Where Do I Begin?

Everything I've read and researched has lead to this point in my life. It lead me to a secret only few were meant to know. There are real truths, real existences... Or just a real idea in play.

This morning, before I left my drive way, I was as normal as I was yesterday and the day before but this evening I'm just realizing I've been sitting in my driveway, car in drive, foot on the breaks and I'm dazed. Everything I ever thought true was flipped to a world of thoughts that I had never considered. With everything beginning to circle around my head again, I stopped the confusion long enough to put my car in park, kill the engine and grab the keys.

Stepping out of the car, I could smell the sweetness of the two magnolia trees in the back yard. The scent took me back to when I was just a girl, running through my moms house, on her freshly waxed wood floors to a big, beautiful bouquet of wild flowers around the three creamy white magnolias that sat in middle of the dining room table. It seemed, in my memories that everything shined and wind blew the scent through the house as if to whisper for me to come gather round. I would pull a chair and climb to get to the bouquet close my eyes and just take a breath of pure awesomeness. I could see moms sheer curtains blowing as I opened my eyes see the beautifully arranged flowers against the backdrop of field outside. Scenes and scents. Sounds and lights. Dreams and thoughts.

What's real, what's not? The thoughts start to pick up again before I came to reality and saw that I was already in the door of my house and I was about ready to soak in a bath. How did I get here so fast? I looked at my phone. The time was 8:22. It was getting late and I had no idea where the time went. Its almost as if there's no way to deny everything I learned that day to be true. But it couldn't be. Not unless you go back. Way, way back to find out. Cause as much as I'd like to say I remember, or I dream or I thought . or I did anything at all, it may not be true and I may or you may only be a thought and none of this is happening.

Could it be why I have moments like this. Time skips. From my yard to my bath and never realizing. From work to home. Time skips in stores, work, dates. How many times have I lost a really great guy because my mind was elsewhere?
It could be that he didn't exist at that moment in time. Maybe it was I who did not exist. How can we be in one place one minute and in a split second be somewhere else but clock says its been twenty minutes has passed and you can't remember any of it. Is this the times I was only a thought in the lives of another?

How can I tell whats real and not real? Here and not here? How is the... "STOP!", I spoke the words allowed. "You're going to bed." I spoke the words and with that I shut off the lights and climbed the stairs and went to bed.

The rest of my week was filled with meetings, flights, hundreds of emails, missed calls and call backs and yet still I have very little inclination to the depth of the rabbit hole I speak of to any of my clients, but if they have questions I have answers. The week was excruciating, politics and religions. All the political stands coming together with all the religious stands. A total mess. A total war starting mess.

Secrets hide right under peoples noses. At first it seems some to be monumental cover up by genius Achieved by the ones who have lied to us the most and longest. Top secrets belonging to Top politicians, religious leaders and history writers for the soul purpose of hiding history and changing the truths to lies. People get paid big dollars to gain this knowledge, use what they want, change what they want and bury it again. I get paid to shovel it all around and not know anything at all. But in reality, I do know. I know how they plan to lie about our history by taking everything that was a memorabilia down and replacing it with the false memorabilia and rewriting our history books. But the truth, the real truth of our history has yet to be seen or truly verified. And do keep in mind we still have no answer to the real extinction of Dino's. Giants?

Now back to today's world of worries... Worries to be hidden behind a smile, because all worries are hidden. It pays the bills but scatters your thoughts, puts your faith through many tests. My faith has been knocked around and kicked down to the point it took Jesus himself to put me on track, but that's religious talk, nobody wants to hear that. So I began my research where I left off, just a few days before.

I opened my browser to my resents and pulled up my last links ...and BOOM.. It was gone. I searched my history, ran back other links and turned up nothing. I was was lead there from one link to another but this one string... Gone!

I searched what I thought might have brought me to the page I needed. Keywords about dreams and realities. I searched out words, descriptions, random thoughts but nothing brought me the results I was searching to find.

I was carrying info on an atom collision project performed by Cern and the Roman Catholic telescope, Lucifer. There was a Top Secret file. In the file was the results of the bottom of the barrel in the beginning of creation. Angels, demons, aliens, orbs, humans and a file listed as "Thoughts." When I opened the file I was stunned to find names, pictures, birth certificates, social security numbers, addresses, and so on. In this file it said there were trillions of thoughts from the past to present times and some "thoughts" travel time and sadly some die and never relive because the thought of the character didn't impress the Creator. But who's the Creator, God or Scientist. Keep in mind, there are many religions and a One True God, who will you be impressing? Who am I impressing? Or will I soon be taken down and hidden away like the memorabilia in histories past?

Author's Note

OK. My shot at writing! Critiques welcome. I haven't written for quite a while so be gentle..or just fire away!! I learn from both. Thank you.

Reviews

[Memnoch]

This was interesting, to say the least. I WANT MORE :) I think you have a great story and it flows like water(Easy to read)What was your train of thought when you thought this up? Not to dig in too deeply just curious. Anyway, great start to a mystery maybe?

[JayG]

I hate to do this, because I know you’re hoping for a, “I saw problems, but I really liked the story idea.” So before I comment, a disclaimer: What I have to say has nothing to do with the plot, your talent and potential as a writer, or is in any way a reflection on you.

You’re working hard on it with the tools you have available, true. But…are the writing tools we were given in school, and which we use on the job, the same set that professional fiction-writers use? Sadly, no. That’s not to say that you can’t learn them as easily as that pro did. But you do need them.

Think about it. All your life, you, and everyone else, has been reading only professionally written and polished fiction. So it’s what we expect to be used in anything we read. And while plot counts, in the bookstore, how much plot has happened in the few pages we read while deciding if we like the WRITING. Damn little, right? In reality, those pages are our audition. And while our words are being read, there are thousands of other books shouting, “Read me…I’m better!” So we had damn well better not screw up in that audition. As Sol Stein put it: “A novel is like a car—it won’t go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The “engine” of both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the decision not to put the book down. The engine should start in the first three pages, the closer to the top of page one the better.”

In short, unless you MAKE the reader turn to page two, and MAKE them need to continue reading on-every-page, they won’t. And while that may seem like bad news, like every other profession there are ways of pleasing the customer that aren’t apparent to the outsider. In fact, many of those tricks are of the, “That’s so obvious. Why didn’t I see that for myself?” variety.

For example: When entering any scene, the reader has only what the words we chose suggest TO THEM, based on THEIR background, not our intent. So to make sense of the words, they need to be placed in time and space, must know what’s going on in the moment the protagonist calls now, and must know whose skin they wear. Remember, the reader can neither hear nor see your performance. So the emotion you place into a personal performance—what you hear and feel as you read—is missing for the reader. Have your computer read it aloud to hear how different what the reader gets si from what it sounds like to you.

Those tricks-of-the-trade I mentioned, above, like orienting the reader on entering a scene, compensate for that problem. But unless you know what those tricks are, and what they do for you, how can you use them? To quote another author, Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So, with that in mind, let’s look at the opening as a reader, rather than the author:

In the first five paragraphs—520 words, or the first two standard manuscript pages, what happens? Someone of unknown gender, and age changes their mind about going to an unknown place, leaves their car and goes back to bed. Why? Because unknown things changed in an unknown way from the previous day. That’s the sum-total of the action on TWO pages. Everything else came from an invisible talking head, rambling on about things for which the reader has been given no context. Why does it all matter to the reader? No way to tell without context. In short: In writing fiction, fiction isn’t just important, it’s EVERYTHING.

Some specifics:

• This morning, before I left my drive way, I was as normal as I was yesterday and the day before but this evening I'm just realizing I've been sitting in my driveway, car in drive, foot on the breaks and I'm dazed.

First: Never show anything but your “A” game, polished as highly as you can make it, so the one critiquing has an accurate idea of where you stand. In this, you have “drive way” and “driveway” in the same sentence, which says you wrote it, read it, but didn’t edit carefully.

One of the pitfalls of trying to “tell” a story, is that because you begin reading with full knowledge of the three issues I mentioned above, plus the backstory of all the characters, you automatically fill in any missing detail, and see what you expect to see. You’ll miss any problems a reader will have because you’re editing from the author’s seat instead of the reader’s. It’s why new writers are told so strongly, “Show, don’t tell.” By presenting the scene in the protagonist’s viewpoint, you’re forced to take their perceptions and needs into account, and use their agenda not the yours.

Why does this matter: As a reader sees this first line: Someone of unknown gender, age, situation is in a car for unknown reasons, believing that they are as “normal” as they were in the past. But given that we don’t know any of the unknowns, or even what this person thinks of as “normal,” why do we care? As presented, this isn’t someone in the car, in the moment they call “now.” It’s someone unknown, who’s not on the scene, talking ABOUT something we’ve not been made to care about. Yes, it makes perfect sense….to you For the reader, who just arrived? Not so much.

So…think back to the three things a reader needs and visualize that opening again. Think about what matters to your protagonist in their moment of now—and to a reader who knows only what the words suggest TO THEM. Do we care if the car is in a driveway, a parking lot, or on the street? No. That’s visual detail and our medium doesn’t show visual detail. So why mention it? Do we care what happened before the story began? Hell no, because there’s a lifetime of things you could mention. What matters to her in her “now” is the realization that she can’t make herself drive away. Anything else that doesn’t support that realization, directly—if it isn’t meaningfully set the scene, doesn’t develop character, or move the plot,is irrelevant TO YOUR CHARACTER. And story is what’s happening, not what once happened. You’re not on the scene, and using first person pronouns does NOT place the reader into the protagonist’s viewpoint because person and viewpoint are two VERY different things. For how viewpoint can involve the reader, this article may clarify: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/the-grumpy-writing-coach-8/

• Everything I ever thought true was flipped to a world of thoughts that I had never considered.

That’s like saying that mashed potatoes have no bones. It may be true, but so what? And: everything? So the sun didn’t rise? Fire doesn’t heat water anymore? Up is now down. And… You cannot, cannot, cannot, say, “you know what I mean,” to a reader, because they won’t. And given that the reader has no idea of what this unknown, ungendered person once thought true, what can changing it in an unknown way mean to a reader? The problem is that, as currently presented, this faceless narrator is talking TO the reader about things meaningful ONLY if we know them and their situation prior to the story’s opening.

• Stepping out of the car, I could smell the sweetness of the two magnolia trees in the back yard.

And the reader cares what can be smelled by someone they know nothing about, who didn’t drive to someplace unknown for reasons unknown? I know this hurts, and I wish my news was better, but you need to see how the reader perceives this approach to telling a story, and why you need to dig into the craft of writing fiction. After all, you can’t use the tool you don’t know exists, and why it’s necessary.

In our schooldays we write endless numbers of essays and reports, to prepare us to write the essays and reports the average employer requires. But all professions are learned after we’re given the general skills everyone needs. And writing fiction is a profession, a difficult one to master, at that. So some time spent curled up with a good book on fiction-writing technique, like Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict, or others you may find in the library’s fiction-writing section, would be a huge help. In fact, With Deb’s book you’ll even learn why a line like, “Merry smiled when she say Dirk in the doorway,” should be avoided. I’ve found that nowhere else, and it matters a great deal as to making the action seem real to a reader.

For an overview of the issues you need to look into, and perfect, you might dig around in the articles in my writing blog. They were written with the hopeful writer in mind.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

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