1850. How I (usually) write a story

When this blog hits a roundish story number (in this case Number 1850) I try to blather on in a way more meaningless and useless than usual. Every second posting on the Net seems to offer advice on how to do this or that; how to increase readers to the blog, how to write a blog, and so on.

I don’t purport to be an expert (in anything). So today, rather than tell you how to go about writing a story I thought I would tell you how I go about writing a story. Perhaps the odd snippet might be of help. Possibly not.

This is me cooking, but I could just as easily be cooking up a story.

When I start writing a story I have absolutely no idea how it will end.

First of all, when I rise in the morning I check the news online, and look at the obituaries to see who has expired that I went to school with. From the obituary column I take one or two female and male names and jot them down. I don’t jot down any surnames, just the first names. I jot names down because by the time of a second cup of coffee I will have forgotten everything.

Armed with a name, the first sentence gets written. It can be anything. Sometimes it’s suggested by the name. Who cares? I type out whatever comes in my head. Today the selected names are Sheree, Ferris, Beverley, and Rex. Pick a name; if more enter the story the other three names are waiting!

Let’s start:

Beverley was forever sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong.

Isn’t it exciting? Who knows what she will do next! Who knows where it will end up!

Beverley was forever sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong. It seems that she stuck it in where it didn’t belong just the once too often.

Handy hint: Throw in little details to give the illusion that things are happening in real life.

Beverley was forever sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong. It seems that last Saturday, mid-morning, she stuck it in where it didn’t belong just the once too often. She had been baking for the first half of the morning and now was taking a small basket of oatmeal cookies to Ferris, who worked on the corner mending and sewing horse saddles for the rich and indolent. Beverley had heard that his marriage had disintegrated several months earlier and she, well, kind of fancied him.

“Hi,” said Beverley. “I was just passing on a visit to my grandmother’s when I thought I’d pop in to see how you’re doing. No doubt, with your wife no longer being at home, you miss the odd bit of home cooking. So I bought you this basket of homemade oatmeal cookies.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Ferris. “Yes, I certainly miss the home cooking since Sheree has gone.”

“I suppose,” said Beverley tentatively, “she is not coming back?”

“You supposed right,” said Ferris.

“So how are you coping on your own then?”

“Why the hell don’t you mind your own business?” said Ferris, chucking a large pair of pliers and a mallet onto a pile of leather next to him. “What’s it to you?”

“I was just trying to be sympathetic, that’s all.”

“Well you’re a bloody nosy-parker. I don’t want your dried up cookies. You can take them away and piss off.”

“I heard,” said Beverley rather rankled, “that Sheree hadn’t left you at all, but you did her in and hid the body underneath the floorboards of this workshop.”

Ferris saw red. The collapse of a marriage is a very gruelling experience. One never knows what will happen next. Beverley’s been missing for just on a week now. No one has thought to look under the floorboards of Ferris’ workshop. And, yeah, Ferris enjoyed the cookies.

(Well I’m as surprised as you are).

1528: Weekly meeting of the Writers’ Club

(The opening sentence for this story was suggested by Marina (M.L.) of Letters from Athens.  If you want to join in the fun of suggesting a future opening sentence for these stories, click here for a peek as to what’s what.)

It was a dark and stormy night. Rhoda droned on and on reading her week’s effort aloud at the Writers’ Club meeting. The rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies)…

“Don’t you know,” interrupted Cassandra, “that the passage you are reading, claiming it to be your own, is familiar to everyone in this room? We all know it’s straight out of Wuthering Heights.”

“It’s not,” declared Rowena. “It’s Jane Austen. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall if I remember correctly.”

“I think you mean Northanger Abbey,” said Jennifer.

“It sounds like Charles Dickens to me,” added Wilfred.

Things grew into a cataclysmic argument. Rhoda droned on as if nothing was happening. …rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness…

Arnold got out of his chair and stormed out of the room. “You people are so thick. This is a waste of time. And I’m not coming back.” He was closely followed out by Meredith.

“Good riddance to them both,” declared Declan. “Goodbye to both of them and the affair they’re having.”

“Thanks for that reading, Rhonda,” said Phyllis. She was chairing the meeting. “That’s got rid of them and their loud negative opinions of our weekly efforts. Thanks to Rhonda and the writing of Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton we can get on with sharing our weekly efforts uninterrupted.”

1263. Corectly speled

It’s such a sad indictment of our modern, and by modern I mean say roughly in the last hundred and fifty years, education system which, unlike that experienced by great stylists such as John Ruskin, Lytton Strachey and Charles Kingsley, and even Cardinal Newman although he ever so slightly dirtied his copybook by going over to Rome, was the norm and produced writers with flair who knew how to write both with a flourish and with something to say, and I am including Charles Dickens in that list although he was something of a popularist in reality, rather like William Makepeace Thackeray possibly, to say nothing of the women who wrote, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontes, and George Eliot, although being women they wrote with style but very little depth of thought, has produced few who can compose with skill and in a manner that highlights beautifully the intricacies of the English language not in simple subject-verb-object sentences but writing that is both complex and striking, for unfortunately the contemporary reader appears to have the inability not to comprehend anything longer than three words in a sentence and that neither hand-writen nor corectly speled.