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Oiling the Hinges: Writing on Wednesday’s Word

At almost 100 years old, our Grandfather clock stands with authority in our living room. Its inner workings are simple, but delicate, and when I don’t pay attention – when I let the weights wind their way to the bottom – the gears stick. Only a silent prayer and a gentle nudge of the minute hand will break an invisible seal and get the clock ticking again.

Caring for that clock requires the same diligence as nurturing all aspects of my writing. If I ignore one area of writing for too long, it grows stagnant, it stalls, and it takes muscle to get that part of my creativity flowing again.

Recently, I had a chance to crank out a flash fiction piece for Pam Parker for a Flash Friday post. She emailed me and two other writers a prompt and asked that we turn it into a 100 word flash in a few days (you can read the pieces here). Writing 100 words was not an easy task, and it was a reminder that I can’t ignore that side of myself that loves creating something new. Rewriting and editing are great (dare I say fun?….nah. Great, but not fun). But my muse gets bored helping me whittle down the same old short story. She wants shiny, new, get-the-blood-pumping kind of work. So, I’m dipping back into Wednesday’s Word today, basically so my muse won’t leave me high and dry when I return to those rewrites.

Today’s word from Wordsmith.org:

volte-face. noun. A reversal in policy or opinion; an about face

*****

Fickle

Lately, Nick predicted his wife’s moods with the same success rate as the new guy on Channel 9 when he predicted the weather: nine times out of ten he was wrong. When the forecast called for sun, Nick was pelted with insults like hail. If Nick braced himself for frigid temps, he came home to a barrage of affection. He began to wonder if there wasn’t something in the water. Or, maybe it was all that Sweet and Sour Chicken his wife had been eating for the last week. The sauce had an unnatural color, that was for sure, and maybe housed some other infecting quality.

He watched her scarf down another take-out order for the eighth day in a row. He shook his head.

“What?” she asked, as she licked each finger clean.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just –”

“Hold that thought.” She pointed her index finger at him in a way that made him jump, then she ran to the bathroom. He considered retreating upstairs, to wait out whatever might be brewing. But, when she came out of the bathroom, she looked flushed and giddy.

She pulled him out of his seat and squeezed both his hands.

“I’m pregnant!” She beamed.

He rolled his eyes. “Thank God,” he said. “I thought you were going crazy.”

She squinted, then she slapped him, and then she drenched him in kisses.

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Don’t just tell your story. Make it come alive.

I’ll be honest, my first attempts at writing short stories or essays turned out to be a series of rants and confessions — experiences that needed clearing before any real writing could take place. In those first few weeks of purging, I learned the difference between telling a story and writing a story. As Margaret Atwood says in her book, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing:

A lot of people do have a book in them – that is, they have had an experience that other people might want to read about. But this is not the same as “being a writer.” Or, to put it in a more sinister way: everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger.

I wanted to be a writer, so I signed up for an online course.

I forget the exact writing assignment from our instructor that first week (something about a lie you’d been told or a person who betrayed you), but, oh, was I itching to write it. My fingers were on fire. What’s funny is that my burning assignment ended up being very little “story.” It finished out at less than one thousand words, and I managed to fill many of those sentences with the word “irritating,” or some derivation thereof. That could be an exaggeration, but I doubt it, since one of the other writers in class commented that “We get that your character is irritated.”

In other words, show us, don’t tell us. Please.

“Show don’t tell.” That phrase sounded familiar, but my newbie writer’s mind thought it vague. Being a compare and contrast kind of girl, I needed concrete examples. Show me, I whined! One of the other writers must have heard me, and she sent a quick note to the message board with a few snippets of telling vs. showing. One particular example made all the difference for me. She wrote:

Telling: Louie drank a lot.

Showing: Louie shoved last night’s collection of empty beer bottles aside and poured the morning’s pick-me-up into a glass. He considered topping it off with orange juice, but the sweet smell turned his stomach. Instead, he downed the vodka straight. “Ah, that’s a better color on the day,” he said. He said that every day. *

Show, don’t tell.

The February 2011 issue of Writer’s Digest also talks about the same issue in an article called, “25 Ways to Improve Your Writing in 30 Minutes a Day.” Jack Heffron and Sage Cohen call it Precision and Imagery, but the meaning is the same.

On precision, Jack Heffron says, “The key to successfully creating or conveying worlds for our readers is painstakingly observing those worlds, and then scribbling down the precise details that tell the story. On imagery, Sage Cohen says “A successful image can plug right into your reader’s nervous system at times when explanation falls flat.”

A well-formed image appears when the writer uses tiny, often overlooked details, from a scene. Sometimes those details emerge through other senses, sometimes they are just visual notes. Either way, a sentence or a scene comes alive in the end.

To be fair, telling in writing has its own purpose as well. In the Writer’s Digest article, Sage Cohen also says that “sometimes a simple, unembellished statement will be the most powerful choice. But you won’t know until you try.”

What’s your favorite example of showing, not telling? Or, maybe you have an example where telling is the better choice?

* Used with permission from Jennifer Savage.

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Flash Fiction: Somebody Needs Attention

Wordsmith.org and I are on a break.

Though I’ve enjoyed the freedom, I’ve missed the early morning wake up call in my inbox where the Word of the Day challenge awaited. I’ve forgotten the playful tease that comes in a real stinker of a word, felt lonely for the thrill in wrestling a word into submission, and longed for the surprise when a word lends itself to a poem.

I needed a flash fiction fix, but I’m not ready to recommit. So, I glommed onto one of Lisa Romeo’s writing prompts (from her Winter Writing Prompts Project). The word: bloated.

Nobody said re-entry would be pretty.

*****

Somebody Needs Attention

Rebecca held the curtain open with the back of her hand. The sunrise colored the sky with a fiery orange and shed light on the fact that nothing had changed. Bags of garbage still lined the sidewalks; they festered, split, and spilled out onto the street.

Mrs. Owen, from across the street, ate a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken it seemed, and Bobby Cooper, at the end of the block, must not have any real dishes. Paper plates and red plastic cups littered his stretch of lawn.  Rebecca’s next door neighbor, Stan, had tried to keep things neat by piling his garbage into a well-formed mountain, but one of the bags had rolled off and exploded onto Rebecca’s driveway. A shadow moved across the concrete and slipped behind the trash — a rat.

It had only been three weeks since the Waste Management workers first refused to fire up their trucks and clear the neighborhood, but already they made national headlines. Workers weren’t allowed to collect any trash, but the mayor insisted they had hauled somebody’s garbage and dropped it on the front steps of his house. The mayor’s front door was blocked, he said, and he was being held hostage by refuse. Still, he didn’t budge on concessions. It was like the New York City garbage strike on a small town scale.

Rebecca turned on the news, which showed two police officers outside the mayor’s house wearing face masks. Then, the news cut to the mayor, who sat inside and conducted a news conference using his son’s videocam. He drank his coffee and bragged that, with the internet, he could run the city from the comfort of his own kitchen. “Bring it on,” he told the camera, meaning more garbage Rebecca guessed.

The mayor reminded Rebecca of Vince Watters in high school. Vince played the clarinet, he wore high-waisted jeans from Walmart, and he got pushed around during lunch. Vince landed in detention one week, for fighting back, and got chummy with Darrin and Hendricks, two beefy outcasts who happened to be seniors. Vince marched into the lunchroom that Friday, with Darrin and Hendricks at his side, pointing fingers at the jocks who shoved him around and yelling “Yeah! Bring it on, dickheads!”

If memory served Rebecca right, the mayor played clarinet at his inauguration that year, and, like Vince, he puffed his chest when he was flanked by guards.

Once during the broadcast, the cameras fell onto the mayor’s wife as she wiped off the counter and poured him another cup of coffee. She cleared his breakfast plate and dumped the leftovers into the trash can, which seemed mostly empty. Her shoulders sagged and her expression was flat when she turned back around, but Rebecca thought she saw a hint of disgust in her eyes.

The mayor, however, beamed.

*****

For fun, click on over to this video from They Might Be Giants, called “I’m All You Can Think About.” The song plays just at the beginning, and is well worth the click.

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