Emptiness

A man struggles with depression, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety.

The soles of his tattered tennis shoes scraped the ground as he trudged forward. His legs moved slowly, his gait with a lack of life. He walked as if gravity was gradually winning the battle against him. In the stomach pocket of his cigarette burned hoodie was a pill bottle that he was fiddling with between his fingers. Every few seconds the shifting and clicking of sleeping pills colliding could heard within the foggy, dark air.

He felt like he was dead, for his emotions were nonexistent. There was an emptiness in his chest, as if his heart had been removed. His mind was spiraling in the way the mind does in a sick, deep fever.

 The world seemed to be swirling within a dark and gothic dream which he could not escape. The paved road and the forest beside it all blurred together. Clouds twisted themselves into the shapes of abstract monsters that he felt were watching him and plotting against him. The bark of the birch trees was forming sharp teeth, eager to devour him. Roots and spiky plants were trying to grab his legs and pull him to the earth.

For a little over a decade, he had lived like this. His mind had created objects for him to fear, made him hate himself, and want to kill himself through every moment of his existence.

Due to several mental hospitalizations, he had never had the opportunity to end it all, but tonight he had escaped.

Once he felt that he had walked along the highway far enough, he fell down to the ground and sat cross-legged. Setting the full water bottle next to him, he proceeded to pull out the bottle of sleeping pills. He pushed down on the cap and twisted it, and it opened with a click. Dumping a handful of pills into his hand, he emptied a bit of water into his throat, and tossed the pills down. He repeated this until the entirety of the pill bottle was gone.

And so then, he laid down on his back on the side of the highway and waited. He watched the stars watch him. They wanted to shoot fire at him and kill him. Soon he felt drowsy, and his vision became increasingly blurry and unclear. For this one moment, he had felt peace. No longer did he see the eyes of the stars and feel panic. No longer did he worry if the trees would devour him and grow from eating his body. It would all be over soon. Soon he would feel the calmness of death.

A few moments later, his heart stopped, and his eyes shut, for now he was truly dead.

Reviews

[JayG]

• The soles of his tattered tennis shoes scraped the ground as he trudged forward. His legs moved slowly, his gait with a lack of life. He walked as if gravity was gradually winning the battle against him...

First: If he's not important enough to have a name, why should a reader care what happens to him? Stories are about people we've been made to care about. not events.

Next: This is an essay about a person in a picture you're viewing. Why would I, someone reading fiction as an entertainment, want to know how someone I know nothing about walks? Why would I want to know more about someone who's in an unknown place, doing something unknown, for unknown reasons? That's description, not story, and you've failed to give a reason to WANT to know what you're saying by not setting the reader into the scene AS the protagonist.

In other words, you're explaining what YOU see, adding in information you think the reader should know, not giving me an avatar to care about. That matters a great deal because unless the reader is made to care they won't turn to page two. Lecture them for a single paragraph and they're gone. But make them WANT that information...

So in the end, you spent 139 words saying, in effect: "An unknown male died of an overdose of unknown drugs on the street today." From a reader's viewpoint, what else matters?

My point is that a story isn't a list of what happened, related by an external and dispassionate voice (dispassionate because the reader can't hear the emotion in the voice of the narrator as you can). A story is a thing to vicariously live...AS THE PROTAGONIST. But to do that we don't need the sequence of events, we have to be made to become the character in real-time, face the same situation, and make the same decisions for the same reasons. Only then will we care what happens next.

No way in hell can the nonfiction writing skills our schooldays give us do that. They're made for writing a report. When used in an attempt to write fiction they usually yield something like this.

The fact that our teachers never tell us that we're learning only nonfiction writing skills (remember all the reports and essays we wrote?) is why so many hopeful writers fall into the same trap. So you're far from alone in that.

And the solution is simple enough: add the tricks of fiction-writing to your writing toolkit, and practice them into perfection matching your existing skills.

Is that easy? No. If it was we'd all be famous writers. But on the other hand, if you don't take the step of acquiring professional knowledge, no one will ever accuse you of being one.

So hit the local library system's fiction writing department and devour a half dozen books You'll be glad you did.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

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