It Only Takes One Bullet Part 1

(Warning

This Chapter is rated Mature and may contain material unsuitable for readers under 18.)

“The man who kills a man kills a man.

The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

 

Emily would kill me if she saw me smoking, Doctor Jack Tomb told himself standing outside the back of a secret military base, but I think she might understand for today. The bitter wind of the North Carolina Mountains raced between the trees, chasing the leaves like children playing a game of tag. The wind was the only sound in the cold morning air outside of the few birds left this far north before the winter comes marching south. They said it was going to be a cold winter, but Jack wasn’t sure it mattered to him or anyone, not anymore.

            He listens to the birds’ cheer on the leaves trying their best to tag the wind, but the dying colors of the world always fell short in the end. The little game of tag was a needed distraction from trying to convince the savior of the world to save, well, the bloody world. It was a good way to start the day, or was it a good to end his day? He wasn’t sure anymore. He has been up for what, two days? No, three days now. He lit up another cigarette letting the one in his hand fall to the stone floor, his boots quickly crushing the life out of it.

            He found a sick enjoyment in killing the thing killing him, but he knew the smoke always got the last laugh.

            If you get lung cancer, Emily would always say when he came home smelling of smoke, I’m going to kick your a*s all the way to the pearly gates.

            It’s why he stopped smoking, he was truly afraid she could find a way to keep her word and of course, there was his daughter, Jessica Lee Tomb. Lee was his mother’s middle name, and he wanted to keep the name in the family. The day Jessica was born was the day he stopped smoking.

            Seven years ago, in two weeks and he hadn’t even thought about smoking until a week ago. He glanced down at the burning paper and the ghostly smoke puffing from the end. She would kill me, he told himself once more.

            It didn’t matter much anymore if he died of lung cancer or a bullet to the head. The whole world was dying, and no one knew how to stop it. Some damn virus was released by a death cult of terrorists wanting to bring on a new world about. Kill the world, and the Lord would have to come back to save it.

            Right?

            Jack and everyone else guessed not. He figures the Lord was looking down on them right now shaking his head, thinking, you can’t make me come home. He was not on our time but us on His time and in the end, we were all going to go face Him.

            Jack believes it to be true, even now he still held his deep beliefs in the Lord. The Good Book as a guide to life and a way to have a relationship with the one who created us all, yeah, it still held true in Jack’s heart.

The words on that book give him solace the a*****e, who killed us, will be judged for their actions.

            He inhaled the last of the dying smoke thinking about the first days the virus spun to life. The group of madmen and he guessed woman too had hit one major city in the world, London. They set off a few small bombs, not so small for the people they killed in the explosions. The bombs only killed fourteen people or were it fifteen? Jack couldn’t remember now, he barely remembered then because his mind was somewhere else. People dying all around the world meant little to him, it happened every day, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

            Well, not then anyway, he was trying to save the world or at least help it. He was going to be a true superhero and do some real good in the world before his end.

            After the smoke had cleared from the small attack, people in the city of London started to get sick and die fast. People were falling dead in the streets, and the hospitals were overwhelmed, and then the city was shut down, but it was too late. Someone got out of the city, took a plane home, to Japan than from there the rest of the world. Days later reports of the virus were in every city in the world, and nothing was stopping it. No one had any idea how to slow the Beast down, and the powers that be did the only thing power knew how to do. It took over, started to shut ports, airports, cities, borders, and everything else down.

            The world suddenly became one massive graveyard or holding cell for the dying. The end was here, and all anyone could do was stare at it in dismay as it stared calmly back at them.

            The virus started to pick up colorful names like the Beast, the Choker, but Jack’s favorite name was Captain Trips. Someone news reporter had read a little too much Stephen King and Jack always liked “The Stand,” it was King’s best book if you asked him.

            Wonder if he thought it was ironic, he died by Captain Trips? Jack asked himself as he let the latest smoke feel the weight of his boot.

            He didn’t reach for another one, he wanted to but now wasn’t the time. He breathed in the cool air staring up into the sky. The world of man was about to die, our bodies washed away in a sea of disease and sickness, and all that will be left is the animals to roam once again.

            None of the world’s animals seem to be infected by the Beast which led every scientist in the world to waste days looking at their cats and dogs. It was a massive mistake because the virus was for humans alone and it was only killing them. But at least, Jack thought with a smile, his dog will be live through all this.

            The steel door to his right opened in the solid concrete building, and a tall man with pale blue eyes stepped out. He was as wide as he was tall and sadly hadn’t shaved in weeks. A thick black beard was starting to grow, but no one in the base cared.

            “Sir,” Lieutenant Holiday said, “they are here.”

            Jack smiled breathing in the air once more before heading back into the underground base. His family had made it to him, safe and alive, at least for now.  

Reviews

[JayG]

I’m sure what I’m about to say isn’t what you hoped to hear, but I thought you would want to know.

But before I began, and because this may sting a bit, let me say that NOTHING I’m about to say has anything to do with you, your talent and potential as a writer, or the story. It is, 100% about the craft of the fiction writer—the leaned part of our profession.

To understand the problem I saw, look at the opening, not as yourself—someone who knows who we are, where we are, and what’s going on—but as a reader, who knows only what the words suggest to them, based on THEIR background.

• Emily would kill me if she saw me smoking, Doctor Jack Tomb told himself standing outside the back of the main building,

1. You hear this in the proper tone, as you read, because you know the backstory. But for a reader: the opening sentence has someone they know nothing about, of unknown gender, age, and situation, saying that someone not yet introduced wouldn’t want them to smoke. Perhaps if I knew what she was to the character; perhaps if I knew why it mattered to them; perhaps if I knew where we were in time and space, or why that person was there—and why it should matter to ME… If I knew any of those things this would make sense as it’s read. But the reader doesn’t. And explaining who it is AFTER it’s read can’t retroactively remove confusion, or give a second first-impression.

My point is to always provide context either before, or as a line is read. Fail that and the reader closes the cover

2. And, you’re way over-explaining things, which slows the read and dilutes the impact. Every unnecessary word you remove makes the act of reading faster, and therefore, have more impact. Stories should come at the reader at high speed, remember, not saunter, and deal in things that don’t move the plot, don’t matter to the protagonist in a way understandable to the reader, or don’t meaningfully set the scene.

In line with that, doesn’t “standing outside the back of the main building,” reduce to “behind the main building,” with no loss of meaning? Eight words become four with no loss of meaning.

But of more importance, why does a reader care if we’re behind, in front of, or on the roof of an unknown building, at this point? Unlike you, they can neither see nor visualize the building you have in mind. Think about what matters to the plot or the character in the moment that person calls now. Anything you talk about that doesn’t relate to that, places you on the stage lecturing the reader on things the one living the story doesn’t care about, making you a guest lecturer, blocking the reader’s view of the protagonist, not a storyteller.

The short version: Begin with story, not history or trivia. As James Schmitz said, “Don’t inflict the reader with irrelevant background material—get on with the story.”

You follow this paragraph with a weather report. Why does a reader care that there’s a breeze? Not unless the protagonist has reason to react to it. You described what you see happening in the scene, but your character isn’t reacting to the weather. So why would it matter to a reader? It’s not your story, remember, it’s his. Your reader wants to know what matters to him in the moment he calls “now,” not what you see on a TV screen they have no access to. Think about it. If I described what can be seen in the room where I’m typing this you would know what’s there, but would that be even remotely close to seeing it? Would it give you a feel for the place? Hell no. To give a reader a fraction of what they would see in an eyeblink’s time in person, would take pages of words, and talk about things your character is mostly ignoring. Readers want to be IN the scene with him, in real-time and living HIS story not hearing about it second-hand from someone whose performance they can’t see, and whose “voice” carries no emotion.

You’re trying to make the telling more interesting and immediate to the reader by being “literary,” in describing the scene, and by using present tense. But that doesn’t make up for the fact that the viewpoint is yours, when it should be his. And I’m not talking about POV as defined by personal pronouns, I mean how he views the scene. To see how viewpoint drives the reader’s perception of the scene, you might want to look at this article:
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/the-grumpy-writing-coach-8/

As an external storyteller who knows the story before you read the first word, you automatically fill in the blanks. You know that Emily is his wife. You know that she’s not with him. You know his family history. Because you do, you have context. The reader? Not so much.

Think about it. What happened to the protagonist in the 1086 words you posted? The man smoked two cigarettes and came to the conclusion that his wife wouldn’t like him doing it. That’s it. The rest had him tapping his foot and waiting to begin doing something interesting, while you, someone no on the scene and not in the story, talked about things that happened before the story began. Part of it was trivia about him and part a synopsis. But if the past matters all that much, why didn’t you begin the story there? Who wants to read more than four pages of history in order to read a story? Answer: no one.

Want the reader to know al that backstory? Begin the story with a harried doctor as the protagonist, working up a patient, while complaining to a colleague that it looks like everyone in the city has come down with something. Let him explain the symptoms to this doctor who is about to replace him, and warn him of the precautions to take. It takes only a paragraph or two to do that, and show that the protagonist is overworked and exhausted. That will give the magnitude of the problem, and a remark that it’s in other cities as well, will show the reader that it’s major. Then, as the protagonist walks toward where a cot awaits, have him work to suppress a cough, fail, and clutch at his chest in pain.

Do we care how the plague was spread, or need to know? No. If it matters to the story let someone have reason to explain that, and why it matters, in a necessary conversation. In short, as Sol Stein observed: “In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.”

Bottom line: You’re working hard on this. You have the story, the desire, and the perseverance needed. But like everyone who comes to writing fiction, you have only the tools of writing we’re given in school, plus the storytelling skills we use every time someone says, “So how was your weekend?” But neither can work in our medium.

Although no one tells us, every writing technique we learned in school was meant to make us ready to be productive, and employed, adults. To aid in that we did a lot of writing that mirrors what employers will need from us: letters, reports, and essays—all nonfiction applications. And those few fiction assignments we were given were graded by someone who probably had sold not a word of their own writing, and who learned their writing skills in the same classrooms. Our teachers might have told us that there was an entire body of knowledge related to a parallel but very different set of writing techniques, but who was there to tell them?

Here’s the thing: nonfiction is meant to inform, so it’s author-centric and fact-based. But fiction’s goal is to make the act-of-reading entertaining on every page, beginning with page one. Fail that and they don’t turn to page two. So fiction must be character-centric and emotion-based—a writing style not mentioned as existing during our school days—one that must be learned.

So the bad news is that we all leave our school days as well qualified to write fiction as to work as an account, or design a bridge. The worse news is that at least we know we can’t design that bridge without a bit more knowledge, so we seek it. Most of us only learn of the problem with fiction when someone like me, who started out making the same mistakes, comes along to break the news. So… Surprise!

I truly wish there were some more gentle way of doing this, because, in reality, since we all face and overcome the problem on the path to publication, it’s really no big deal. And of more importance, it’s fixable. The solution is simple, though not easy.

Simple, because all we need do is learn that alternative set of writing skills and add it to our existing skill-set. It’s not easy, though, because it took us a lot of time to perfect the skills we leave school with, and they are going to get in the way when we try using those new skills, because it “feels wrong.”

But again, everyone who became successful overcame the problem, so you can, too. For all we know, you’re awash in writing talent. But those with untrained talent are no different than those without talent (and talent may be overrated given the number of people making a living at writing, while being called no-talent hacks). So head to the local library’s fiction writing section and devour a few books on technique. And while you’re there, or on Amazon, seek the names, Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham, or Debra Dixon on the cover. They’re pure gold.

For a kind of overview of the issues, you might look around in the writing articles in my blog. But whatever you do, hang in there, and keep on writing.

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

[CLCurrie]

Thanks for the review and there is a lot you pointed out that I need to work on, thanks.