The Strays

Used the story prompt “You find strange, muddy footprints leading up to your front door.”

Hard as I’ve tried to fight it, I know I won’t fall back asleep unless I take a piss, but that reality doesn’t stop me from trying in vain. God d****t.  I throw my feet on the floor, stretch my aching back, and hobble to the bathroom on feet that feel like they’re on fire.  I lean against the wall so I don’t keel over from the pain - which seems excessive for only having played two rounds of golf three days ago, but when you get to be into your fifties, the pain never really does seem to go away. Nor does the constant need to piss throughout the night…

I head to the kitchen and grab an ice pack for my wrist, which I’m pretty sure is going to hurt from this day until my last. I’m limping back to the bedroom when suddenly I hear a knock at the door. I glance at the oven clock and see that it’s 2:46, which really means that it’s 1:44 because I never changed clocks, and it’s always been two minutes slow. Who would be here at this time? I creep to the door and stare out into the night. I flip the porch light on and it illuminates the garden, but no one’s there.

“Liam?” I call out.

"Everything okay out there?” He groans from the living room, his usually subtle Irish accent seeming more accentuated than usual.

 

Everything looks quiet out there. Must have been in my head.

“Yeah, everything’s okay,” I shrug. Wait. What are those? I lower my eyes and see half a dozen sets of strangely small muddy footprints leading up to my front door. S**t. They’re back. The Strays are the most ruthless gang of Alien cats in the area. There’s six of them. Cute as can be, but dangerous, devious little critters. It’s said that their leader, Mittens, only drinks milk made from ground up human bones.

At once the windows come crashing in and shards of shattered glass slice into my eyes rendering me completely blind. I scream out in agony. There’s meowing everywhere.

“LIAM!” I roar. I can hear him on his feet in a second, he c***s his gun no more than a second after that and I know… It’s go time. What these cat burglars don’t know is that the guy on my couch happens to be Liam Neeson. That’s right m***********s. The guy from Taken. And he just so happens to be one of my oldest, dearest friends, and golfing buddies.

  I can’t see them, but I can hear their purring. I envision a stand off in my mind. Those cats with their little Alien ray guns and Liam, with his gun pointed at them.

 

“Say it, Liam.”

There’s silence before one cat meows something to the others, "Meow?” It sounds like he asked a question, but I’m not completely fluent in their language so I can’t be sure.

“Come on, Liam. Just say the damn line.” 

   

Again there's silence. Seriously? Not even now? He hates doing it. He used to love it, but after having said it so many times now he just feels cheap every time those words come from his mouth. Ugh. Fine. I’ll do it.

“Alright you little kitty b******s. What you dumb little s***s don’t know is that he has many skills. Skills that he can use to end your entire existence at a moment’s notice. Get out of here now, or he will kick you. He will punch you. He will use your own little phazer guns against you. He will f**k you up.”

“Drink this,” Liam whispers, placing something in my hand. I guzzle it down and my vision returns to me.

“Meow,” one cat says, and I recognize that cat terminology. It means good luck. I was wrong before. Now, it’s on. The first gunshot goes off in an instant and is followed by a haunting meoooooow. One down.  I reach for a frying pan on the stove and flail it wildly, hitting an Alien cat. Two down. But that son of a b***h still has lives left and springs into me with his claws out. He slices at me, tries to gouge at my eyes - and all the while Liam’s taken out two, three, four. I tear the cat from my face, grab him by the tail and slam him into the counter. Five down? He springs back to life, reaches for his alien blaster gun and fires at me. Liam dives across the counter, fires a bullet mid-slide, shoves me out the way. The bullet flies straight through the cat’s eyes. Ain’t no coming back from that one.

Only Mittens remains. His little gun quivers in his hand as he moves it back and forth between Liam and I.

“Drop it,” I say, holding the frying pan behind my head, ready to let it fire.

“Put down the gun, and I’ll let you live,” Liam says. Mittens relinquishes his gun immediately, puts his paws up in the air and surrenders.

“Now that’s a good kitty,” Liam says, reaching down to pet Mittens. He’s a pretty good guy, Liam Neeson. He kept Mittens, and they’ve been inseparable ever since.

Reviews

[JayG]

You write well—though given your profession, that’s expected. Unfortunately, given your profession, you’re also hit hard by a misunderstanding that you’re helping to perpetuate, which is that the skill we call “writing,” learned and practiced through our school-days, is the skill referred to in the profession of Fiction-Writing. Unfortunately, the thing we universally forget is that professions are learned in addition to the general skill set often referred to as, The Three R’s. And Fiction-Writing is a profession, and a difficult one to master, at that.

Think back to last year. What was the ratio of reports and essays that you, and the other teachers assigned, compared to fiction assignments? That will tell you how well prepared the high school graduate is to write fiction.

Look at your own history. In all of your school years, through college and including the creative writing courses you took, how much time did your teachers spend on tag usage, the three issues we need to address quickly on entering any scene, the short-term scene-goal, and the differences between a scene on the page and one on stage and screen?

Did even one teacher explain why a scene on the page ends in disaster for the protagonist, and why? Most people who leave their high school years have no idea of what the elements of a scene on the page are. And how can we write a scene if we don’t know what it is? Reading doesn’t help. We no more learn the techniques of creating fiction by reading it than eating teaches us to be a chef.

But because no one ever mentions that fiction and nonfiction, with dramatically differing goals, must use a different methodology, we make the logical assumption that writing-is-writing, and that we have that covered.

If only…

The purpose of universal education, from when it began at the start of the Industrial Revolution, is to provide employers with a pool of potential workers who possess a useful and predictable set of skills. And what kind of writing do most employers require? Reports and essays, which, like all nonfiction, have an informational experience as their goal. So it’s author-centric and fact-based. In a dispassionate voice the author explains and reports.

Look at your story. In it, an external narrator reports and explains, primarily in overview. Changing the personal pronouns from “he” to “I” doesn’t change the fact that we are hearing about the events, not living them in real time from within the protagonist's moment of "now." And transcribing the words of a verbal storyteller, as you do, cannot add life to the words because verbal storytelling is a performance skill. How we tell the story—our performance—provides nearly all the emotional content. But your reader can neither hear nor see the narrator. Have your computer read the story aloud to hear how different what the reader gets is from what you “hear” as you read it.

Another problem is that because you know the backstory, the situation, and setting before you begin to write, the outside-in approach you use works against you. There are things that are so obvious to you that you’ll foget the reader needs them. Then, when you read the story the details are automatically called to mind as you read and the story works perfectly.

Look at the opening paragraph, not as the author, but as a reader who just arrived, and who has only what the words you’ve chosen suggest to them, based on their life-history, not yours.

• Hard as I’ve tried to fight it, I know I won’t fall back asleep unless I take a piss, but that reality doesn’t stop me from trying in vain.

Okay, someone unknown, in an unknown location. Just tried to urinate but couldn’t. (.4 m/g of Tamulosin combined with the Saw Palmetto extract known as Beta Sitosterol helps a lot). That’s not what you meant, but it is what you said. And the logical result of you you said, is also a ruptured bladder because the man can't urinate. Remember, the reader probably hasn’t experienced the result of an enlarged prostate, or even knows what you’re talking about. (See what I mean as it working for you because you possess context before you read the first line?)

• I throw my feet on the floor, stretch my aching back, and hobble to the bathroom on feet that feel like they’re on fire.

So you just told the reader that for no known reason, but probably related to that inability to urinate, the speaker is unable to walk normally. Again, not what you meant, but it is what you said. Will you clarify? It doesn’t matter because you cannot retroactively remove confusion, and there is no second first-impression.

• I lean against the wall so I don’t keel over from the pain - which seems excessive for only having played two rounds of golf three days ago, but when you get to be into your fifties...

Based on this, someone we know nothing about is in pain because they overdid it on the golf course? Aside from the fact that pain that severe three days after taking a long walk seems absurd. But that aside, from that point forward his feet are never mentioned again. So the trouble urinating, the foot pain, and the wrist pain are irrelevant to the story. So why include them. all they did was to slow the narrative and delay the actual story events. In the words of the great Alfred Hitchcock: “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” Add to that the words of James Schmitz: “Don’t inflict the reader with irrelevant background material—get on with the story.”

In short, all of this is the end result of the mistake we all make on leaving school of believing we learned a skill useful to the fiction-writer.

The solution? Simplicity itself: just add the skills you weren’t aware you needed to your existing nonfiction skills.

Unfortunately, simple and easy aren’t interchangeable words, so there is a fair amount of study and practice involved. But that’s true of acquiring any profession, so it’s more a rite of passage than a disaster. And, you’ll spent a lot of time slapping your forehead and saying, “But that’s so…it’s so obvious, why didn’t I see it?” That’s fun, though only till the tenth time, when you start saying, “Damn…not again!” But in general, if you were meant to write fiction you’ll find the learning fascinating, and filled with the joy of discovery. And you’ll LOVE the way your protagonist becomes your co-writer. If you’ve not had a character place hands on hips and say, “Do what? Hell no. I’m smarter than that. In fact, here’s what I’d do,” your characters aren’t real to either you or the reader.

So…this was a lot, and a bit like trying to take a sip from a running fire hose, I’m sure—certainly not what you hoped for after all the work you’ve put into writing and editing, though it is what you need to know. After all, you, and everyone you know, have been choosing fiction created with those professional techniques since you began to read. So you expect to see the result of their use in your choices, now. Of more importance, it’s what your reader expects in your work. Their desire for is forthe kind of experience that E. L. Doctorow commented on with: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

So, some suggestions: First, for a bit of overview on the issues that differ between fiction and nonfiction, you might check a few of the articles in my WordPress writing blog. They’re meant as an introduction to the issues. Then, if the investment in time seems worth the effort, go to the pros for the nuts-and-bolts issues of creating scenes that sing to the reader, and how to sew them together into a cohesive whole. The local library system’s fiction-writing section can be a huge resource. But my personal recommendation is that you start with the best book on the subject I’ve found to date, “Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. You can download it at the page I link to below. Use the leftmost of the three buttons (it’s the one in Russian) to select the format your reader requires.
https://ru.b-ok2.org/book/2640776/e749ea

So there you go. Dig in. I think you’ll like it. And if you do, you can do me a favor: tell your students that that there are other approaches to writing. You’ll save those that try to write fiction hours of practicing bad habits into concrete.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

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

[Davidgeo]

This is going to be underappreciated. Well done none the less, you've got skills. Be self confident enough to acknowledge that without some fucktarded a*s clown telling you so.

Don't stop what you're doing.

[Brian Aguiar]

Thank you! That's awesome to hear. I'm just trying to mix it up and not be afraid to step outside the box every now and then. Thanks for the encouragement!

[Davidgeo]

It was more awesome to read. I really mean it when I say it …. don't f*****g stop what you're doing. You have a certain kind of talent that is not repeatable.

[Davidgeo]

… good luck with that. How ever you choose to use it.

[Brian Aguiar]

You just inspired the hell out me. Thank you!

[Davidgeo]

Outstanding.