Just a few more adjustments to the English language if you will
If people can be hard of hearing they should be able to be hard of other things too, you know, like hard of sense
I started writing a story yesterday and it had nowhere to go and I’d been down that road before and recognized the futility of continuing, but I was awfully fond of the characters and didn’t want to kill them which is basically what you do when you give up on a story. Sometimes you can take them with you into another one but they’re never quite right, you know, they have some weird allergy to whatever environment you pop them into and they exhibit problem behaviour sometimes to the point of becoming grey, sullen alcoholics who just sort of fade, muttering, into the set which is awful and you just can’t save them and it totally ruins your day.
I mean what writer needs that shit hanging over their head?
So I just kept on poking around the two pages I’d written and I finally found a place that I thought might be hiding something and I just looked at it for a long time and then I started tinkering. I changed a few words. Increased the blood flow. Cut here and applied pressure there and actually removed a few vitals which eventually wore a kind of hole in it and you know what?
It was a fucking geyser
And I wrote another two pages before I stopped dead again.
Fuck
So I decided I’d use it as a jumping point and I skipped to 14 years later and a few people didn’t make it, you know how it goes, and the restaurant was the same but the menu was different which is not an analogy because this story takes place in a restaurant where the main character makes different kinds of grilled cheese for her cousin Zen who is blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and emotes through the piano.
Which is maybe exactly why it doesn’t go anywhere
But fuck. I can’t let go because I think there’s something to say, you know, although I have half-accepted the likelihood that it’s a dead horse. Which is an analogy and a miserable one at that.
And this is why writers drink too much or at least they do in books
Ok we’re going for a walk even though the sun’s not up yet. By the time we get to the trail there will be a glimmer, I hope, and when we get back I might have figured some things out besides the thirty-third way to make a grilled cheese and how you might ask for ketchup using the keys of a piano. Which unfortunately is not an analogy.
One hour later…
So I left without my flipper ice thingys and since I time my walk to my bladder and its weaknesses I couldn’t really go back without causing problems so I weighed the options for too short a time and just carried on.
Imagine Maria Von Trapp in a snowy forest for a moment
And although it is delightfully icy underfoot and lumpy as fuck, see how she moves elegantly between the trees, holding a birch elbow now and then which both steadies and offers velocity. It’s a new song she’s singing. One you haven’t heard before but it’s got lightness and twinkles and lyrics that defy gravity and logic but we don’t care so swept up we are in her gracefulness and the cute minor slips which turn into a flute solo with lyrics like what a bluebird might say except they rhyme.
Nobody cares about the adjustments to the English language Maria makes, do they?
My walk was nothing like hers, but I was still a movie star. If Shrek’s a movie star that is.
But a few of my favourite things anyway
The view over the lake was astonishing. It looked like somebody had run out of cleaner or steam or decided maybe it was better before (the writer’s lament) and half the sky was crisp with defined clouds and the lake below was tight with waves and a million wings of reflected sunlight, and the other half was a smudge of grey.
Equally gorgeous but in a totally different way of course, you know, like Maria and Shrek (if you’re Fiona)
And in between bouts of Zen’s da-da-da-DUM! footsteps where I nearly lost it a handful or two times, I thought about gravity and how it’s not just an earth thing. Stay with me here, which is what my yoga teacher always says, because this is hard to explain but here goes everything which is what I pre-collapse gasp back to my yoga teacher.
Words also have gravity and the heavy ones have a way of winning and I think that’s what was happening in my story. Sometimes I get tragic because it’s an easy way to send a shot of feeling off the page and into your (the reader’s) gut. It’s almost always a sure thing.
I don’t know if I told you but my preference is to practice my aim at your funny bone instead, which is attached to your heart in a way that makes both of us feel good
And in the story I was telling you about which is called The Outskirts of Nowhere (although that might not stick), I let gravity have its way almost immediately and my characters were sort of clawing their way out of tragedy from the get-go and, you know, I guess they couldn’t. I even threw in a dog to rescue the story and I know my aim’s not perfect here or even very good, but here’s a little outtake:
I pushed the door open and went inside. Aunt Steph was expecting me, and she sort of waltzed me to a booth, took Rip’s leash and led him through the back door where she tied him to the green garden hose and he stood, giving me his bravest silhouette, his back supporting the train tracks that ran through the field behind him. At one point a train rode along his back and made a perfect exit through his bum.
