The Prophet

Orphalese was once a wonderful city.  A beautiful place of simple white houses, of crickets singing on warm summer evenings and warmer hellos from neighbours who were genuinely happy to see you. It was small and unhurried. It ambled rather than bustled. It hummed softly and happily to itself rather than shouted. People had time for each other and were happy to let their children laugh and play in the streets, secure in the knowledge that there was no harm to fear.

But then one day the Prophet came.

He walked into Orphalese and smiled, his one good eye glinting merrily in the sunshine as he accepted the peoples' hospitality, their genuine offers of food, shelter and friendship. He smiled as he told them that with his other eye - the one that was as dead and grey as a shark's, he could see the future and foretell what awaited them all if they didn't change their ways.

He smiled as he sat in the warm sunshine of the courtyard with the smell of jasmine and the soft music of the fountain, and he told them that everything they thought they knew was wrong. He told them that their simple pleasures were sinful, that their happiness was an affront to God and that their freedom was an illusion. He smiled as he stood in the square, his arms outspread and told them that their trust in each other was misplaced, that their neighbours spoke ill of them behind their backs and that their children were in danger. He told them this because he loved them, he said, and did not wish them to come to harm.

At first the people dismissed him, shaking their heads and muttering as they walked away. But he had planted the seed of fear within them, and soon more and more people would stop to listen to what he had to say as he stood and smiled and nodded and expounded on the evil that lay hidden within each of them and within the hearts of their friends, lovers and children. Before long the people gathered in their multitudes to hear him speak, and looked askance at each other as they made their way home.

Soon Summer faded and the nights became colder. Where once the streets had been full of happy couples and families making their way home, they were now all but deserted as the people huddled in their homes. The doors that had once stood wide open to invite friends and neighbours inside were now all barred, and the laughter within had soured into dark mutterings and hissing arguments.

The Prophet stayed and spoke on, and by the end of Autumn the people of Orphalese had stopped greeting each other as they passed in the streets, and they squabbled and spat as they fought in the marketplace and accused each other of cheating, or miserliness, or lying or worse.

Until one day in the depths of Winter the wind bit and snapped along the empty streets, scrabbling at the locked doors of the houses and howling at the windows. The Prophet stood alone in the deserted square and looked about him with his good eye and his dead one, happily observing what Orphalese had become. And, satisfied that his work was done, he smiled and walked out of the city towards the next town.

Losing Stories

Once upon a time there was a man who used to write but didn't any longer. He hadn't written anything for a very long time. He used to think of wonderful stories peopled by brave and enduring characters, and thrilling adventures in far-off lands. Tales of magic, danger, and courage. Tales of clockwork superheros, oracular children with hanted eyes, gun-toting, trash-talking heroines and dinosaur-hunting cowboy space-ninjas.

 

But sadly, that was all in the past. It had been so long since he'd actually written anything that he'd forgotten how to do it. When he tried to use his imagination to dream up a story, his mind simply shuddered and ground to a halt like a piece of rusted machinery. Soon he began to forget words altogether, saying "nice" when he really mean "wondrous" or "bad" when he meant "hellish".  The sentences that fell from his lips became pitiful, shrivelled little gray things where once they had been intricate and beautiful curlicues of thought and expression intertwined.

 

Eventually he struggled to communicate at all and just said "um" or "er" a lot, then he resorted to pointing at things and grunting or simply shrugging his shoulders in dumb resignation.

 

Eventually the man sat in a chair, alone and mute. The words had left him, the beautiful thoughts and stories had left him, and all he could do was sit and stare as blankly as a dead fish, his mind a blank expanse of empty grey with no beginning and no end. His head filled with nothing but the soft hiss of white noise and the absence of stories.

 

Making It Better

The following is a recent attempt at flash fiction that I put together over various lunch breaks. Hope you enjoy it. :o)

Making It Better

Every day I help out at the shelter. If they knew who I was, they'd cast me out, beat me, tear me apart with their bare hands. Every day I leave the spot under the highway where I sleep and walk ten blocks through the shattered remnants of the city to the shelter. There I scrub floors and pans until my hands bleed, I cook and serve food until I'm barely able to stand and I help out in any way I can until the people running the place tell me to go home. They smile and nod at me whenever come in, but I don't meet their eyes. I keep my head down and throw myself into whatever menial, back-breaking task is set before me until it's time to go back under the highway and rest my head on a filthy blanket until morning.

Every day I walk through the jutting bones of the city - past blackened husks of buildings that look like God picked them up and smashed them down again. Every day I walk past the wreckage of a thousand lives, past people reduced to huddling in doorways against the cold and children scavenging for food like feral things. Every day I have to live with the knowledge that this is all my fault.

I did this.

I failed to keep my country safe from war. I failed to see past the smiles of those that wished us harm. And when I failed at the last hope of diplomacy and the bombs fell like black fists and shattered our nation, I failed to protect my people. So I fled into anonymity, fled into the same destitution that stalked the land like a vast, gaunt devil, feeding upon the people whose ruin I had brought about. And although I know redemption will forever be beyond my reach, every day I struggle to make things a bit better - one little piece at a time.

END

Seeing the Stories in People

I'm curious - how many of you deliberately observe people around you so that you can use them (or aspects of them) in your writing? Whenever you come across someone interesting on the train or in the queue at the store, do you surreptitiously pull out a notebook and start jotting down things about them, or do you file them away mentally for future reference?

I do this all the time. I have a little black notebook that I always have within arm's reach, and it's filled with scribbled scraps of dialogue, ideas for short stories, snippets of overheard conversation and lightning descriptions of quirky, interesting or downright odd people that I encounter on my daily commute.

Like the guy who sat in front of me on the train the other day who looked perfectly well-groomed and neatly turned out with a snappy suit and freshly scrubbed, pink face that was nearly hairless, but who nevertheless reeked so viciously that he singed my nostril hairs. It was an actively aggressive, sour stench - as if he'd bathed in every evil, nasty sin he'd ever committed and trailed them around with him like a cloying miasma of pain and guilt.

Or the sweet little old lady who sat across from me (again on the train), soaked and bedraggled from the rain. She stared hard at the sudoku puzzle in the newspaper on her lap, frowning at it, then she shakes her head almost imperceptibly and says "fuck" under her breath.

Or the red-headed guy with the vacant smile who works at my local grocery store and who must have been pushing carts around for at least the past fifteen years - I'm sure there's a story there.

My point is stories are all around us and that people - even ordinary-seeming people, are often deeper and more surprising than you'd believe. Be they villains, protagonists or extras, they can all have a part to play in your developing story.

Print versus Pen

I've always been as fascinated by the process of writing as I am by the end product. The "how", "when", "where" and "why" of it is as important and interesting to me as the "what". So recently I got to thinking about typing versus writing in longhand.

It's pretty much a given that if you're serious about getting your writing published (versus scribbling for your own pleasure), you'll need a digital version of your document saved somewhere so that you can make multiple copies, print them off, edit them painlessly and send them to agents and publishers. But there's something so very viscerally satisfying about a crisp, blank notebook and just the perfect pen.

The stationery nerd in me has amassed an embarrassing collection of blank and partly-used notebooks in all shapes and sizes, and my desk drawer is filled with enough pens to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower. From simple, spiral-bound jotters to elegant, leather-bound works of handcrafted biblio-loveliness, fountain pens to fibre-tips, and humble roller-balls - in their own way they're all inexpressibly and rather worryingly beautiful.

But writing longhand seems inefficient to me - it's harder to organise and edit my work, and I know that I'll inevitably have to transcribe everything into a digital document at some point anyway, so I'm just doubling the amount of work I need to do. And yet the thought of finally filling an entire notebook with page after painstakingly handwritten page of lovingly crafted story makes me smile in a way that a printed manuscript in 12-point Courier just can't.

I'm sure I can't be the only one.

Health, Family, Work, Writing - Choose Three

I've been wondering a lot recently about what it takes to be a writer, and more specifically about the challenges of making space for writing in your life. Finishing an entire novel means putting one word after another on the page, relentlessly and painstakingly, until you're done. That means setting aside a regular slot of time for writing, be it every day or every week, as long as it's regular and as long as you stick to it religiously.

It also means finding a space to write. I don't know about you, but I need privacy and quiet to get my head together before I can effectively put words on the page. Some people can happily tap away at their laptops in the living room, surrounded by the chaos and tumble of family life. Some can happily scribble away on a notebook on the train in to work, oblivious of the hacking coughs of the other commuters or the tinny scritching coming from the headphones of the badly-shaven salesman in the cheap suit that's sitting next to them.

I find that I can't even listen to music while I write as it puts me off, so my only realistic chance of getting a solid hour to myself is waking up an hour earlier before work. That means dragging my bleary carcass out of bed at 6am every day, sitting my arse down in front of the laptop and forcing my brain to form some coherent sentences, regardless of what time I actually fell asleep or how often the baby cried that night.

In addition to this, I'm also on a bit of a weight-loss crusade at the moment. I'm hell-bent on regaining the washboard abs of my distant youth, so I'm hitting the gym during my office lunch breaks, leaving no time for writing at work.

So to all you aspiring writers out there who actually bloody write instead of just talking about writing (or writing about writing, as I'm so ironically doing here) - my hat's off to you. If you can juggle that burning need to write with the more prosaic (but no less demanding) requirements of health, work and family, then you're already a world ahead of those who are still only dreaming. I wish you the very best of luck.

A few years ago, I was helping to run a writing competition that my employer was running in conjunction with a major publisher. The grand prize was a magazine feature and a guaranteed book deal, so it's no surprise that we were inundated with entries. The aspiring writers had to send in their complete novels and it was my job to help sort and organise the entries, so every once in a while I'd read a bit out of curiosity.

The majority of it was dross of course. As with all writing competitions, we had to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff, but I actually had a bit of fun while wading. I'd roll my eyes at clumsy sentences; I'd tut and sigh at poor grammar and terrible spelling. I'm ashamed to say that I even sniggered a bit.

"Look at this!" I'd say. "Does she really think she'll win with that shite?"

I was heartened by some of the utterly execrable writing before me. It was reassuring because I knew I could do better. But as I guffawed and chortled and sneered, it eventually dawned on me that each and every one of these entrants had achieved something that I hadn't:

They'd written a novel.

Each and every one of them had sweated and laboured - sometimes for years - to create something that they believed in, and had sent out to us with hope. As flawed as some of the stories were, they represented a dedication and self-discipline that was worthy of admiration in its own right. It was a humbling thought.

I still haven't completed an entire novel, but I've learned that anyone who has deserves a little respect.