Short Story - Abdication

I wrote this one because my tutee wanted me to write a story for him. And I thought it fit the word Abdication (remember, it was one of the words with which we had to write a one-page scene for our introductory playwriting class). I love writing for children.


Abdication - Fiction by Joyce Chua

The snake reared its gleaming black head. Its eyes flashed, never once leaving me. A hiss, almost gloating, slipped out of it. Its body was arched, lithe, ready to attack. Could it smell my fear?

Deep breaths, Alex, I thought to myself. You’re the next Amazing Animal-Tamer. What’s a mere snake to you?

The truth was, though, that I had never been able to tame any animal, much less tame it amazingly. The circus had assigned me this position because the last animal-tamer had his right leg chomped off by a tiger he had been trying to tame. Naturally, once I’d heard that, my new job had not inspired any confidence in me. But I needed this job. And, as it turned out, there wasn’t much that a mute, half-deaf man of my age and qualifications could do.

So there I was, trapped in a giant steel cage with a giant snake ready to kill me. This test was meant to be my initiation ceremony. I could see Homer, said ex animal-tamer with chomped-off leg, watching from the sidelines. You would think my employers would be kind enough to start from the basics – let me try training a goldfish or a dog or something. You know, elementary level.

But apparently, circus performers don’t have time for elementary level tricks. No, we had to leap straight to the advanced level.

Back to business. No time for regrets or complaints now. There would be time for that after I had gotten out of this jail cell.

If I got out of this jail cell. Alive.

Beano, the sword-juggler, rattled the cage. “Get closer, man! How’re you going to quail the beast if you’re afraid to get your hands dirty?”

He reached through the bars and shoved me forward. I stumbled forth, catching myself a couple of meters before the hissing creature.

The snake interpreted my advance as an attack, and launched one of its own. I barely had time to dodge before it pitched itself at me. Its fangs clamped down on one of the bars, where my neck would have been had I been slower by a fraction of a second.

Cheers erupted from the spectator stand, where almost the entire circus crew, including the ringmaster, Mr. Caramel, was seated next to Homer. I was pretty sure they weren’t cheering for me, though.

And true enough, Dobson the fire-eater roared, “Did you see that? What a magnificent beast she is!”

“Beautiful attack, Comet!” Homer cried. Rising to his feet, Mr. Caramel clapped his hands. His gold watch gleamed as brightly as his shoes.

Comet. That thing had a name. And it sure lived up to it, given the speed at which it moved. How was plain old Alex supposed to tame a gigantic snake named Comet?

“Alex!” Mr. Caramel barked. “Stop daydreaming! Do your job, or you’re going to be locked in there all day! I mean it.”

I had no idea how to tame a snake, but damned if I was going to be stuck in a cage with it for a day. I spread my stance and raised my hands before me, ready to grab at the snake should it launch a second attack. Perspiration pooled at the nape of my neck. I hoped no one noticed my shaking hands.

When it came, I spared no time to consider what I was doing. I saw my hands reach out to grab at it, then my fingers wrap around its dry scaly body, just below its head.

It lashed its body at me, but I hopped out of range in the nick of time. I waited for it to strike again, then slammed my foot down on its writhing body. It thrashed like an out-of-control hose and hissed so loudly I could hear it with my faulty ear.

With a free hand, I scrambled around my pocket for my trusty old Swiss Army knife.

‘Snick!’

Right before the snake tossed me off its body – right before I could lose my balance – I swung the blade across the snake’s neck, just below where my other hand was clamped around it.

Blood. It flowed, poured, streamed from the gash I had made. In a few moments, its body slackened, then became completely limp.

I stared as it lay before me like a thick rubber hose, its eyes glazing over as seconds ticked by. The crew erupted in cheers again – for me, this time.

“Well done, Alex!” Homer said, thumping me on the back when he approached me.

“Well done, indeed!” Mr. Caramel bellowed. “Next, we’ll try Bessie, our Sumatran tiger. She’s a tough cookie, but I think you’re ready for her. Just don’t kill her this time, will you? Sumatran tigers are much rarer than cobras.”

Short Story - Eyes Full of Stars

The water would be icy tonight, after the day’s rain.

As the water lapped at his toes – crept up his ankles, calves, knees, chest – and stung his skin, he almost laughed at his own stupidity. It felt foolish enough to believe what the medium said, and even more foolish to act on her words. But hope and desperation were two sides of the same coin, and there was nothing else left to lose.

It was deep, too deep, but not deep enough. The lady had said it was absolutely crucial that he stood at the deepest inch of the lake.

And what the hell, he thought. Since I’m already here.

Another thunderstorm seemed possible. The sky still took on a bruised shade, though it revealed a faint hint of the moon.

Keep her name in your heart, the medium had instructed. If the bond you share with her is strong enough, she will come.

Of course, it was the sort of thing a medium would say. That way, you couldn’t blame her if this didn’t work.

But he held her name close to his heart anyway, felt the cadence fall in tandem with his heartbeat, until it became nothing less than breathing, a habit, then a need.

Under the faint moonlight the stone glittered, unnaturally bright, in his palm. Onyx, a love stone for the reunion of couples. The medium had definitely done her homework, at the very least.

He felt a tug at his feet that grew stronger by the second. Ripples started dancing across the surface. Water rushed towards him, churning, roiling, almost knocking him off his feet. He folded his fingers over the stone and squeezed it tight. Its edges dug into his palm. He could lose his footing, but not the stone. Anything but the stone. It was his only chance.

He did not let go when a particularly strong current swept him off his feet. He did not let go when he gulped down a mouthful of bitter lake water. Not even when he dipped under the surface. Not even when he felt the fire in his lungs, heard the awful cold ringing in his ears despite the underwater turbulence, glimpsed the last of the moonlight as night took over completely.

The next time he saw the sky, it was clear – moonless, cloudless, but strewn with stars, glittering like tearful eyes. There was no ringing in his ears, and the cold had dissipated. He was no longer in the middle of the lake; he was dry.

And there she stood, in the middle of the field before him, like she had never left.  She was more beautiful than he remembered, her thick long hair cascading down her shoulders. And her eyes, wide and dark, made up of a million stars, shining like the black onyx still in his palm. He dropped it at last and took a step closer to her. She extended a hand, waiting for him to slip his into hers.

He stared at their intertwined fingers in wonder. To think it had really worked.

Tomorrow, he thought, stroking her hair. Tomorrow he would pay that medium a visit again.

Beauty and the Beast - Raffles Alumni CO

I cried listening to this. Especially when the 高胡 (something like the first violin) started playing. There's something about string instruments hitting the high notes that brings out the tears. Makes me miss playing in an orchestra. It's been ages since I touched my 二胡 (something like second violin), and I just miss the feeling of working with everyone in the orchestra to create music. The end makes me especially emotional. You just feel this sense of achievement and the power of teamwork. Doesn't beat completing a novel, of course. More like a short story. And Raffles Alumni Chinese Orchestra is really impressive.

Given that a number of things (not too significant, so don't hold your breath, if you are) have happened since the last time I blogged, I think I'll make a list of updates this time.

I. Bidding period begins.

Can you feel the anticipation, the territorial vigilance with which everyone is camping out before their computers, lying in wait for the next bidder so that they can one-up him and throw in a higher bid? I know seniors get priority (well, not exactly priority - just that they have more points accumulated from past semesters and can afford to bid higher), but with so few options this coming semesters, competition for English modules is tough! And because of some administrative failures last semester, I absolutely have to take five English modules next semester so I can graduate on time. So I HAVE - did I mention HAVE? - to secure all five. The only five, in fact, because I've taken the rest before. You'd wonder why they offer so few English modules for this coming semester. I could ask the same.

So if everything goes according to plan, I'd be taking:

1. EL3204, Discourse Structure
2. EL3206, Psycholinguistics
3. EL3252, Language Planning and Policy
4. EL3880E, Second Language Learning,
5. EL3257, Investigating Language in the Media

I know. Hardly inspiring or scintillating. But, you know, school is school. No more fun modules, like Playwriting or language modules. Speaking of which, I got the A I wanted for Playwriting, and did better than I expected for my other modules. It's different when you feel passionately about the things you study, indeed.

II. One more semester and I'm done with school. Can you believe it? Not to sound completely corny, but it feels just like yesterday that I attended my first 10am lecture at LT11. I was rereading Megan McCafferty's Charmed Thirds, the third of the Jessica Darling series, where Jess attends Columbia University. And I just felt like it was such an apt book to be reading, because I could totally relate to what she was going through. The uncertainty, in the new environment and in herself, the diversity, and the stuff she was learning, the what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life-after-I-graduate brand of anxiety. My three years of tertiary education is coming to an end, and I feel more than ever the pressure to make a decision, pick a path already, plan plan plan your life, don't waste time or you'll fall behind.

I admit, a lot of the pressure comes from myself. My dad's not putting any pressure on me to earn my first million by the time I'm 25 or whatever, but I do want to achieve something quick so that I can show my dad that I will get by in life and that he doesn't have to worry so much.

But 2012 seems bleak, at least on the job market front. And that's not something I can control. So in the words of my dad, let go of what you can't control.

III. So Christmas has come and gone. Next up: New Year's. Excited? Not really. Thankful, though? Definitely. We've all lived through another year, at the very least, and that's always something to be thankful for.

IV. I'm currently reading The Grift by Debra Ginsberg. This is the third time I'm attempting to read it. I don't know why I didn't manage to get through it the previous couple of times, because it's actually a pretty well-written story. Not so much about plot, but about character, and it's high time I learnt how to write a character-driven novel without sucking instead of falling back on plot every time my story stalls.

And remember when I said my goal was to finish writing Fifteen Minutes Down Sunset Avenue by the end of this holiday? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Unless I manage to write, like, ten pages a day every day until 9 January 2012, the first day of school (after which I won't have time to write at all). At the rate I'm going (about three pages a day), that seems highly unlikely. Still, it's making progress. And I've finally come up with an idea on how I'm going to raise the stakes and resolve the story. All that's left is to write it. Which is always easier said than done.

V. The National Arts Council is organising a competition to select five young adult manuscripts to publish. And I was considering sending in Fifteen Minutes, but that doesn't seem possible now. With all the editing to do, it'll take me months before I deem the final manuscript ready. Besides, I'm still too attached to Lambs for Dinner to pass it up for this competition. But one of the criteria is that the story should not incite violence. And Lambs is really a little dark. Maybe not gory, but it might incite violence, how should I know? So I either risk submitting something that may or may not go against their criteria, or submit something that's not ready yet. I don't know about you, but the latter seems much worse to me. So Lambs it is. I believe more in it than Fifteen Minutes anyway. At least for the moment.

And a final word from Lev Grossman:

"Don't let the world convince you that you can't write. That may ultimately be true, who knows, but it's way too early to tell."

Beware these writing maladies!

And more great advice from Nathan Bransford's blog:

Do You Suffer From One of These Writing Maladies?

[commercial voice] There are pernicious writerly germs out there infecting pages all around the world. Left uncured they can be fatal. Talk to your book doctor or literary health provider if you notice any of these symptoms:

Yoda Effect: Difficult to read, sentences are, when reversing sentences an author is. Cart before horse, I'm putting, and confused, readers will be.

Overstuffed Sentences: An overstuffed sentence happens when a writer tries to pack too many things into one sentence in convoluted fashion, making it difficult for the intent of the sentence to come through and to follow it becomes an exercise in re-reading the sentence while making the sentence clearer in our brains so we can understand the overstuffed sentence, which is the point of reading.

Imprecision: When writers just miss the target ground with their word using they on occasion elicit a type of sentence experiential feeling that creates a backtracking necessity.

Chatty Cathy: So, like, I don't know if you've noticed but OMG teenagers use so much freaking slang!!! And multiple exclamation points!!! In a novel not a blog post!!! And so I'm all putting tons of freaking repetitious verbal tics into totes every sentence and it's majorly exhausting the reader because WAIT I NEED TO USE ALL CAPS.

Repetition: Sometimes when authors get lyrical, lyrical in a mystical, wondrous sense, they use repetition, repetition that used sparingly can be effective, effective in a way that makes us pause and focus, focus on the thing they're repeating, but when used too many times, so many times again and again, it can drive us insane, insane in a way that will land the reader in the loony bin, the loony bin for aggrieved readers.

Shorter Hemingway: Clipped sentences. Muscular. Am dropping articles. The death. It spreads. No sentence more than six words. Dear god the monotony. The monotony like death.

Non Sequiturs: Sometimes when authors are in a paragraph one thing won't flow to the next. They'll describe one thing, wow can you believe that thing that happened three days ago?, and keep describing the first thing.

Description Overload: Upon this page there is a period. It is not just any period, it is a period following a sentence. It follows this sentence in a way befitting a period of its kind, possessing a roundness that is pleasing to the eye and hearty to the soul. This period has the bearing of a regal tennis ball combined with the utility of a used spoon. It is an unpretentious period, just like any other, the result of hundreds of years of typesetting innovations that allows it to be used, almost forgotten, like oxygen to the sentence only darker, more visible. And it is after this period, which will neither reappear nor matter in any sense whatsoever to the rest of the novel, that our story begins.

Stilted dialogue:
Character #1: "I am saying precisely what I mean!"
Character #2: "Wait. What is that you are trying to tell me?"
Character #1: "Are you frickin' listening to me? I am telling you precisely what I am feeling in this given moment. And I'm showing you I'm really angry by using pointed rhetorical questions and petulant exhortations. God."
Character #2: "Sheesh! Well, I'm responding with leading questions that allow you to tell me exactly what you mean while adding little of value to the conversation on my own. Am I not?"
Character #1:"You are totally doing that. You totally frickin' are. Ugh! I'm so mad right now!"

The Old Spice Guy Effect (excessive rug-pulling). The character was standing on a rug. He falls through his floor to his death! The rug was actually a trap door. But wait, the character was already dead. He merely faked falling through the trap door. But wait, the trap door was actually a portal into another world. The character was actually alive, he just thought he was dead. Now he's really dead. Or is he? I'm in a chair.

Have you spotted any other writerly viruses out there in the wild?
The fall season of writing viruses is here. Watch out for these dangerous diseases!

Part 2

Catching the Rye:
Well you probably first want to have read this book by J.D. Salinger with an immediately catchy voice that kind of spoke to a generation or some nonsense, and after you do that you may be corrupted with that voice in your head for some time if you want to know the truth of the matter. If you really want to think about it it’s already been done and anyway the guy who wrote it didn’t end up wanting to talk to anyone anymore and holed up in a house somewhere so that can’t have been good and you probably want to try and go and write your own voice so you’re not a phony.


Adverb Central:
“What do you mean I can’t use adverbs with dialogue tags?” Lucia asked questioningly.
“Just don’t do it,” Nathan replied testily.
“But why not?” Lucia asked quizzically.
“It’s kind of a rule,” Nathan said resignedly.
“I kind of like them,” Lucia said poutingly.
“If you keep using adverbs,” Nathan said patiently, “Pretty soon your reader will only notice the adverbs and not the dialogue because the adverbs are doing all the work for the reader.”
“Oh,” Lucia said understandingly.
“Yeah,” Nathan nodded knowingly.


Gee Whiz That’s a Lot of Exposition:
“But what is it?” Captain Spaceman asked.
“I’m glad you asked,” his crack scientist said. “It’s a ‘What’s It.’ It is a device that requires me to explain to you precisely how the technology in this world works so the writer can get some exposition out of the way.”
“But why wouldn’t I already know how the technology works?” Captain Spaceman asked. “I am the captain, aren’t I?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” the scientist said. “You will impatiently prod me along while I tell the reader exactly what they need to know even though there is no good reason for us to be having this conversation. You might even say ‘Yes yes, go on.’”
“Yes yes, go on,” Captain Spaceman said.
“And I’ll be sure to include some foreshadowing. I mean, sir, just think of what would happen if the ‘What’s It’ fell into the wrong hands... You might even be moved to weigh in on the gravity of the situation.”
Captain Spaceman scratched his chin. “My gods, that would be catastrophic.”


Olympic Head Jumping:
Jackie saw the problem approach from a mile away. She turned to Richard, who was wondering about the weather that day and thought nothing of Susan, who was sitting quietly and wasn’t expecting the problem at all. Jackie wondered at that moment how everything had gone wrong, while Richard’s eyes widened as he saw another person approaching, Derrick, who gave a wave as he approached, happy to see his friends. Susan began to notice something was amiss and gave a start, which Richard noticed and looked in Derrick’s direction while Jackie had already been onto the problem from the start, ignoring the quizzical expression on Derrick’s face as he tried to understand. No one had any idea what was really happening.


Fantasy Overload:
“We are hearty warriors! Let us share a hearty chuckle! Ha ha ha!” Pentrarch said.
There was a glint in Lentwendon’s eye as he took a swill from a mighty cistern of ale. He bellowed a deep laugh and clapped his friend on the back.
“I say,” Pentrarch said, “What is it about fantasy novels that lends itself to such stilted, manly camaraderie? Do we not have normal interactions?”
“We do not,” Lentwendon said, his voice suddenly grave. “We do not. We prefer to express our friendship with great noise and clapping of shoulders and brood quietly but stoically when matters turn serious. It is the same with our women.”
“Oh yes,” Pentrarch said “Our women are quietly supportive that we must do battle in far off lands, and they always have weary, knowing eyes. In truth they are the strong ones.”
Lentwendon nodded as he stared quietly at his cistern. “And ale, always ale.”

Really helpful advice from Janis Hubschman's blog:

1. When the story stalls, ask: what is the character thinking now? Is she thinking anything? If not, why not? Characters need to learn something about themselves, about their values and assumptions.
2. Characters reveal themselves under stress. Raise the stakes. Drive the character into a tight spot. What are the psychological crutches the character relies on under pressure?
3. Readers like to learn about something when they read. The details of an unusual job or hobby, the day-to-day activities of a particular place at a particular time in history, for example, draw the reader in.
4. Trust the reader. Remember Hemingway's iceberg theory: "you could omit anything if you knew you omitted it and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."
5. Take apart successful published stories (or the stories of writers you admire) to see how they work.
6. Give the character something to do in the scene. It brings the character and the scene to life. A character soaking in the bathtub, thinking about her rotten marriage is boring. A character performing brain surgery, thinking about her rotten marriage is a different proposition.
7. To gain insight into a character, consider her history: Think about what happened before the story, what tortuous path led the character to this particular moment?
8. Allow the character to misinterpret another character's words or actions. In life, we often misread a situation, jump to conclusions. Interesting things can happen when characters make presumptions or project their own hang-ups onto others.
9. Let the characters connect with others. Alienated characters, the whiney and self-absorbed protagonists that blame everyone else for their predicament have lots of precedent in literature, but can hold readers at a remove.
10. Build tension by slowing down a scene. Let the scene unfold moment by moment. Linger on the details. Build silences into the dialogue.