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Part of a little short story by me

 
 
Reply Sat 27 May, 2006 12:50 am
I really wanted to get some feedback on my writing. It's a new style for me, and I honestly don't know how good it is. Please, go ahead and be cruel.
There are also plenty of grammatical mistakes, since I did some extensive rewriting.
This is just the first couple sections, as I find the rest of it too unfinished to present just now.

Tonight everything is quiet in East Warren. A universally calm Sunday morning segued into a peaceful afternoon, and passed into a relaxing evening. Now all the kids are in bed while their parents enjoy Leno, the swingin' singles are home from a night of drinking and dancing, and a young man named Russell Sawyer is cleaning an HK UCP (advertised as "The Ultimate Combat Pistol").
Russell is nice guy with a pleasant face, good attitude, and self-inflicted cuts, burns and scars covering his torso. Once the gun is cleaned, oiled, and loaded to his satisfaction, he picks up a surprisingly large suppressor and screws it into the barrel. He holds it for a moment to get the feeling, then puts it back on the table next to a short-barreled Mossberg pump and a little stiletto knife.
Russell leans back in his chair; stares at the weapons laid out in front of him and scratches his neck. He decides everything is sufficiently cleaned, properly assembled, and correctly loaded, and stands up. He walks to the next room, taking off clothes en route.
He searches through the dresser and pulls out three long rolls of bandages. He wraps one around his left bicep, which appears to have been sliced repeatedly with a razor blade. The second goes on his right hand, wrist, and forearm, which is covered in second degree burns. The last bandage covers his stomach and chest, which appear to be crisscrossed with shallow scratches, almost as though someone raked their fingernails across them repeatedly.
He goes on to put on a comfortable flannel shirt and an old pair of jeans. He pulls out a well-worn pair of boots and slips his feet in. He moves back to his assembly of weapons, strapping the stiletto to his boot, and putting the two guns into a gym bag. He picks up the bag on the way out the door towards a blue 1958 Coupe de Ville.



Across town, on the border of Easy Warren and New City, the streets are a little dirtier, the cars are a little older, and the houses are a little smaller. It would definitely be an exaggeration to call it a "ghetto", and "slum" might be stretch, but "bad neighborhood" puts it a little lightly. There are no crack dens or meth labs, but there are a handful of dealers standing on street corners. No streetwalkers, but a couple classier call girls. No porno movie theatres, but three adult bookstores.
Outside of one of these bookstores, one of these call girls is being propositioned by one of these dealers and his cameraman buddy. He offered three hundred bucks for a half hour of solo work followed by a half hour of solid *******.
The dealer is named Brian Barry, and he only sells pot part time. His real passion lies in producing and staring in Internet pornography. Over the last three years he has tried a series of gimmicks for his website, finally settling on exhibitionism. He decided that the best name was the simplest one: Public Fuckers (subtitled: "We **** in Public"). The site just about broke even, all things considered, but Brian would happily run it at a loss. Such is his love of women!
"You just strip here and walk slow down the alley, then I bend you over and **** you by the wall," he explains.
The call girl is named Jenny, and is not a real call girl. Nor is she really named Jenny. She is actually named Jessica Arden but she took an alias when her dad beat the crap out of her for the last time and kicked her out of the house. She is beautiful, with medium length brown hair, and features that imply genuine kindness and compassion. Her fashion choices are bad, but in a subtle way, one that somehow only amplifies the impression that she is a very, very good person.
Brian only thought she was a call girl based on her proximity to the adult bookstore, and he propositioned her, as he does with every girl he sees by the store. In fact, she had just come out of the Laundromat next door, checking each change slot for a spare quarter or two, and just about to head to the McDonalds on the other side to buy her first meal in a day.
Brian says, "Come on, three hundred bucks an hour is good money. You can't do better than that."
The cameraman chimes in, "You look like you need a good *******."
Jessica's head says, "You will never forgive yourself for this."
Her stomach says, "You need food now."
Her mouth says, "I'll do it."
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Francis
 
  1  
Reply Sat 27 May, 2006 01:07 am
I'm not being cruel but just guessing...


Tonight everything is quiet in East Warren - Is that very unusual?

A universally calm Sunday morning segued into a peaceful afternoon, and passed into a relaxing evening. - Oh yeah? Many parts of the universe are known to be restless...

Now all the kids are in bed while their parents enjoy Leno - I bet not all parents enjoy Leno.

the swingin' singles are home from a night of drinking and dancing - some of them, fortunatelly are not home.

and a young man named Russell Sawyer is cleaning an HK UCP (advertised as "The Ultimate Combat Pistol"). Russell is nice guy - Isn't that an oxymoron?

And so on...
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SallyMander
 
  1  
Reply Fri 9 Jun, 2006 08:49 pm
Well, I may regret commenting so soon after reading. I'll say this, sleep on the whole thing, read it again tomorrow, and see what comes to mind then. Really, what's important is not what any of us say but what you think of in response to it. Something else--something new.

I think your work here is so early in its development that your prose and consistency of style are almost irrelevant. You don't have a pony yet, so why get out the curry comb?

As I read your first two "scenes," with the guy prepping the gun and then wrapping his wounds, it seemed to me you would make a good filmmaker. To SHOW what you were describing would be quite interesting--no dialogue necessary. Just the occasional snapping of the gun and the (ritualistic?) (determined?) (detached?) (??) binding of the wounds.

Very visual narrative you had going on. If you were going to write it and didn't want to film it, I think it would be too "compacted" at this point. You would need to show us more of what's going on with word play. It seemed like a thumbnail sketch of a larger multi-page moment.

Moving to the street scene and the crossed paths between the Internet ****er and the young hungry thing with laundry, again, I still "see" more than I read. Not a bad idea to set up chance meetings and surprising twists of choice ("I'll do it"), but again too compact. It's as if you're capsulizing a longer story or book rather than telling the story itself. What does her face look like? How does she walk? Where's her basket? I imagined her carrying one, but reading again I guess the clothes are inside, which is how she gets mistaken for a whore. What's her body language? etc., etc. Dealer's choice, but you ain't dealt much yet.

I think you are still noodling around, which is fine. It's an early stage in a writing process. Do you have a plot at this point--do you know where these people are going? Is your story going to have multiple characters in seemingly disjointed scenes coming together or braiding their lives in parallel or no-contact existences within the same city or theme or whatever?

Next step/s? How about one of these two:

1. Have fun with the characters and keep on noodling--find out who they are and get it into words or onto film. Learn about them from your own outpouring. Just write and write and draw yourself into a total adventure to start showing and seeing them as real folks by what you say, describe, and set us up to imagine. You can portray who they are in many ways, including (but not limited to) narrative, description of their nonverbal actions or inner thoughts or whatever. Now they're flat. Make them 3-D one way or another.

Think about what SHOWS who they are through their encounters with their sores or boinking the girl with the bluejeans swirling in a dryer. And you could think up thematic stuff, such as the contrast of dirtying her life with a cheap exhibitionist on her foray for clean clothes--Bottoms-up for an imagined 300 bucks and getting a surprisingly thrilling boink, an even 50, beads of sweat glimmering on her bare skin and her clothes slumped (or neatly folded?) on the greasy pavement--Why does she hope she'll see him again? hahaha Much to consider.

2. Or, instead of developing the characters, go back and figure out what you are doing with the whole structure of the story and what part the two different scenes play within it. Then revisit what you have written so far as speed-dating and expand it into something "real." Unpack it in ways that fits your greater design.

***
That's my two-bits worth.

Sal
p.s.: After my second read tonight, I think tomorrow I will give some examples of places where you said something like "well-worn" when you would want _us_ the readers to _conclude_ "well-worn" as you described the holes or the threads or something else real. Don't say to us "tastes good" when you can lead us to actually taste it ourselves and have our brains begging for more.
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