Dark: Chapter 1

 I lay in the forest in the middle of the night, listening to the sound of silence. No owl hooting, or wolf howling, like in the horror movies. I don’t even hear insect chirping. No, silence is worse than that. I’ve never liked the quiet. It makes me feel alone and far away. If I screamed no one would hear me, and no one would find me until it was too late. In these times, I feel even more vulnerable like this, because the monsters can hear me if they want to, but I can't hear them. They can see me, but I would not see their glowing yellow eyes until it was too late. And this time, the scary beings aren’t just shadows that disappear when I turn on my light, and that shy away when I crawl into bed with my parents. These shadows are very real, and will never go away until my body is still and cold. I hear a rustle of the bushes, and I tense, gripping onto my hunting knife harder as if it is a safety line grappling me to reality. Why does this sound make me more afraid? Doesn't it mean that this creature isn't so quiet, and isn't so dangerous? Well, I was more afraid now because even the quietest of creatures have to make a sound before they attack.

 I see the yellow eyes of the beast, and can slightly make out the hunched figure of it. It looks like a human, but smaller, hunchbacked, and with black, brittle, burned skin. No one truly knows where they came from, most of humanity barely had time to scramble and run, let alone to think. All we really know is that they are here, they are dangerous, and they are dead bent on killing us. The feral animal snarls, and I am frozen in fear.

The monster reaches its hand out to me, and for a moment our eyes lock. In those yellow eyes I see a glimpse of something human; I see understanding, and pain. So much pain, I have to look away. Suddenly, the kind of human in front of me becomes wild again, lounging at me as if to attack. I jump, and run. Faster and faster. I hear it behind me. I don't look, just run. Come on, keep running! Stop thinking like you’re the star in a stupid novel! Run, just run, think later! The dark thin figure is getting closer, leaning its scratchy claws out to cut me, to have me bleed out. Fresh meat, seasoned by its own still warm blood. I don't even have to try not to think about this, as animal instincts kick in and my mind goes blank. I don't even think about running. I just do it, as automatically as breathing comes. Breathing. Speaking of it, mine is getting faster now, I am starting to get tired. It's been a couple of minutes, and the thing is still following me, only just out of reach. Run, run, run. I run until I come to a clearing in a forest, with a little pond in the middle just big enough for swimming. Funny, 10 year old me would have thought this clearing a wonderful find, so I could go swimming all afternoon after school. I try to stop myself, but end up stumbling face-first into the water anyway. I am plunged into darkness. It's so cold, it feels like I am being needled with it in a million places at once. I am paralyzed for a second, thinking that I will drown until I realize that the water isn't so deep after all, I can stand up and have the water right up to my neck. I get up, and the beast is there, at the edge of the water, staring at me as if I am it's only chance at life, and I have been taken away from it. Suddenly, I hear a whizzing sound, then the beast is jerked to the left, crying in pain. The sound is immediately cut off when it hits a tree and goes silent. I freeze, more afraid than ever now. I knew that whatever hit that monster was something I should probably be afraid of, and I started to quickly wade as silently as I could to shore. Maybe I can run before they realize that I am here, I thought, right before the dart hit me. It didn't make me woozy, or knock me out, or kill me, or anything like that. Instead, a strange contraption at the end of the arrow opens, a net flies out, and wraps itself tightly around me in less than a second. Then, my net is yanked with amazing strength and speed to the right, where some men dressed like stormtroopers stood in a circle around me. Before I can fight, or struggle, or say anything, one of them sticks a needle into my arm, and I fall, my surroundings getting dimmer and dimmer into restless oblivion.

I am up high, in a tree branch that I recognize. I am 12 years old again, quick and nimble as I jump from one tree to another. I know every step by heart. Heck, I could probably do this in my sleep. I jump through my home forest, and as I get near the entrance to it, I start to slow. By the time I get to my big brother, I am as silent as a mouse. I drop down from a tree limb right in front of him, and he jumps back a little.

“Charlie! You have got to stop doing that!” I don't answer, as I am rendered speechless by my uncontrollable laughter.

This never gets old. Finally, when I have calmed down, I look up to see that my brother has stepped around me and continued to walk farther on the forest. I run up to him, and ask,

“So, Abe, what brings you here? I thought you were an inside guy.” I like to tease Abe about that. I think it is wimpy to stay inside all day as he does, with the controlled temperatures and plump pillows. I am more of pink cheeks in the cold, sleeping on a bed of leaves kind of girl.

Though I and the rest of my family are related by blood, it is almost as if I was adopted. My dad spends all his free time watching sports, my mom likes to paint in her studio, and my big brother spends all his time drinking soda and talking to his friends. I, on the other hand, am quite different. I think sports are boring, I do terrible art, and I hate soda.

“I wanted to see if you would pull that stunt again, and you did!” He said to me with a smile, mussing up my hair affectionately.

“Oh come on,” I said, “My tricks are the same old, same old to you, I'm not that gullible. Why did you really come out?”

I like to spend all my time outside, as I have since I could walk. My parents say I started climbing the forest evergreens when I was only 6, I started leaping through them at the age of 9, nearly giving my dad a heart attack. I now spend every single moment of my free time outside, only coming in for dinner and my homeschooling lessons in the mornings. He’s about to answer me when he stops walking. I see him tense, and he slowly pulls something out of his left pocket: A knife. I look at it in amazement. 

“Where did you-” I am cut off by a low raspy growl coming from the bushes nearby. 

I step back in surprise, and my big brother moves in front of me protectively. I gasp as a bony black creature steps out, right from some poor kid’s nightmares. It is a hunchback, with bright yellow eyes and no pupils. It is like a possessed black bear with no fur that walks on two legs. I watch in horror as my brother calmy flings his knife at its skull. There's a thwick, and a twang before the beast gurgles, falling to the ground, dead and cold as stone. 

Author's Note

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[JayG]

First, as presented, this is unreadable. You can indent paragraphs by using the menu-bar ruler in Word. Leading tab or spaces are deleted on HTML sites.

The alternative is to double-space paragraphs.

That aside... I wrote this critique before checking if I'd done on of your work before. I gave thought to erasing it, given that you don't react well to the comments you get, in spite of asking for comment.

But in the end, you really need to see your writing as a reader will, so I've posted it.

• I lay in the forest in the middle of the night, listening to the sound of silence.

You just told the reader that it’s silent. First, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the woods at night, and they’re not usually silent. But that aside, why would a reader want to know, or care, that someone unknown, in an unknown place/country, era, is awake at night noting that it’s quiet? Answer…they don’t. So, were this a submission to an agent of publisher, here is where the rejection comes out of the drawer.

• No owl hooting, or wolf howling, like in the horror movies.

But we already know this, because you said it’s silent. And, back to my time in the woods, there’s not usually a lot of owls sounding off, and you only hear wolves in certain areas and at certain times. Are we in such an area? Since there aren’t any howling, and none in the scene, who cares?

My point? You said it’s silent. So listing things that aren’t being heard is a waste of time. Readers aren’t looking for a dissertation. They want raw meat. They want something interesting happening that makes sense TO THEM.

Your first paragraph is a 229 word info-dump in which someone we know nothing about, not even to age, gender, or location, blathers on, and on, and on, about what matters to them, without ever giving the reader context, or, making the reader WANT to know. You talk about “monsters” without giving the reader a hint of what’s going on that’s meaningful to the reader. Why is s/he there? Who knows? Who is s/he? Unknown. Where are we in time and space? Unknowable. What led to his being there? Not even a hint. You know. The character knows. The monsters know. But the reader, the one you write this for, has not a clue of what’s going on. So...what's real and exciting as you read is meaningless to a reader, because you’re providing a chronicle of events, intermixed with running commentary by the narrator, told in overview and summation, when you should be making the reader live it, as the protagonist, from withinn the moment that character calls "now."

If you were writing a history, or a chronicle of events a part of a report, it would work. But how many people read reports and history books for fun? They inform, but fiction lives. A story places the reader INTO the story as the protagonist. They don’t want to be informed. As E, L. Doctorow puts it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

Your reader should be hearing the sounds,understanding them in the way the protasgonist does, so they know what they signify without having the narrator stride on stage to explain. But…how much time did your teachers spend on how to do that? None, because the skills of professions, like Commercial Fiction Writing, and the others, are acquired IN ADDITION to the general skills we’re given in school. Remember, they offer degree programs in ficton writing, so you have to assume that at least some of what’s taught there is necessary. Right?

I truly wish there was a more gentle way of breaking the news, but if it helps, you have lots of company—including me when I began recording my campfire stories—because we all leave our school days believing that we learned how to write. But in reality, we learned only one approach to writing: Nonfiction, to ready us for employment, we were assigned lots of reports and essays. But did a single teacher talk about how a scene on the page is so different from one on stage, why, and, the explain the elements that make it up? Did they mention why a scene ends in disaster? Because if you don’t truly understand what a scene is, how can you write what a reader will see as one?

So, while this is pretty lousy news, we’ll not address the problem we don’t see as being a problem. So while it hurts, knowing of the problem is the first step toward solving it.

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

Try a few chapters. I’m betting you’ll spend a lot of time saying, “But…that’s so obvious. How could I not have seen it for myself.

And if a kind of overview might help, the articles in my WordPress writing blog are based on what you’ll find in such a book.

So jump 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/