Welcome to week 13 of CU This Tuesday Writing Group! I’m fully into this idea of writing about an eating disorder clinic on a somewhat remote island. So maybe I’ll stop telling you each week that this is what I’m writing about. Today, I got into Harry’s perspective (the psychiatrist, Dr. Laura Binet’s partner). Monday’s Wordle answer was KAZOO and my random number generator generated a 2—2nd-person point of view. So that’s what we’ll go with here! Here are some ideas for you:
Your character is a street performer who’s introduced a kazoo into their act to maybe disastrous consequences?
A child has received a kazoo as a birthday gift. You could tell this story from a number of perspectives. Maybe:
The child (witnessing the adults’ reactions from the child’s perspective).
The parents
The in-laws, who gave the child this kazoo, perhaps for vindictive purposes.
Writing prompt: KAZOO in 2nd-person POV
You enter the ferry gift shop with the intention to buy something for Laura. One of those pens with an orca trapped in a mini-aquarium of turquoise gel inside. For her writing practice. That book she always talks about but never writes. To show her how supportive you are. Maybe, if you’re honest, to rub her nose in the disparity between her kind of love (self-centred) and yours.
What you leave the shop with is a kazoo. When you fingered items intended for Laura, all you felt was a great sadness. You pictured her face upon receiving the gift—the way her eyes would droop at the corners and the lines around her mouth would multiply—a look of repressed pity. Your efforts only serve to swell her guilt. The look would plead with you to stop, already. Stop cheerleading for this losing team.
You take the kazoo outside to the deck and you play it for the seagulls, the inattentive Gulf Island mothers with their nappy-headed children. They swivel toward your sound—you, the pied piper, here to direct them off the ferry and into your never-never land.
And that’s it, isn’t it? The source of the dry well inside of you. You’ve lost your Wendy. Laura’s appetite for your boyish spontaneity waned ages ago. Perhaps she only took you on hoping you’d shed your playfulness, acquire table manners, strength, and silence with every grey hair. Hoping you’d become a man. Hoping you’d become something else.
She once told you she loved parts of you. Nobody loves everything about someone, she’d said. But don’t people normally say I love you?
So you’ve resolved to be wholly you. You with a blazing kazoo. Because you have given up. You’ve finally accepted her challenge to sink into your worst version and see who folds first.
Afterthoughts
Ok, this one definitely didn’t work as a 2nd-person from Harry’s POV, per se, meaning that I don’t really hear Harry here. It’s the same voice I’ve been using for Dr. Binet, really. So this tells me if I write from Harry’s perspective, it’ll probably have to be maybe a distant third person, OR I could try from first-person so that I really challenge myself to embody him and his speech, his language, his diction a bit more. Or maybe it’s best to hear about Harry from someone else’s perspective. Anyway, I hope your writing is going well. Let me know! I’ll CU Next Tuesday.