Killing your darlings

Anyone else found anything interesting during a Covid clean-out? Like, for example, their own completed novella manuscript buried in a back room drawer? Well, that was what I found. I'd put it away, after too many publishing rejections, in 1997. A bit disappointed with myself, I shook the dust off and returned full time to my proper job as a secondary English teacher. Hadn't read my novella until recently. It's a bit of a time capsule and I can well understand the rejections and why a trusted reader proclaimed it a draft short of complete. But rereading it, I didn't hate it. Its themes are perennial and I am still interested in my protagonist's story.

So during Covid-19 lock-down, amongst other things I've been revising my novel. That means trying to improve my fiction writing. Call it a project. It's not for anything but it is creative and absorbing; good way to keep the black dog at bay. (And believe me, I can see it straining at the lead in my peripheral vision.)

You'd think that as an English teacher I'd be able to write passable fiction, given I taught writing for years in secondary school. Yeah? Well, no. Sure, I wasn't bad at encouraging others to develop their ideas.  Same with editing students' writing. I could easily correct grammar and spelling, slash redundant expressions and suggest modifications to anything clunky. I also had heaps of ideas as to how others could begin and develop their stories.

And yet, I've struggled with this in my own prose fiction. 

Somewhere in my thirties, I think I was trying too hard to be literary, or something. My fiction style became ponderous, laboured . No one's ever enjoyed my fiction writing. There's been a bit of damning with feint praise if not actually diving under bushes to avoid my asking them what they thought of something I'd written and foisted on them for comment. 

However, with the help of a couple of trusted, unpaid editors, I think I may be finally figuring it out.  Of course, one can Google all this stuff. Gems of wisdom are fed to me daily on social media. But something clicked when my editor-sister - also an English teacher - gave this piece of advice after she'd graciously suffered another telephone reading. Get rid of the scaffolding, she said.  Trust the reader's intelligence. Let the reader make the connections. She demonstrated in an example and, lo and behold, a veil fell away. Never mind that I'm a fascinated wanderer as I detail what I can see in my mind's eye. It's not doing it for the reader. 

It's the basic 'show don't tell' thing. And furthermore, don't make a ball of string out of a piece of cotton, which I fear I may have just done.

My last post, Broken Glass, was a short story that I wrote in the mid-1990s during my early try-hard literary phase. I've edited it, keeping my sister's sage advice in mind. Is it any better? Perhaps. Think I was quite depressed when I wrote it, having just lost a 39 year old friend to pancreatic cancer. Didn't realise how prescient that whole experience would be, given how things have turned out with the loss of our lovely 'son-in-law' to cancer last year.

Anyway, here it is Broken Glass, version 2

The crash sent Rick's mind back to his childhood, so he could almost feel the slippery opaque glass with its milky surface, and regular pattern of tiny coloured dots. Holding it was dangerous, but he'd wanted it.

Even his mother couldn't hold it easily in one hand.

"That's too much. Here." Cross again, she’d made a sucking snapping sound with her mouth. "I’ll do it. As if I haven't got enough to do around here." She'd helped him."Why did I buy these stupid looking things? I should throw them out." She kept saying she'd get rid of them but she hadn't.

His mother was outside at the line when he wanted a drink. Knowing he was supposed to have his drink in the kitchen, he chose instead to sit on the floor in front of the TV in his nest of cushions and blankets.

Despite his mum’s warning, he took one of the greedy, slippery glasses from the back of the cupboard where they lived with the Easter and Christmas mugs from his granny. "Cheap and nasty rubbish," according to his mum when Granny wasn't around to hear.

With infinite care, he poured his cordial from the heavy bottle in the fridge. It welled and splashed at first, but he wiped it up. He avoided resting the container on the side of the glass in case the glass tipped over. He didn’t completely fill it.

Holding the drink aloft, he walked in concentrated slow-motion to the lounge. His eyes flicked from glass to doorway guarding against a spill. Painstakingly pacing, his toes feeling the ground, he made slow progress on the tortuous route to the next room, six adult strides away.

After a sip, he placed the glass safely not near the edge but in the middle of the coffee table. He remembered his mum’s lessons.

Pleased with himself for not bothering his mother, he clambered into his nest. 

Suddenly his mum shouted sharply, "Rick! Get the door for me! Hurry up!"

In his haste to help her, he knocked the table. The drink washed over onto the floor on the far side. Helpless, he watched the slippery glass rolling across the table before smashing on the hardwood floorboards.

"Rick? Rick! What have you done now?"

He heard the backdoor and the alarming rush of air and temper as his mum flew

into the room. As he darted around the table, his bare feet lost their grip in cordial.

"Leave it! It's too late now! You've done the damage. What have I told you

about those damn glasses?"

Her feet outside the puddle, she reached out  and dragged him back. He’d felt sharp pain in his bottom and legs as glass jabbed into the ball of his foot near his little toe.

"Stop crying now. It's never as bad as it looks." Crimson splats dripped on the floorboards as she'd hobbled him back into the kitchen. She bathed his foot with cotton balls soggy from disinfectant mixed white in her baking dish. "Oh, it's all right!" Soothing, holding his face in her hands she kissed him and lifted him onto the table. "Sit there and I'll get you another drink. Don't worry about the rotten glass. Stupid looking things." She was quite sure she'd got all the glass out.

The memory flashed through Rick in the seconds after his son, Luke, accidentally nudged the wine glass off the edge of the bench. They both looked blankly at the spreading red pool on the floor and the glass, on its side, missing a jagged piece but with its stem intact.

Standing there, he remembered a few weeks ago looking outside over someone’s shoulder and watching the celebrant. Her lacquered dark hair was lifting slightly with the pace she was making. Brief case at her side, she was probably striding off to the next job. That bit of hem on her long black skirt was coming down. You'd think she'd have fixed it. He hadn't been able to stop cataloguing the details and felt guilty.

"I think we're talking about a very special person here," she'd said, her voice like liqueur. Her head to one side, she'd slowly scanned the crowd. She'd timed the pause while the mourners drew breath. Janine's sister in the front row released an enormous sob which hung for a while like the dust motes visible in the sun.

Rick shook the memory away, crouched and picked the two sections of glass out of the puddle which Luke was about to step into.  “Careful, mate. Go round that way and get the mop would you?’ 

"Sorry, dad." Luke's eyes filled with tears.

"Forget it, Luke. It was an accident. It doesn’t matter."

Rick had only drunk a mouthful out of that second glass and there was no more left in the bottle. He wasn’t sure he could manage through the night without another drink. Rationing it, he'd saved some from the night before. Sensibly, he’d consciously re-corked the bottle after he'd had his two and a bit glasses. 

'It's not a good time to give up drinking," some friend had told Rick, a couple of

months back. They'd shared a bottle of wine on a Tuesday morning. Janine had been asleep and wine seemed like a good idea. 

He hadn't had such a hectic social life since he was a teenager. The visitors with their cakes and casseroles had propelled them along. But that had stopped now. Life was supposed to go on after some respectful pause.

"I've got it dad." Luke mopped the floor while Rick prepared dinner, wondering whether he ought to go out and buy another bottle. Maybe later, after they'd eaten.

Alyse, Rick’s teenage daughter, had turned silent. Like Luke, she was helping out. Doing the washing. Setting the table. Taking over where Janine's mother had left off when she decided it'd be better for all of them if she returned to her own house.

Alyse briskly set out place mats, cutlery and serviettes like Janine had. Alyse's hair fell in golden glossy blobs. Rick had helped her to get the knots out when she was little. She used to hold him round the waist and press her face into his tummy while he smoothed out the tangles. He'd held her head gently so he wouldn't hurt her. There'd be a hot damp patch on his shirt where she'd been breathing. Now she  glanced up occasionally at The Simpsons on the television as she set the table. They watched television while they ate.

Rick was still painting the house. He hadn’t finished it in time, even though he'd

tried to. The garden was a clock, every day reminding him as he weeded it.  He'd never really bothered with it except for this last year. He’d thought it would be good for Janine. Some sort of compensation for their up and down life together for the last sixteen years. 

He'd really upset his mother-in-law when he'd refused to go and have one last look at Janine in the funeral home.

He'd felt a curious ecstasy after the funeral. He was ashamed of the feeling of relief after weeks of lying next to his dwindling sedated wife, her body swelling hideously and her  bones sticking out, never sure when death would strike or whether it already had.

The day of the funeral came blue and sunny; odd vaporous clouds drifted in a warm deep sky; weird metaphysical conditions that he couldn't help noticing. A compilation of Janine's favourites blasted at the crowd as they gathered outside the bizarre red-carpeted hopeless mechanised temple.

They'd all gone back to Rick's afterwards. He didn't know who'd organised the barrage of food and alcohol but it had all happened. The sun shone and he’d sat on the front veranda and held court with Janine's basketball girlfriends. One minute he’d forget and be laughing and getting drunk. Next he’d be slammed by violent engulfing waves of unthinkable loss and that putrid jasmine blooming by the front door.

Sometimes it is as bad as it looks.