“Josie, I’m so sorry. Seth told me what happened,” Ray Ann said as soon as she saw me the next day, during our break between our first two sessions with the InfoMaster. We were in the Psych-Lab Wing, the most central spot when the cafeteria wasn’t open. White, windowless walls surrounded us on all sides. Above were large fluorescent lights that left not a spot of darkness, much to my dismay. There were large heavy doors on each side of the boxlike room. The one to the cafeteria had a green metallic number pad next to it-students needed to punch in their ID numbers to enter-that read “CLOSED” in electric blue letters across the display.
“Oh, so you’re speaking to me now? I feel honored,” I replied with a twinge of bitterness. Lately it seemed she was a friend when it was convenient for her, or when she felt it was her duty.
“Of course. I’m sorry about that dumb fight. It was all my fault.”
I love my computer. Since I’m what some people would call a “loser,” I don’t have much of a social life. But when I get on the computer, a whole different side of me comes out. I am no longer shy and dorky, but the queen of the chat rooms. I run three mailing lists and manage two newsgroups. My real hobby, though, is creating webpages. I am an expert when it comes to HTML, and many people do not know it, so the business is pretty good.
Life is always shoving it down my throat that I am never going to be a success, or anyone important, however. My older brother, Brian, is a professional webpage designer and a computer programmer. He gets paid a ton of money for doing the same thing I do, and all I get is lunch money out of it. Sometimes I envy him so much; Brian is everyone’s favorite guy. He was always the prize child. Now he is the richest guy in the family. I will never be anything compared to him.
At the same time, though, I can’t dislike him. He’s nicer to me than anyone else is. He makes time to call me at least once a week and listens to my teenage angst even though he’s been out of college for three years already. He is always doing special things for me like buying me little presents or sending me funny e-mails just to make me laugh. Even though I’m jealous of him, he’s really a great guy. And he can always help when the stupid computer won’t listen to me.
Okay, this has to be the most embarrassing story I could post, but since I allude to it in my introductory post, it seems only fair to put it up. This is the one with characters named after members of Alice in Chains, one of whom speaks in song lyrics. I wrote this in 1997, back when my parents very first got the internet and I had no knowledge whatsoever of how the internet works so there is a bunch of made up stuff, and a lot of it is really dated. Entertainment purposes!
I walked slowly to my backyard with candles and matches under my arm. The wind howled and whistled in the trees. The dead leaves crackled under my feet. It was as dark as night. That’s probably because it was night. Halloween night to be exact.
We were planning to have a seance. It was rather strange, the way it came about. All of us, excluding Curt, had dreamt about it. I was first, last Monday. Since then, one by one, we each had the seance dream. We pretended to take this lightly, as a joke to see if our dreams were psychic or something, but we all knew how serious we were about it. We tried to keep it light so that we couldn’t admit to ourselves how spooky and terrifying it was. If only we’d truly known how terrible it would really be.
Even though Curt hadn’t had the dream, he was included. We couldn’t not inc≥lude him. He was there last Halloween when the whole thing began, along with Daniel, Alexa, Edna and I. It did bother me though, that he had no dream about it.
It was to be a night of evils. I knew that the moment the sun set. As soon as the blues, violets, reds, greens, oranges and yellows drained from the sky it was clear. The evil vibes were almost tangible. Mystery hung in the air and fear was everywhere. I could taste the sadness and smell the sorrows. Horror and hatred weighed heavily in the clouds. It didn’t need to be spoken aloud, the fact was evident: Death was ready to strike. I knew all this and yet I went to the lake anyway.
I could get to the lake by taking a path through the woods that were in my backyard. It was so familiar and routine that I could easily get there blindfolded. Tonight, though, everything was different. I had trouble staying on the path, which had never happened before and really worried me. The wind blew fiercely, chilling the night air and making whistling and howling noises in the trees. I had to pull on a sweater to avoid the cold.
When I arrived at the lake, it was spooky as well. The full moon cast eerie shadows all over its surface. The stars didn’t seem to twinkle as they should. The sky had a strange reddish tint. No light from nearby homes shone through the trees, as it usually did at this time of night. The whole place had a somewhat grayish fog around it that reminded me of a dream scene in a TV show.
I’m going back to delving into early work for some writing samples.
I thought of this story in particular because it was right about this time of year that I wrote this story. The year was 1997. I was a junior in high school and for a creative writing class, the assignment was to write our first full-length story. This started for me with trying to evoke the atmosphere. I can actually remember typing this up on my parents’ computer and doing some really funky stuff with the background and font colors to help match the atmosphere I was trying to portray, which I never felt I fully did. Some things in our minds, especially the very ethereal, just can’t be fully captured in words. So instead, I made a story out of it.
“Josie, I’m sorry,” he said for the thousandth time. “Things just aren’t working out.”
My heart was being broken and I was reading a book. While he rattled off all the reasons why we couldn’t be together, I sat there with one ear on the phone, and my eyes on the pages of a book I had found in the basement of my house.
It was actually more like a diary than a novel. It was written by Janet Andrioli, who had apparently lived in my house almost two hundred years before I was born, way back near the turn of the 21st century. I was reading about her teenage years. Things were so different back then. Humanity had not traveled past the moon. Computers had required laborious typing to function; that seems so mediocre compared to the ones we have today, where you can give them voice commands. And people couldn’t interact with their televisions; I couldn’t live like that!
Sryall had once been a beautiful land, adorned with blooming trees offering many leaves. Serene waters were plenty. The sky above was a tranquil blue by day and a quiet navy blanket by night. Birds sang and animals frolicked in the grass. Humans lived, loved and laughed, generally enjoying the beauties and pleasures that life offered. The Sun rose high, not each day, but frequently, giving many great joy. The moon and stars gave comfort at night. Death was a sad event, for which were shed many tears, but it was often at the time of birth, to carry on the Eternal Cycle.
Life was simple then. People were free to express themselves how they wished. It was a period of great creativity. Much art, music, dance and writing were accomplished throughout the land. Imagination was encouraged. Dreams were seen as the gateway to unlocking the mysteries of the soul, something they truly believed to exist.
I can’t post too much current material (a lot of times, writing posted on a blog is considered “previously published,” which disqualifies it for lots of places I might want to submit my writing pieces to) that I’m sending out (sporadically) and trying to get published. But I want to keep giving a writing sample every Friday.
So, what I’m doing is pulling up some of my early work and posting it here. Even though it’s mostly terrible and makes me cringe (like in a whole body shuddering, totally embarrassed cringe sort of way) to read it. I wrote a LOT while in high school, sometimes without deadlines or prompts. They were prolific years and there’s lots to mine. I feel like (hope?) my writing is really different now. A lot of the old stuff is sorta sci-fi-ish and not at all the kind of stuff I write now, but in the interest of posting something on a consistent basis, I’m going to embarrass myself publicly.
I wrote this one during my senior year of high school, and it won first place in my school’s short story contest that year. Fun fact: Winning the short story contest, as well as an essay contest, was how I paid for some prom-related expenses.
Check out other (incl. some more current) Samples, as well as Published and Older Works for more writing samples.
I poked my brother sitting beside me. “Pssst, we only have fifteen more minutes,” I whispered. He pretended not to notice but I could see the smile on his face and knew he was glad that Junior Sunday School was almost over. I played with my pigtails, pretending to scratch my ear. Then I poked Davey again. “I guess Anne’s the favorite today,” I whispered. He still wouldn’t look at me but he stuck out his lower lip.
“Elizabeth, that’s enough! Stop disrupting your brother and start paying attention right this very minute!” Mrs. Ross’ voice was high and shrill, and she had a snarl on her face. I gave her a nasty look back. “And quit it with the pouting or you’re in big trouble, missy.”
She shifted Anne from one knee to the other and went back to reading us her Bible story. I growled under my breath. Anne lived next door to us. We walked to our first grade class together every day and she yelled at me because I played with flowers in the fields and chased the neighbor’s dog. “Lizzy, we’re going to be late,” she’d say like the whole world was going to end if we were late by even one little second.
I always said, “Then go ahead alone and be a goody-two-shoes,” but she never did. She stayed and waited while I climbed trees and picked dandelions and rubbed them on her arm and made up songs about the clouds. We were never late ever, I always looked at my Little Mermaid watch and made sure we had enough time to make it just before the bell. I liked to give Anne a scare.
~~~
This is an excerpt of a fiction story called “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” about kids who test the scary stories their Sunday School teacher tells them. I’m never sure exactly hwo to classify this one. The main characters are really young, so it could be thought of as a children’s story but I never really think of it that way.
Have you ever thought about this? By soul mate, I’m not talking about which character from fiction you’d want to hook up with or have as your lover (that could be another post), but which character feels most like you? If you were to undergo some sort of weird science disaster and somehow morph from your real life into fiction, which character would you surface as? Is there someone you’ve read whose voice feels so close to your own, who thinks your thoughts?
The character doesn’t have to have the same gender as you, be around your age or have any of the same life accoutrements that you do, just a character who, when you read, you recognize in some inner place as almost you?
For me, it would have to be Astrid from White Oleander by Janet Fitch. Our lives are nothing alike, but the way Astrid sees the world, the way she expresses things in her inner monologues, just describes ways that I have thought and felt much better than I ever could. I have some of these passages bookmarked with post-it notes. Every few years, I go back and reread White Oleander and it’s always a trippy experience to read someone thinking some of my thoughts and feeling some of your feelings.
Writing about your own life is like walking through murky water. On one hand, you are employing some of the techniques of fiction. Dialogue. Description. Setting. Character Development. Theme. Symbolism. Story arc and plot. Scene, scene, scene. Internal monologue. All of these come into play. And then there are the smaller, detail-oriented things like cadence, sentence variation, and playing with language in an artful way that expresses what you want to say.
And yet, it’s not fiction. There are limits on all of the above elements (except perhaps the language and sentence levels). Your dialog has to match, more or less, the dialogue as you remember it from real life. Your character development is limited to how much you’ve developed your insights and observations about the people around you, how closely and in how many dimensions you’ve paid attention.
Your story arc often won’t fit the more linear traditional arc. That can be one of the trickier things to work with. I think you do need a fair amount of crafting to make the raw material of your life into a story worth telling. You can’t just vomit out exactly as you remember it happening because life is so messy that your story would end up that way too. At the same time, I think it’s dangerous to control the messiness too much, to work too hard to fit things into and expected and accepted story arc. Doing so can push you too far into fiction. There has to be a balance between free-flowing creative energy and craft. And the more you write, the more both come naturally.
I look around the classroom and try not to see anyone. I should pay attention to the psychology book on my desk—after all, the midterm is on Friday and it’s now Monday—but the words blur and swim on the page. At the board, Dr. Crowley goes on, reviewing the abnormal cases. Pretty soon he’ll bring up synesthesia and I’ll melt into a puddle of mush on the floor and die. In the meantime, I suppose I’ll stare at the wall. I can’t look at my classmates, I’ll only see the colors. Won’t even be able to see the faces for all the haze brought on by midterm worry. I’m going mad, I know.
Dark Rose
I’ve always seen the colors around the people, even as a very small child. Most of the shrinks my mom dragged me to back then chalked it up to synesthesia, said there was some odd wiring in my brain that confused my senses and that’s why I saw colors. They always did remark though, that it’s a very focused case. Usually people with synesthesia hear sound when they see motion or associate colors with certain letters and numbers, whereas I only saw the colors on the people. My classmates used to tease me about being the crazy girl in town, after I made the grave mistake of talking about it. Frustrated teachers tried to educate them about my affliction, as they called it, about the wiring gone wrong in my brain. That only made them laugh until they were sick with giggles. They called me “Metalbrain.”
Now it’s my second year away at college and no one knows about my problem. I don’t want Dr. Crowley talking about my affliction in the class. I might concentrate too hard on the professor, or the floor, or this wall I’m staring at. I might nervously twirl my hair or fidget and then everyone will know my secret.
~~~
Today I decided to go with some fiction. “Dark As Roses” is a short story I wrote about a girl who struggles with psychic ability she’s not sure she wants to possess. These are the first few paragraphs.
“Josie, I’m so sorry. Seth told me what happened,” Ray Ann said as soon as she saw me the next day, during our break between our first two sessions with the InfoMaster. We were in the Psych-Lab Wing, the most central spot when the cafeteria wasn’t open. White, windowless walls surrounded us on all sides. Above were large fluorescent lights that left not a spot of darkness, much to my dismay. There were large heavy doors on each side of the boxlike room. The one to the cafeteria had a green metallic number pad next to it-students needed to punch in their ID numbers to enter-that read “CLOSED” in electric blue letters across the display.
Chrys Buckley 