Week 7!
Welcome to Week 7 of CU This Tuesday Writing Group! I was a bit waylaid this morning by my good friend Garth Martens, a poet everyone should be reading! His debut, Prologue for the Age of Consequence, is available from House of Anansi :) Anyway. I’ve had a new idea for what to work on. I was really inspired by reading Brutes by Dizz Tate over the weekend. I LOVED it and it’s a fantastic example of a novel written mostly in the 1st-person collective voice, which I’m getting more and more into. Anyway, I’m now writing into an idea about a hospital that’s more like a home for girls with eating disorders on a small island. Maybe the novel is told from the collective point of view of the girls, but it also focuses on their psychiatrist, Dr. Binet, who is unhappily married and maybe she has an affair with the produce guy at the local grocery? This week’s prompt is AGLOW in third-person POV. Here are some ideas for you guys:
Your character is having regrets about her pregnancy, fears about being a mother but nobody wants to hear it. They just want to tell her how glow she is.
Your character is part of a pyramid scheme, hosting an Avon-style party, to sell products that will make her friends and neighbours glow.
A family of field mice react to a forest fire and the state of the environment more generally.
Writing prompt: AGLOW in third-person POV
Dr. Binet powdered her face. Better to look ghostly, hardly alive, dead inside, than aglow. Would Harry believe the sad truth? He would be more inclined to believe in a full-blown deceit than this flirtation concocted in the dusty caverns of her hypothalamus.
She wished she could control her mind they way she attempted to control the girls’. Could she force sexual desire in the same way she forced the will to eat? Is all nourishment the same?
On her birthday, with that pair of expensive silk panties between her fingers. He’d ordered them online. He’d told her this proudly, as though using the internet was a difficult skill he’d mastered. How revolted she’d felt at their smoothness. What place did silk have on this island? Against these jagged rocks?
They became a symbol of everything that was wrong with Harry. He grasped at band-aid solutions, to wrap her growing distaste for him as anything but a pair of hands that helped her carry out her work, in silk.
She wanted him to stop trying, as she had. To admit defeat. To extend a hand for her to hold until she slipped into death. Nothing more.
And the revulsion, she’d realized in self-analysis, was an incestuous reaction. She’d come to see Harry—in his silent support, his bursts of anger, his virtuosity—as a father figure.
What she wanted was a boy. He who lurked among the produce in an ill-fitting apron, palming apples, oranges, mangoes. The mangoes were her favourite—the way his fingers stretched around them gently, so as not to bruise.
You look pale, Harry said.
He’d burst into the bathroom as he had every right to do. It was his bathroom too. But his every motion felt like an invasion.
Haven’t been outside in a while, Dr. Binet answered.
Why don’t you go? I’ll take care of lunch.
No, I shouldn’t.
Go, go. Take one of the bikes to the beach.
He held her shoulders, turned her toward the door. Even his efforts to help were a form of control. What if she’d wanted to hide in the back corner of her closet, to lie on that ridiculous fur coat her mother had passed down to her, to pretend she was a baby bear in hibernation? To know there would be another spring to come. A rebirth.
Afterthoughts
I think until I sort of come up with a bit of a plot structure, and one that I can stick to, haha, all of my writing exercises are going to look more like character sketches than actual scenes. But that’s ok. I realize when I do this sometimes it just comes out as a series of questions the character is asking themselves—questions I want to know the answers to in order to get to know this character better. It would be cool to dive in and write more of a scene. I’m almost finished with the first draft of the novel manuscirpt I’ve been working on for a few years now, so maybe once that one is a bit more settled, I can spend some time coming up with a more solid idea for a next project. Let me know how you’re writing went! I’ll CU Next Tuesday!