The Story of Blair Faircloth

Once again just read the Preface because I'm too long-winded for description!

Preface: Welcome back to the wonderful on my own writings a magical place of awkward writings and future embarrassment in the now, this time we have ourselves set in the world of Blair Faircloth the Anne Cuthbert inspired character in co-op with a certain Wayne Legault the ‘villain’ or so we think in the primary school unrelated to the high-school of the last one, to get a passing passing grade and slightly referenced to the first writing in this series (I’m not this big of a egotistical maniac don’t worry I just liked the idea of tying my writings in or making a world out of it, I gave up on it exactly after this so you know.)  and yes that reference to a Canadian classic is drenched throughout this piece I absolutely love the the style and writing of a certain L.M. Montgomery but this is enough of a foreword for not being written by anybody of any influence whatsoever. On to the show: 

Blair Faircloth was an ordinary girl with an ordinary family… For the most part. But like most families they pushed grades a lot and Blair’s grades were slipping, hard… From A to B to C and just etching on a full on D! No way! She knew if it slipped any further there would be trouble and she didn’t want to find out what…. There was only one chance… She had to ace the next test, but it was Mr. Legault’s class! That guy hated her, he hated her, she heard him say just that! Or at least she imagined that, she, I will stress was normal, for the most part… But either way she had to be so good that he couldn’t even pretend giving her anything less than an A+, she knew the next test was a writing prompt! She stunk at those and she knew it, but she couldn’t afford to stink at it this time. She really had to step up her game as she said blankly to her Mom when she got home the day it was assigned. Her Mom then told her with the same stereotypical (For her anyways.) blankness “Then go do that then.” Blair took those words to heart. The prompt was writing about a young girl trying to get over humiliation and of all things Blair knew that very well. She recited a time she was bullied when she arrived at school though changing the names to some fanciful ones she could think of. She thought it was great but it was up to her teacher not her-though if it was up to do she would honestly grade herself a F and just get it over with… She handed it to Mr. Legault and just as she did and he looked it over she felt her bones shiver and entire body turn to ice on a cold January morning without your coat. But when she looked at the man and saw him smile brightly at her she felt the sun crash through and thaw her out on a nice September morning with the curtains open. Legault or Wayne as she later learned he preferred to be referred by said to her “This is the best prompt I’ve ever read! I really misjudged you.” She asked him why he had been so cold to her before he responded “Oh, my child-you don’t need to think about it I was all wrong! Oh my child I thought you were nothing but a slouch and a good for nothin’ but turns out I was completely of kilter! I’m sorry I just thought you wouldn’t ever do anything without a switch and a rod! But life has a funny way of misguiding you, you know?” He chuckled his expression completely flipped from the grimace he showed when she handed it in-she replied, “Yeah I guess I do I always thought you were just a very angry hateful man but, I got that all wrong myself. Looks like we’ve both been wrong about each other before?” “Guess so.” Wayne chuckled again, Blaire very much liked his laugh it sounded like honey all over a rainbow-she will of course become very much accustomed to his deep belly laughs since they both became great friends after that. Turned out the only thing she’d been missing was her confidence in herself.

Reviews

[JayG]

You need, need, need to look into the required skills of the fiction-writing profession. They're not at all like the ones you were given in school. Those skills are nonfiction-writing skills, meant to inform. But fiction’s goal is to provide an emotional experience. And that CAN’T be done with our school-day skills.

For you. the stories work. But you cheat. You come to the reading already knowing who we are, where we are, and what’s going on. And, you can hear emotion in the voice of the narrator because you already know how you want it to be read. The reader has NONE of that. Look at the opening, not as the author, but as someone who has only what the words suggest TO THEM, based on THEIR life, not yours. Look at it as someone who has not a clue of how you would perform as you read:

• Blair Faircloth was an ordinary girl with an ordinary family…

1. You’re misusing the ellipse. It’s not a sort of super comma.
2. If I believe what the line says, you’ve taken away all reason to read on. Who wants to read about an ordinary girl? And in any case, that’s history. She's about to become extraordinary. Story is what’s happening, not what once happened. And stories are almost always in the viewpoint of the protagonist—in this case, Blair—NOT that of someone unknown, who we can neither hear nor see. Fiction, as E. L. Doctorow puts it, “is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” A report can’t do that.
3. An ordinary family? In what country? In what era? On what planet? You know. The characters in the story know. But shouldn’t the ones you wrote this for know? After all, an ordinary family of farmers in the 1400’s is very different from one living in Iceland today. But the reader can't tell what her normal is without knowing HER as a person, not the subject of your dissertation. So ,without knowing the setting, and when and where this takes place, how can this mean anything to anyone but you and Blair?

• For the most part.

You just told me you lied in the first line? Why not start with what matters?

What you’re doing is transcribing yourself talking to an audience, and telling them a story. But that’s a performance, where the audience can see and hear you. So HOW you tell the story matters as much as what you sat. But not a trace of the way you perform makes it to the page. The narrator's voice contains only the emotrion that punctuation suggests. And none of your facial expressions, your gestures, or even your body-language makes it to the page. So in all the world, only you can read this as you intended it to be read.

The short version: You need, need, need to look into the required skills of the fiction-writing profession. And, you need to be knowledgeable in such basics as paragraphing. Without that you have a block of print that makes it impossible to find your place if you lose it.

And as a minor point: Get your finger off the bang key. In little more than 500 words you have 9 exclamation points. Most novels don’t have that, start-t-finish. If your favorite authors can place excitement into their writing without the constant bangs, so can you. You just have to learn how. It's not about talent. It's not abut how well you write. It's not even about the story. It's that to practice and profession you need to know the "tricks of the trade."

And to make learning them easier, try this: The site I link to below is giving away the best book on fiction writing technique I’ve found to date. Grab a copy, then read it slowly, with lots of time spent practicing each point raised, to make it yours.
https://ru.b-ok2.org/book/2640776/e749ea

Or don't…the choice is yours. But think abut this: Since the day you learned to read, you've been choosing fiction written with the skills of the pros. You expect to see them in use, just as people expect to see them used in your work. It might be nice if we learned those skills by reading, but do we learn to cook by eating?

So dig in. And while you do, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/