Week 5!
Welcome to Week 5 of CU This Tuesday Writing Group. Wow, I’ve been doing this for a month and already I’ve changed my idea for my next novel. I’m kind of digging the new idea I’ve gotten into. Something about child actors, female friendship, exploitation. This week, Monday’s Wordle answer was DITTO and my random number generator came up with 4, which is the first-person collective point of view (from the perspective of “we”). I’ve just realized now that I’ve finished my 30 minutes of writing that I didn’t actually use the word “ditto” in what I wrote today! Oops. It was inspired by ditto in any case. Here are some ideas for the prompt:
A day in the life of we the quintuplets.
Write from the perspective of the Patrick Swayze fanclub members, obsessing over his use of “ditto” to mean “I love you, too” in Ghost.
Write from the perspective of a 7th-grade classroom tormenting their substitute teacher by overusing “ditto” the way the Smurfs use “smurf.”
Writing prompt: DITTO in first-person collective POV
We, the child actors slump in our chairs in audition waiting rooms until our mothers’ elbows poke our spines straight. Our dreams have been sown by our mothers since the sprouting of our first curly lock of hair and so we dream of starring roles and Hollywood, of the cover of Time. We dream of attention, spotlights, the adoration of strangers. We dream of zeros on our paycheques. We pray our grown-up teeth will come in straight.
If we were to dream our own dreams—if we were able to pry our mothers out of our minds for one moment—we would dream of monkey bars and ice cream cones, water slides and suntans. We would dream of watching TV without envy, of enjoying. We would dream of bruises and scabbing and body fat, of unbrushed hair and wiping our runny noses on the backs of our hands. We would dream away the dollar signs and the stars in our mothers’ eyes. We would dream for their dreams to come true so that we could dream our own.
Some of us enjoy this. The child stars, those of the Pampers commercial variety, those exploited since birth. Those child stars never knew love without expectation, performance. They will turn on their mothers when they come of age, become addicts and tabloid fodder. No matter, they love only to see their names in print.
The rest of us will peak at age ten or whenever our chubby cheeks thin out to reveal our monstrous prepubescent scaffolding. We will be sent back to the real world, to forever be That Kid Who … We will not blend in. We don’t know how to socialize with children, only yes-people. Our parents will hide their disappointment with public outings to malls and hockey games, secretly hoping we will be rediscovered.
But we will not be rediscovered. We will sink to the bottom of the stew of regular life like overcooked chunks of yam that have lost their shape. We are only child actors, not child stars. We do not seek light on our petals. We have only ever wanted to disappear.
Afterthoughts
This one was fun. I think the first-person collective POV is such an interesting voice. I’ve often thought it would be cool to write an entire novel in 1st-person collective from the point of view of a cult. I wonder if that could be pulled off for an entire novel. If you know of a novel written in 1st-person collective, let me know! I hope your writing went well today and I’ll CU Next Tuesday!