My Silent Undoing - Life etc.

http://www.abctales.com/story/my-silent-undoing/life-etc

I'm writing this here to try to give an example for everyone who finds it difficult to get themselves into the writing groove.

This piece by my_silent_undoing is a tiny set of notes, rather than a piece of writing. Reading it, I could see at least five stories that deserve to be written. I was wondering whether this is obvious to my_silent_undoing.

In this piece there are a series of statements that for me act like questions that kick start stories

1. "I've fallen into a few hands, a few smiles, woken up and decided that the emptiness beside me was actually quite poetic. "

What does this mean? What character would say this? Is this someone who has had too few affairs or too many? How is the emptiness poetic? What does this character want?

2. " I have been to Paris, sat on the steps of the Sacre Coeur and fallen in love with the world all over again."

What made the character fall out of love with the world? What took them to Paris? What happened there? What did it look like? What does falling in love with the world feel like?

3. "I have gotten drunk on countless trains, stumbled through numerous town-centres in a not-so straight line, and ended up in hospital a few too many times."

This sounds very poetic, but in fact isn't because it describes nothing, only states. If there is a story of drunken desolation I want to hear it. I want to feel getting drunk on countless trains. I want images and sensations. Try the difference between a news report that states that a man has been shot and a person's description of how it feels to be shot and what it feels like to recover. Which one is more powerful?

4. "I have fallen in love a few times, but with all the wrong things."

This is a good line to start a story with. Who falls in love with the wrong things? What are the wrong things? What happens when you fall in love with them? how do you know that they are the wrong things?

5. "I've been places. Seen things you wouldn't believe"

You've got to qualify a statement like that! What things? Why wouldn't I believe them? If the narrator is a world-weary figure, why are they so? What are they going to tell me? Is the statement a warning or a boast? If this is true of a character, who are they saying this to? Can someone who has seen extraordinary things go back to normal life?

the point I'm making is that it is easy to make sets of statements that sound good as a voice over for a film or telly programme, forgetting that they sound profound because they are accompanied by pictures and sounds. On the page, statements like this don't describe anything, or give a reader anything to imagine. It's not possible to trace what they are saying to anything concrete.

To say, for instance, "I was born in a depressing town" sounds okay until the reader tries to work out why the town was depressing. On the information given by that sentence, they can't, all they can do is take the narrator's word for it. If the sentence was "I was was born in a depressing town where all of the houses were painted faded pastel colours and even on special occasions you were lucky to see anyone in the streets"; then there are some things for the reader to work on in their mind.

The reason I use My_Silent_Undoing' piece as an example is that there are lots of potential interesting things that could be written about, wrapped up in a tiny package that's really difficult to unwrap and unpack. I feel like this piece is a series of statements that provide summaries of a lot of thinking or feelings when what the reader needs to see is the processes behind those statements.

Making statements doesn't only close the piece to the reader but can also make it so much harder for you as the writer to continue with that given thought.

Just some thoughts, hope that they help,

Cheers,

Mark Brown, Editor (on leave), www.ABCtales.com