One - Riles

Christopher Riles was not a dishonest man.

Or, at least, that’s what he told himself as the cashier swiped his wife’s credit card.

Ex-wife, corrected a voice in the back of his head.

Riles’ thoughts were his own, but that voice in the corner of his mind was definitely Jennifer’s, ground into his subconscious by eleven tiresome years of marriage. There was no way it couldn’t be hers; he’d met no one else in his 32 years of life that rose her voice to any volume necessary to be heard, leapt at the opportunity to argue, and generally made it her goal to be loathed by everyone she crossed.

Not yet, he fired back. She’s not my ex-wife yet, and as long as her brunch-going, lacquer-nailed, Pilates-fanatic wagon is hitched to mine, I’m not broke.

Not broke yet, crooned the voice. Jennifer. Mrs. Riles. B***h. And what’ll happen then, Riles ol’ boy? What’ll you do when I stick a foreclosure sign in your yard and also a foot up your a*s?

Riles gritted his teeth. The cashier snapped a large bubble of chewing gum, frowned dully when the register chirped in response to the card, and raised her vacant eyes to meet his.

“D’ya have anotha card? Says this one’s suspended or somethin,” she drawled. Her gaze left his to lazily follow a fly that descended upon a patch of spilled fountain soda on the counter.

“Susp--yeah, here try any of these and see what’ll work,” muttered Riles, shaking a stack of plastic out of his wallet onto the warped vinyl. A gold Visa slid into the soda puddle and sent the fly skittering across the counter.

Crack--she sucked another bubble into her mouth. Riles was randomly repulsed by the gesture. He was repulsed by the cola on the countertop turned syrupy in the Texas heat, by the sweat stains under the cashier’s bulging arms, by the pitiful column of slightly-less-than-boiling-hot air that a revolving tabletop fan regularly pushed into his face--it stank of dollar store perfume and stale gas station pizza. His head began to hurt as his eyes trailed the pink wad she was gnashing between her teeth.

An angry electronic beep snapped Riles out of his reverie. “These’re all declined, missa. Fraid you’re gon have to pay in cash.”

F**k.

Riles took a deep breath and flashed the cashier a smile. He dug around in his suit pockets as if he expected to find some forgotten bills crumpled up there.

Please tell me you’re a sucker for blue eyes, Bessy. Please oh please tell me I can still pass for the high school Riles, or maybe even college Riles, even though by then the tow chains were just starting to loop his wagon to Jennifer’s. He could smile his way out of murder, that heartbreaking son of a b***h. Cool Chris Riles. Come on, Petunia. I’m smiling for you, can’t you smile for me? I’m still Cool Chris. What do ya say, sweetness?

The cashier’s chewing jaws slowed, and then, after what seemed like forever, she mirrored his smile. Meanwhile, his fingers were brushing past nothing but a tube of Chapstick and an ages-old coffee shop receipt.

That’s it, old girl. Come on into the corral, says the cowboy.

“Y’know, missa, I think I seen ya on a magazine while I was stocking the shelves. Real pretty eyes you got,” she chattered. She hadn’t given so much as a glance to the register screen in several moments.

Riles hadn’t tried this hard to charm someone into confusion in a long, long time. He widened his grin, knowing that his eyes were crinkling in the corners in a way that females tended to be fond of.

“Oh yeah, I was on a cover a time or two,” he said.

Or ten. There had been a point where looking at a magazine stand felt like stuttering on a broken record; Riles’ thousand-watt smile could be seen side-by-side-by-side on Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and People.

Was that really me? Just ten months ago? For a moment his grin sagged at the corners, but he promptly yanked it back into position.

Yes, but in another life. A Chris before the chrysalis. Except then I was a butterfly, now I’m the caterpillar. I had wings and ripped them off myself.

 

Author's Note

This chapter isn't finished yet, but I'm looking for feedback thus far.

Reviews

[JayG]

What you're doing is telling the reader a story. And by that I mean that you, the storyteller, are talking to the reader, just as you would were you with the reader. But can you? In person, you use gesture, body language, facial expression, and even eye movement to convey the emotion you're trying to express. Your tone, cadence, intensity, and all the tricks of vocal delivery contribute more. In short, HOW you tell the story matters just as much as what you say.

And of course, as you read this, all that is present, so the story lives. But what about the reader, who doesn't already know the story and the characters—who can neither see nor hear your performance? To see what they get, have your computer read the story aloud. It's not, you'll find, too much like what you hear, because all of your performance is missing, and the "voice" that the reader gets holds only the emotion the punctuation suggests, because your intent for what the reader should get never makes it to the page.

There's another downside to the "Tell me a story" approach, in that we tend to bog down in visual trivia. This excerpt is about three standard manuscript pages long. And what has happened in those pages that matters to the plot? A man who was married to a wealthy woman tries to use credit cards controlled his wife and is rebuffed. Basically, he seems pretty stupid, in that he didn't grab cash before leaving, or figure out that she would cut him off. So since he hasn't given me reason to care, I'm kind of siding with his wife. Not exactly what you hoped, I know, but you've given me no reason to sympathize with him, or care. And three pages for so little to happen in the story seems excessive.

Yes, we learn how old he is, how long he was married, and how he feels about his ex, but more as a monologue, presented to give the reader backstory than though his reaction to what happens in the scene. And because it's presented as thought with no known motivation for being there it's data the reader gets, but has been given no reason to want. Do we, as readers care what the clerk looks like if she's not going to be a critical player, and the things described important? No, because that's visual detail, and our medium doesn't reproduce vision, so knowing the had a vacant expression and chews gum doesn't make us see it, or make it matter to the scene. In the film version, everything that you mentioned would be noted in an eyeblink, as we watched the action that matters. But on the page, it must be read one...word...at...a...time. And that slows the action drastically.

That's why, in writing for the page we need to limit what we say to those things that matter in the moment, and place the reader into the viewpoint of the protagonist, so we know what matters enough to him to act on it in that moment. Only then will we know the situation as he does, and understand what's going on as he does. And only then will we know what he's trying to accomplish, so as to have context for the action.

And at the same time, knowing that, we'll want to know if he's successful in what he's trying, and thus care about him. Will the reader WANT to turn the pages if they don't have reason to care? Remember, our goal is to entertain. So of course the reader must be made to care.

And in the end, though this sounds like an impossible problem,the cause is simple: we all leave our school days thinking we learned to write. We didn't, not as a publisher views that act. We learned a general skill—a small part of the spectrum of ways to write—that was designed to make us useful to-our-future-employers.

Think of the years of writing essays and reports, and how few stories we had to write. Think back to how little time our teachers spent on what the differences are between writing for film/stage, and writing for the page. Did your teachers tell you what a scene on the page is, and why it usually ends in disaster for the protagonist? If not, how can you write a scene a publisher would find pleasing?

See my point? It's not a matter of right or wrong, talent, or anything but knowing the tricks of the trade unique to our mission and our medium. And they're pretty easy to find. Your local library's fiction writing section is filled with books on the subject, by successful writers, teachers, and publishing pros.

It's not something that's a snap to fix, because like any other profession it takes study and practice to make it as automatic to write fiction as it is to use the nonfiction skills we already know so well. But it is well worth the time, and if you are meant to be a writer it's fun.

And if you are at the library, look for the names Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham, or Debra Dixon on the cover. They're gold. You might also want to look at a few of the articles on writing in my blog, for a kind of lite version—an overview—of the issues you need to dig into.

But whatever you do, hang ion there, and keep on writing

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