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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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Three Ways to Make a Story Your Own

“Ideas are a dime a dozen.”

Even the source of the quote itself is difficult to pinpoint. Mary Kay Ash said it once. So did Douglas Horton. And, countless other writers and authors have incorporated the phrase into their own works.

How, then, do writers distinguish themselves? How do we mold common themes or similar plot lines into individual novels or essays that rise to the top of the slush pile or stick in a reader’s mind?

I think of this question each time I sit down to write, or rewrite I should say. When I punch out a first draft of fiction or of an essay, I don’t linger on one sentence or paragraph. It’s in re-reading the draft, when I check to see that the facts or main ideas are there, where I tell myself, “Okay, now make it mine.”

Adding my voice is a critical piece in rewriting, but there are other ways to make a story or an essay unique.

1. Think about the predictability of a story, and then avoid it.
Jody Hedlund wrote on this topic in a guest post on Merrilee Faber’s blog, Not Enough Words.  Hedlund discusses how slowing down our process and refusing to be lazy writers helps descriptions, characters, and even plots move beyond clichĂ© into “greater depths of creativity.”

On Wednesday’s, I use “Today’s word” at Wordsmith.org as a writing prompt. The word of the day is typically anything but common in every day conversation. Still, the stories that unfold in my mind can easily end in exactly the way a reader might predict. And, predictability won’t earn me a second read.

2. Know what details to include and which ones to leave out.
Stephen King wrote an article on imagery (recently reprinted in the Aug 2010 issue of The Writer) in which he suggests a writer be choosy when filling in descriptions:

Imagery does not occur on the writer’s page; it occurs in the reader’s mind. To describe everything is to supply a photograph in words; to indicate the points which seem the most vivid and important to you, the writer, is to allow the reader to flesh out your sketch into a portrait.

King’s article highlights the importance of the reader-writer relationship. Like any relationship, I can’t be 100% responsible for making it work. As a writer, I do my part and provide just enough information to spark an image. Then, as King says, the reader experiences the joy of reading, “the joy of seeing in the mind, feeling the fantasy flower in the way that is unique to each individual reader.”

To use a simple example from my own writing, this sentence:

My bedroom wasn’t finished yet, the fancy wallpaper still had to be hung.

doesn’t spark an image as much as this one:

My bedroom sat empty at one end of the hallway, the walls chalky and unfinished. The floor bare of any furniture. It smelled of new construction, but it was uninhabitable.

3. Give an old idea a modern twist.
A while back, I bought the Best American Short Stories 2009 anthology (edited by Alice Sebold). One particular story stands out in my mind as an example of giving an old idea new life. The story, called “Saggitarius” by Greg Hrbek, is about a couple who’s baby is born half human and half horse.

How well does a myth work as a modern short story, you ask? You’ll have to read the story yourself, but here’s an excerpt:

While they were arguing (again) about the surgery, the baby vaulted over the rail of the playpen, as if it were a hurdle to be cleared. They heard his hooves scrabbling on the rubber mat, but were too late to see him jump…When they reached the sunroom, they saw him bounding out the door. Upper half, human half, twisted in their direction; a look of joy and terror in the infant’s eyes. But the equine part would not stop….”

And, one more:

The diagnosis changes every week. Spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy as the cause of the musculoskeletal deformity; the body hair most likely the result of a condition called congenital hypertrichosis….”

Hrbek plays out an old idea within a modern setting with no fear and without looking back. And, he does it so successfully that, by the end of his story you, the reader, believe somewhere in the woods stands a father holding his Sagittarius son and loving him completely for the first time.

How do you distinguish yourself as a writer?

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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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