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Wed’s Word and Flash Fiction: The Mets Fan

Anu Garg pins down the plight of every writer when he introduces this week’s theme on Wordsmith.org:

Illustrating the importance of using the right word, Mark Twain once said, ‘The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning.’

This week’s dose of words relate more in wrongly assumed meanings at first glance. Still, the quote from Mark Twain is a great reminder that every word counts in a story, especially in a flash fiction piece.

Today’s word:

psychopomp. noun. A guide of souls, one who escorts soul of a newly-deceased to the afterlife.

I never would have guessed that meaning.

*****

The Mets Fan

Natalie looked down at the face of her iPhone just in time to see the reception bars collapse.

“Excellent.” She hit the send button with her middle finger several times anyway in hopes that her assistant, Rick, would still get her text.

STUK N TRAFFK. PLZ STALL MTG. U R MY HERO 🙂

Natalie was on her way to meet a client, a new client, and she hated showing up late. She’d been inching along 8th Avenue for fifteen minutes in a sea of cars, when she finally saw a break at the next intersection.  She figured if she turned right and bombed down Arcadia – which always seemed open to traffic – to 12th Avenue, she could circle back towards the business district and her office. She had whipped her steering wheel to the right, punched the gas, and looked down to finish typing her text.

That’s when the bars fell and her reception dropped.

She sighed and looked up to see a trash can on her hood and the reflection of her right turn signal blinking back at her from the Starbucks window. Starbucks was two doors down from the corner, and it was empty. No one inside. No one waiting at the door. No one parked at the curb. In fact, hers was the only car in the street now — in the middle of the street.

She gripped the wheel and peered around the trash can. “What the hell.”

She heard a knock on her driver’s side window.

She noticed the Mets hat first and then saw his face. He nodded slightly and motioned for Natalie to roll down her window. She cracked it an inch.

“Yes?”

“Would you like to step out of your car, Miss?”

He looked harmless, though a little weathered. But something about him was familiar. When he spoke, her shoulders relaxed. She rolled the window down another six inches.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

He smiled, stepped back, and pulled open her door. Natalie brushed off her skirt and swung her legs around. She climbed out of the car and into complete silence — no sounds of construction, no sirens, not even a horn to be heard. Downtown was never this quiet.

“Follow me,” he said.

She surprised herself by taking his hand.

They walked down Arcadia Lane for miles, past the bookstore and the Italian restaurant that serves the best gnocci in the county. Past the laundromat at the edge of town. She’d only been to that laundromat once, when her washer broke down. And, it was depressing: a real wasteland of lost socks and worn dryer sheets.

Natalie’s eyes followed her hand to the stranger’s, on up to his shoulder, and to his face. She studied his profile.

“You have questions,” he said, without looking at her.

“Yeah,” she said, but suddenly she couldn’t think of what she wanted to ask.

“You seem nice,” she said, finally.

“Yes. A lot of people tell me that.”

They were quiet for a long time, until she realized that somewhere along the way she had lost her shoes and her phone.

“I don’t need shoes?” she asked him.

He looked at her and smiled. “No.”

Natalie turned towards the road, which rose up and opened out into the sunset.

“This isn’t at all what I expected,” she said.

“It never is.”

He squeezed her hand and she closed her eyes.
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Wed’s Word: Guest Post by Mercy Loomis

Every Wednesday, on Writing Under Pressure, you’ll find a post based on a word prompt. Past essays, poems, or flash fiction pieces can be found under Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar to the right.

Mercy Loomis

Today, I welcome fellow She Writes member, Mercy Loomis, to Wednesday’s Word.

I met Mercy in person last month at a meet up organized by E. Victoria Flynn. Victoria, Mercy, and I nibbled on sweet treats for several hours that Saturday and talked all things writing.

We laughed at the story material found within the four walls of a coffee shop – a writer’s paradise when it comes to characters.

I also had a taste of Mercy’s writing during our meet up, and I decided to invite her for some “word of the day” flash fiction fun.

Mercy chose the route of a prompt from my personal word bag (in lieu of Wordsmith.org), thus allowing me to play Wordsmith for the day. Oh, how I love control.

The word I chose for her: bitten.

*****

Twice Shy

Trevor tried to pretend he wasn’t winded, but keeping up with Naomi’s long, shapely legs was proving to be more of a challenge than he expected. Not the he minded the view, of course; even though it was dark the trail they were hiking could just keep going up and up forever, as far as he was concerned.

Of course, his own legs would give out long before he got tired of watching. Flex and swing, flex and swing. When she’d picked him up and he saw the short-shorts he’d assumed she wasn’t the outdoorsy type, but either bugs didn’t scare her or she did a lot of Stairmaster. Naomi’s loping strides devoured the trail like…

Something pricked his arm, and Trevor swatted at it with a muffled curse. “Stupid mosquitoes,” he muttered, staring dolefully at the smear on his hand. In the deepening gloom the blood looked almost black. Pausing, he wiped his hand on his jeans and stuck the flashlight in his pocket, the beam pointing up into the leaves and giving the path a weird green glow.

“What are you doing?” Naomi stopped and turned to give him an irritated glance.

“Getting some bug spray.” Trevor dug through his fanny pack for the little bottle. “I must’ve been bitten half a dozen times already.”

Naomi sashayed back to him and took his hand in both of hers. “Aw, what’s a few bug bites? Please, I really hate that stuff. It tastes terrible.”

Trevor blinked, momentarily confused. “Tastes? But why..?” Naomi fluttered her eyelashes at him, and he tossed the bug spray over his shoulder. It landed somewhere in the bushes and was instantly forgotten. “Right. You got it, babe.”

Laughing, Naomi drew him farther up the hill. “C’mon, we’re almost there. You have to see this place.”

Trevor stumbled after her, giddy with the implications of her teasing, but when they finally crested the slope and emerged from under the trees his lascivious thoughts were momentarily silenced by the view. Barely ten feet ahead of them the bluff’s face fell away in a sheer cliff overlooking a glimmering stream that snaked through the wooded valley below. The moon lit up the landscape like a giant spotlight, and even as he stared open-mouthed he saw a barn owl swoop down over the water to disappear beneath the branches.

And another mosquito bit him.

Trevor cursed roundly, slapping one cheek and flinging the dead insect away. “Doll, I don’t understand how you can stand being out here dressed like that. Not that I don’t appreciate it,” he hastened to add, “but they must be eating you alive!”

There was an undertone to Naomi’s chuckle that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise, a low growling that went beyond sultry into something else, something animal. “Oh, they wouldn’t do that. Doll.”

Trevor turned to her slowly, trying to shake off a cold shiver that coursed down his spine. “Why is that?”

She grinned. That was when he saw the fangs. “Professional courtesy, of course.”

*****

Mercy Loomis graduated from college one class short of an accidental certificate in Folklore, which explains a lot. She has a BA in Psychology, but don’t hold that against her. Though fascinated by mythology her whole life, she blames her husband and the History Channel for her late-found love of studying history.

Her stories appear most recently in the anthologies Please, Sir from Cleis Press and Taste Test: Rainy Days and Mondays from Torquere Press, as well as in Hungry For Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance, coming from St. Martin’s Press in October 2010. See what she’s up to and find links to her other work at www.mercyloomis.com.

You can also find her at She Writes here.

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Breaking the Rules: Using Present Tense in Fiction

In my copy of the 1922 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, she says “…a first rule for behavior in society is: ‘Try to do and say those things only which will be agreeable to others.'” So, I wonder if I’ll be ruffling any feathers when I publish this post on writing a novel in present tense?

I know. Throw “present tense” in the midst of a discussion on fiction and you beg for trouble, maybe even set the stage for a form rejection.

But hear me out.

My first writing teacher, Ariel Gore, reminded us one day that a good memoir reads like fiction and great fiction can read like a memoir. The art of the narrative is critical in both genres.

Writers of creative nonfiction often use fiction techniques. And, once in a while, a technique for writing memoir crosses over into fiction. I first considered how the practice of writing memoir can influence a work of fiction in a post I wrote on Stanley Kunitz, Memoir and Fiction. When I flipped open my June issue of The Writer and read an article by Mimi Schwartz on using present tense in memoir, I wondered again about transferable techniques.

I punched out the first draft of my current novel-in-progress during NaNoWriMo two years ago.  In thirty days, I wrote a little over 50,000 words of a story that unfolded in present tense. At the time, I was very much a novice writer and didn’t consider the rule that fiction is usually written in past tense. I didn’t consider anything. I was hunched over a keyboard chasing down a character and her tale before she got away. In the end, I was thrilled at having written a full story, even in its most raw stage.

In between the first draft and a serious rewrite, I read a novel that is written in present tense. I barely made it through the novel; each chapter sounded like a running commentary. So, when I sat down to study and rework chapter one of my WIP, I weighed my options: keep the story as is – in present tense – and risk losing the reader after the first few pages, or rework the story into past tense.

As an emerging writer, I wanted to learn my craft (and earn my way) by following the rules first; I could break them later. So, I changed the tense of the story. Each time I re-read my new version of chapter one, though, something pulled at the back of my throat. My gut twisted. My head was telling me to go one way, but the story insisted I go another.

Isn’t that just how it works sometimes? The story has a mind of it’s own, and I am simply a conductor. I couldn’t ignore the pull to return to present tense.

Here’s where Mimi Schwartz’s article (“The special power of present tense”) comes in. Schwartz mentions a few specific ways that present tense can strengthen memoir.

“For creative nonfiction writers, the act of discovery is what makes the genre so appealing.”

When reading a story written in present tense, the audience experiences the immediacy of the character’s own discoveries, adding to the suspense of the story.

Schwartz also says that using present tense can highlight the main character’s “[changes] over time.” Sure, you can do this with past tense as well, but Schwartz emphasizes her point by sharing her own experience when she used it her memoir Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village:

“…[T]he village and the villagers kept drawing me back, literally and figuratively, into their living rooms and kitchens, as I tried to uncover why these people mattered to me in New Jersey, 70 years later. And the present tense let the reader come along; we walk together in my father’s old world, trying to figure it out.”

Writing fiction in present tense can be a stylistic choice that taps into the readers senses and emotion on a deeper level.

There’s still a part of me that worries I’m biting off more than can chew, being so green and all, but I like a challenge. And I also like to listen to the way the story wants to be told. That means, my choice to stick with present tense must be a stylistic move and not a way of avoiding a major restructuring of a draft. Throughout the whole rewriting process, I must make each word, phrase, and passage count.

What are your experiences with present tense? Have you written a short story or a novel that cried out for it? Or, have you read a novel that used it successfully?

*****

Schwartz, Mimi. “The special power of present tense.” The Writer. June 2010: 26-27. Print.

Post, Emily. Etiquette. United States of America: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1922. p.  Print.

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