Discovery

Felicity has a not-so-ordinary start to her day. Chapter 1 of 5

“Auntie Felicity!”

“The door’s open, darling!” Felicity called back, smoothing the blanket on her bed back in to place.

“But she’s hurt!”

Felicity frowned and hurried to open the door to her cottage. When she did, she saw two people. One she expected: her 8-year-old niece, Penelope, who came to get eggs from her each week. The other, well…

It wasn’t every day a beautiful naked woman with an arrow lodged in her shoulder showed up on her front door step.

The woman was on her feet but barely. She swayed with every breath Felicity took.

“Penelope, go fetch the doctor. Tell him it’s an emergency,” Felicity said. She reached out and took the woman’s hand. The woman followed her lead and collapsed on to the couch. Penelope ran off in the direction of the rest of the village. 

Felicity took a moment to better study the woman. Her skin was dark and pocked by irregular scars. Her hair was black with leaves tangled up in it. Blood oozed slowly from her arrow wound and smeared along her arm. 

Felicity tore her eyes away and got the woman a blanket. The woman barely reacted, as Felicity gathered it around her.

“Auntie!”

“The door’s open!”

The door swung open, admitting Penelope and Doctor Lucca. 

“I’m going to take a wild stab and say she’s the patient?” Lucca said, sitting down beside the woman.

“You’d be correct. Penelope, fill up a pot with water for me,” Felicity said.

Penelope took a pot and took off running again.

Felicity started to make a fire while Lucca examined the woman.

“What’s her name?” he asked after a moment.

“I don’t know. She hasn’t said a word since she’s been here.”

“How much to you know about her?”

“Nothing. Penelope showed up with her, she collapsed on the couch, and I sent Penelope to fetch you.”

Lucca hummed.

“Is she going to be okay?”

“I’m optimistic. She’s lost a lot of blood but the arrow didn’t hit anything vital. Will she be staying with you?”

“I don’t think she’s in a state to go anywhere else,” Felicity half-laughed.

Lucca chuckled in response. “Do you have towels I can use? Ones that you don’t mind getting blood on.”

“Let me see,” Felicity replied. The fire finally took to the log she was adjusting, and she left it to rummage through her cabinet. “How many do you need?”

“Just one or two.”

“Three it is,” Felicity replied, handing them over.

“Auntie Felicity!”

“Come in!” 

Penelope came in, holding the pot proudly.

“Thank you, Penelope,” Felicity said, taking it from her and setting it over the fire.

“Is she going to be okay?" Penelope asked, sitting at Lucca's feet.

“Yes, she is. You did a good thing getting her all this help. But I need to ask a couple questions so I can best help her. Are you ready?”

Penelope looked at Lucca expectantly.

“About what time did you find her?”

“About 8 in the morning. She was right on the path to Auntie Felicity’s.”

“And once you found her, what did you do?”

“I asked her if she needed help. She didn’t say anything, but I told her that Auntie Felicity lives nearby and that she could help. She followed me all the way here.”

“And she didn’t say anything to you?”

“She did say something, but I didn’t understand any of it.”

“Okay, thanks for that.”

“Is that really going to help you fix her?” Penelope asked.

“Yes. I need all the information I can. But now I need to concentrate so I can get this arrow out of her.”

“Okay, I’ll be quiet.”

Lucca looked up to Felicity with pleading eyes.

“Come on, Penelope. Doctor Lucca needs as few people around as possible so he can help her. And your mom’s going to start worrying if you don’t get back soon with your eggs.”

“But I want to help.”

“You’ve already helped a lot, and now you can help by letting the grown-ups do their jobs.”

Penelope pouted but took the eggs from Felicity and left the cottage.

Felicity leaned against the wall, watching Lucca. His deft fingers cleaned away the blood and felt around the wound.

“Hello, ma’am. My name is Doctor Lucca. Can you understand me?”

The woman nodded, her breath hitching from even the subtle movement.

“Great. I’m going to take this arrow out of your arm. It’s going to hurt, but I need you to hold still, okay?”

She nodded again.

“Alright, deep breath. One, two, three.” Lucca got his hands around the arrow, and the woman screamed but didn’t move a muscle. Lucca threw the arrow aside and began cleaning the wound.

It seemed like an age to Felicity before Lucca was finished, but finally the wound was covered, and Lucca wiped the worst of the blood off of his fingers. The woman was asleep, shivering in the warm cottage.

“That’s all I can do for her for now. I’ll come back in the evening to check on her,” Lucca said.

“Can I give her anything?”

“Some water and bread. Don’t give her too much until I can talk to her.”

“I meant anything for pain.”

“Not until I can talk to her. Keep her warm and come get me if she seems worse at all.”

“I’ll see you this evening, then.”

“Take care.”

Lucca showed himself out of the cottage, leaving me alone with the woman. Felicity threw leaves in to the pot to make tea and sank down in to the armchair across from her, watching the flickering movements of her closed eyes.

Reviews

[JayG]

In constructing this story, your approach is outside-in, but should be inside-out. What I mean by that is that you, the narrator, are assigning actions and speech to the character, as needed, instead of letting them respond as a function of their perceptions, personality, and the situation. As an example:

Think of yourself. You’ve discovered someone who’s wounded, and take them to someone’s house to get help. You knock and call, they tell you to come in. Do you:
a) Shout, “I need help!”
b) Shout, “I need you here!”
c) Shout, “I found someone who need help. Hurry!
c) Shout! “But she’s hurt!” to someone who doesn’t know who “she” is, and had been given no reason to use the word “but.”

And when the doctor arrives and finds a naked woman with an arrow in her shoulder, why would he ask the one who’s not wounded what the injured woman’ name is? In fact, why would the doctor not react to that serious a wound with medical, not verbal actions? Hospitals ask for registration information. The village doctor treats problems, first.

You’re letting your knowledge of what’s to come, of backstory, and that the woman doesn’t speak their language, influence the actions of the man who doesn’t yet know any of it.

The problem you face isn’t a matter of your talent, or how well you write. It’s that you, like most hopeful writers, are using the writing skills we were given in school—honed by endless assignments to write reports—to write fiction. And the approach to writing reports? Outside in, as is all nonfiction writing.

And because of that nonfiction approach, your focus is on the progression of events, which is how we write history books. Fiction is written from the inside out, with a focus on the internal reactions and motivations of our protagonist. We must involve the reader, emotionally, and do that early, or they walk away.

The problem that’s making it more difficult is that for you the story works. For you, uniquely, the narrator’s performance is live, the “voice” you hear is filled with exactly the right emotion. For the reader? a text-to-speech translator. A very powerful editing tool that will help overcome that is to have your computer read the story to you.

Another is to acquire the skills our schooling doesn’t provide, the emotion-based and character-centric skills of the working fiction-writer—the skills given to those who are working to earn a degree in Commercial Fiction-Writing. That make a HUGE difference. Using them, you will live the scene as you write it, as the protagonist, taking into account that character’s background, personality, objectives, and more.

After all, if the reader doesn’t view the scene exactly as the protagonist does, can they truly understand why they act and speak as they do? And remember, the reader sees and reacts to everything that’s said and done, BEFORE they learn what the character will do.

So, do you want the reader to react as themselves, in a way that might be different from what you have the character do, or do you want them to react as the character is about to, to make them feel they’re living the story?

To do that, though, you need the skills of the Fiction Writing Profession. And that takes study and practice. But...the study is like going backstage at the theater, and the practice is writing stories that the reader will like a lot better.

So... Personally? I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found to date at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

It’s free to read or download, so try a few chapters. I think you’ll be amazed at the difference it will make in your writing.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334