then, of course, something changes. She meets new people and the routine is different. People are not Emily’s thing, because she speaks before thinking, and then thinks for hours about what she said to someone and what they think of her now. She wonders about what her life was like before she forgot how to be a friend. She obsesses about the look she got on the subway this morning. Things like this pick away at her brain and it makes her anxious.

Suddenly, everything comes to a peak, and like Krakatoa, she explodes because it’s impossible to hold it all in anymore. She cries and screams and throws things. She rages for nearly half an hour, the pressure of a thousand things she's never allowed herself to feel coursing through her and she escapes for a few minutes from that shell that she's kept herself in for years.

When she's done, her chest hurts from sobbing and yelling and she collapses onto the couch, breathing slowly and deeply, and it isn't long until she drifts to sleep. Emily dreams every night, but usually it’s not this vivid and most of the time she doesn’t remember it in the morning. This dream is different. She remembers the feeling of his hands as they hold hers, the smell of his leather jacket as she leans against his shoulder, the perfect sound of his voice as he says that he cares.

Scrambled Egg Machine:
The continuation of my earlier piece.

    The train pulls in at the sole remaining platform at the Castle Rock firebase, and all soldiers aboard are made to depart before the trains reverse and lays tracks back to Colorado Springs. I am one of five hundred freshly trained soldiers. The obvious place to go is a cratered bunker surrounded with conspicuously new air raid sirens, radar trailers and two anti-aircraft emplacements. They neglected to scrub the bloodstains off of the concrete, though. I step inside and am handed a large pack of gear after having my tags scanned, and then step back outside to get a quick look at the area. I get cut short by a few barely audible metallic coughs in the distance. Every grungy looking veteran immediately dives into the nearest shell hole. When the mortar rounds begin to impact, I follow suit. Pronto. The rain of sixty millimeter death abates a little and I get a chance to book it into the trenches to find my unit. Hurtling into the small roll-out that will be my quarters for the foreseeable future, I land on a pissed looking salt holding a flamethrower.
    " Damn FNG, get your act together." He and two others stare at me. "Welcome to Lone Tree."

jimbunny:

--- Quote from: ThePQ4 on 21 Aug 2008, 09:09 ---
--- Quote from: jimbunny on 21 Aug 2008, 02:40 ---First person present tense is triiiiiiicky. Why is it so attractive?

--- End quote ---

Why is it tricky?? I prefer first person actually. It helps me keep my characters straight (...that just me smile; I am a horrible person). When I write in a 3rd person perspective, I tend to forget who is where doing what when I have a bunch of them together in a situation. Or not really that I forget, but I just write the wrong thing down and when i read over it later, I'm just like "Whoa, that's not right..."
--- End quote ---

Without implying anything negative about your writing, I meant that it is tricky to sound good using first person present tense. In my experience, it's a whole lot harder to vary your sentence structures and get a good flow. If I could hazard a guess (and perhaps answer my own question at the same time), I'd say that writing that way makes people feel as if they have to constantly account for their primary subject, which leads to an overuse of "I do/think/feel this"-type sentences. It can get a little claustrophobic. At the same time, it's probably what the writer feels most comfortable expressing, which might explain its popularity.

imagist42:
This is a weird little thing I did for a competition at another forum. I called it "Capturing Truths" but that is a pretty lame title. Also I recognize that I have developed a really nasty habit lately of injecting music the average person (read: not you guys) has never heard of into my writing, but I can't help it.


The digital 2 on the clock morphs into a 3. It is now 6:33 A.M. Voxtrot bursts from the speakers: “I know that you’re in love with her; I can tell by the way you never touch her or look at her.” It incites thought.

Was it wrong to make you love me if you’d never know love on your own?

A soft click wipes her off the screen. It is almost a noticeable progression, as first the sheen of her deep red hair, then the line where her crooked smile meets her dimple, then the mole on her chin fade into a shot of shadow-casting clouds outside an airplane porthole. In reality all is instantaneous, but instants rarely seem “real” in that sense, anyway.

What good is capturing a moment when it’s a posed lie?
If you don’t want the truth, why try remembering at all?

Several more images captured through that narrow window pass by, all with equally fascinating and landless landscapes. One appears as a floating glacial plateau, another as a dark, stormy tsunami overtaking a bright, calm ocean.

We aren’t meant to fly, but when we do, we might as well make the most of it.

Many more are nothing but blurs of light and shadow. In sight they would send a man into a stupor, but in memory they are flat and lifeless. Something of the immediate impression is lost in the eternal incarceration. It is difficult to place.

I always preferred Monet’s take to photorealism anyway.
If I wanted to see how things looked I’d go look at them.
It’s the impression that lasts long enough to care about.

The skyline of San Francisco from the bay now looms in the distance, with Pier 39 engulfing the foreground like an overgrown gull. The scene appropriately reflects in a half-empty glass of water, the only visible body on the large vacant desk other than the luminous screen itself, as a vague and hazy notion of the city rather than the city itself. Within the reflection is something faint, an almost-echo of the sea lions undoubtedly barking off stage left, but no—it is nothing more than Meric Long's haunting cries as The Dodos’ “The Season” breaks down into its conclusion.

For the sea lions there's a time and place; why can’t we be the same?

The pop of uncapping the bottle, the gulp of swallowing aspirin with a sip of water, the clink of setting the glass back down. The errant twang of a guitar as The Dodos bang out the beginning of “Walking.” A quick succession leading to, “You can fight the fire that’s in your head...”

But it would take hydrant or two...

Suddenly the brilliance of the screen dims as the next shot portrays the city under cover of night—and of fog. The viewpoint is reversed, looking out on the bay from an intersection of roads somewhere nearby, but with the misty, gray veil lying thick, hardly the light from the streetlamps is distinct, much less the flash of fireworks in the distance. Only she is clear; her back turned as she studies the sky in wonder, bundled up heavily in the leather jacket that isn’t hers, her skirt swaying slightly to her right as the breeze complicates the calculations for the show over the water. And something else—a slight gleam to the left, as of light reflecting off metal, a metal that shouldn’t be there in the cordoned-off street.

A car?
Wait...
The car?

The bumper and a portion of the front hood are a blur of motion, but still clearly visible, inching their way into the picture. But with all eyes focused elsewhere, and not even gunfire audible under the din of bursting rockets echoing in all directions, there was no notice that a jet-black sports car had broken the police blockade, and even less chance that its frantic and distracted driver would spot the girl directly in front of him.

Maybe there are some truths worth forgetting, some lies worth remembering.

The digital 5 on the clock morphs into a 6. It is now 6:36 A.M. A dialogue box appears. It warns that to continue with the action of cropping could result in a loss of information. As a dotted line intended for selection outlines a slender portion of the left-hand side of the screen, the dialogue box questions whether this is really the intention. The cursor hovers over the button marked “Yes.”

Jimmy the Squid:
The days crawl past just like they always have but for him every day is a new miracle. He sits in the park every morning, breathes deeply the clean morning air, cold and crisp. He listens to the birds waken before the sun pushes itself past the horizon, their song a sweet greeting to each new day. He walks along the flagstone paths, humming a half remembered tune, wishing he knew how to whistle. He smiles at the early morning joggers but their eyes slide past him, if they look at him at all. Unpertubed he trundles along, enjoying the feeling of the cold in his bones being washed away by the warmth of the sun. He stops to talk to his friend as he has every day since he can remember. He tells his friend of the things he sees and what he thinks about them and his friend listens, patiently, quietly. His friend is very tall and he cannot reach the man's shoulder so he places a hand on his friends knee. Hard. Cold. Unyielding. He pats it by way of saying goodbye and walks away, smiling to himself. Sometimes he wishes his friend would talk back to him. Maybe tell him of what the world looks like from up on his pedestal or whether he minds when birds perch on his shoulders or whether he gets cold, standing in the middle of the park day in, day out. But today he is happy for a kind ear.
In the evening he walks through the streets, feeling like a part of the crowd. Passers-by sometimes stare at him but he doesn't notice. He is too entranced by the flashing neon signs, as if he has never seen them before. If you asked him he would tell you he hadn't. If you asked him.
Once night has properly fallen, once the sky is an inky black peppered with pinpricks of silver light, he goes home. He sits in his favourite spot and thinks. Tiredly he looks down at his hands, his fingernails are dirty, his skin is rough. One day, he thinks, he will clean them. His eyes are heavy and his body aches for he is very old. He breathes deeply as he closes his eyes, drifting into sleep.

In the morning he sits on his bench in the park. The birds sing but today he doesn't listen. The early morning joggers go past, barely turning their heads at the old man but today he doesn't smile. His friend stands alone, unblinking in the morning glare. Eventually someone will notice him. They will bring others to come see him. They will wonder what his name is and if he had a family. They will lie him down, clean him and say a prayer. The days will crawl on as they ever have. The sun will rise and the birds will sing. Life will continue exactly as if nothing was different.

Well, almost exactly.

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