The Creaking of a Door

The Creaking of a Door

By: Nicole Roberts

I stood in the house, staring down the long hallway that had a door at the end. The door caused some sort of gravitational pull, it's like I had no choice. My body just started pulling me down the hallway. I started walking without even realizing it. I couldn’t help but notice it felt more like an effortless float. My feet having gracefully moved without my mind's acknowledgement or effort. All I could think of is the possibility that once I made it to the end, I would find that which has been lost and wandering. Lost in another time and place, far away from reality or myself.

I kept staring at the end as if it would disappear. But instead the door started to get closer and closer. Finally I was so close I could almost reach out and touch it. As I took my last couple steps, I reached out to grab the knob, the smell of the old wooden door filling my nose all the while. Grabbing the knob I entered… thinking to myself this is it.

I could hear the slow creaking from the door, sounding like it hadn’t been opened for a long time. I stood in the frame, with the door partially opened, afraid to let go of the knob and fully enter. Looking around for something to make sense of it all, I could see the small glow of a light in the distance. Letting go of the knob I continued forward. Walking without hesitation for I knew this was where the hall was leading me. I began to approach the light, all the while it glowing brighter and brighter. 

As I got closer and the light grew brighter, I began to see, making out a table and chairs. At the far side of the table sat an older woman with her back to me. I stopped for a moment staring at the back of this woman, a million different thoughts racing through my head. When I began my final steps I heard the creaking of the door as it shut close behind me, just waiting to be opened again. That was until she spoke, I stopped dead in my tracks, for that voice I knew so well. It was me.

“Sit.” The woman said as she slowly turned her chair around towards me. 

I stared at the older woman in disbelief. At this point I knew this couldn’t be real, it must be a dream. The woman stared at me knowing what I must be thinking. The woman waved her hands towards the chair again, gesturing for me to finally sit in it. So I did, pulling the chair out from under the table. I could hear the noise from the legs of the chair as it scraped against the cement floor. I sat down, adjusting myself to the creaking of the wooden chair. 

We sat there a moment just staring at one another, all the while a subtly smirk was 

resting with ease on the older woman's face. I thought to myself how familiar the older woman's features were. The same features I had seen all my life looking back at me in the mirror. The only difference was the woman was obviously aged, but they were still there nonetheless. 

“What is happening?” I said, not being able to take the silence anymore.

“Take my hand and I’ll show you.” The older woman said as she slowly extended her hand across the table towards me, hearing her frail, papery skin slide against the wooden table as she did. 

Suddenly hesitation washed over me as I stared at the older woman's hand. I sat there hesitant for what seemed like forever, but in reality was only a moment. I slowly and carefully raised my hand from my lap and extended it towards the older woman’s already waiting hand on the table. Right before both of our hands met, the woman smirked and said…

“Now I shall show you.” Before I could react we touched hands and a rush came over me right before I suddenly woke up.

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I rushed to sit up in bed, gasping to gain my breath. Looking around I realized it had only been a dream. But it felt so real, the creaking of the door. I stood up from my bed, walking to the door, reaching out I grabbed the knob. I stood there gripping the knob on the door for a moment, hesitant. Laughing at myself, I opened the door. There it was, the creak. The door had been opened...and suddenly I remembered everything.   

Author's Note

Work in progress, this is the 2nd rough draft. I replaced the original I had on here.

Reviews

[JayG]

Well, you did ask... Just keep in mind that what I say below is unrelated to talent or how well you write,

• She sat there staring at the long hall in front of her.

1. She sat “there?” Where's “there.” You know. She knows. Everyone in the story knows. Shouldn’t the one you wrote it for know? For them, this could be taking place in prehistoric times, the future, or any time before. This unknown “she” could be twelve months old, twelve years old, ancient, or anything between. Sure, if they read on, they'll learn it. But they won't. Who wants to be confused, then spend time trying to make sense of it when they can read a story that doesn't confuse? Remember, we cannot retroactively remove confusion, and, there is no second, first-impression.

2. Long hall? In an office building or a school, a long hall might be a block long. For someone who is crippled, thirty feet is a long hall. Would you bet money that what you intend the reader to get from the words "long hall" is what they get?

3. “In front of her?” How could she look down one that was behind her? She can’t. So why waste words telling the reader what they already know?

• Would she walk it?

What conceivable reason is there for asking the reader this question? We don't know who we are, where we are, or what’s going on. Is the reader supposed to guess what YOU have planned? Story happens, as-we-read. It happens in real-time, from within the moment the protagonist calls "now." It isn't talked about by someone neither on the scene nor in the story, whose performance we can't see and whose voice we can't hear.

And, since, after asking these questions, she starts walking, you just wasted the time it took the reader to read those words.

But forget that, because there’s a more significant problem in play here. What you’re doing is transcribing yourself telling the story to an audience. And that cannot work, because verbal storytelling is a performance art. HOW you tell the story matters as much as what you say, because without actors on stage for the audience to see and hear, all the emotional content that the audience would get from watching the actor’s performances: their body-language, gesture and facial expression, plus their auditory performance is missing. In replacement of those missing performances, the storyteller substitutes their own performance. But not the smallest trace of that reaches the page. The only emotion in the narrator’s voice is what punctuation tells the reader to place into those words. The only meaning they can take is what the words suggest to them, based in their background, not your intent.

In short: You cannot use the tricks of one medium in another. It works for you, of course. But before you read the first word you know the character, and everything about her. You know the setting and the situation. You know her expectations, and what’s about to happen. And...the narrator’s voice—your voice—carries exactly the right emotion. But the reader has not a trace of that.

To hear how different what the reader gets is from what you want them to get, have your computer’s narrator program read the story to you.

Bottom line: All those reports and essays you were assigned in school made you very good at writing reports and essays, as they were supposed to. But Fiction-Writing is a profession, and all professions are acquired IN ADDITION to the set of general skills we’re given to make us useful to employers. We no more learn the tricks of fiction by reading it than we become a chef by eating.

So…if writing stories is your goal, and I hope it is, the skills you need are the ones the pros take for granted, and must be added to the basic nonfiction skills of our school days.

That’s terrible news, I know, but it’s something every successful writer faces and overcomes, so why not you? It’s not a matter of talent, or how well you write. It’s what Mark Twain was talking about when he said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

And the first “Just ain’t so” that needs work is the purpose of fiction. Nonfiction’s goal is to inform the reader. And that’s what you do in this piece. You tell the reader, for example, “She kept staring at the end as if it would disappear.” But that’s not what she’s thinking, it’s what YOU conclude as a dispassionate outside observer. It’s what you TELL the reader. But she’s living the scene, and so, like you and I, in life, she's observing and deciding. Her perception of the situation is the mother of every action she takes and every word she speaks. But we know nothing of that, because we’re with you, being talked to, not living the story as her. And as E. L. Doctorow put 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.”

To do that—to make the reader feel and care—takes an entirely, and dramatically different approach from nonfiction. It takes a LOT more than a list of “Do this instead of that.” It takes the skills of Fiction-Writing—a methodology that your teachers never mentioned as existing.

But…it’s a fixable pronblem. And a great place to begin is the fiction-writing section of the library. You work at your own pace, there are no tests, and no pressure.

How necessary are those skills? Look at it this way: Every book you’ve chosen to read was published, which means it was written with the techniques of the profession, then selected from among more than a thousand other submissions. That’s your benchmark. And after a lifetime of reading published fiction, you can tell, in a single paragraph, if those skills weren’t used.

More to the point, your reader can tell if you used them. Given that, spending a bit of time acquiring the basics of a professional education makes a lot of sense. Right?

And as luck would have it, the single best book on creating scenes that will sing to the reader, and linking them into an exciting whole, just passed out of copyright, and is available for free download at a film school’s library, The address is below this paragraph. Copy/paste it into the URL window at the top of any Internet page and hit return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

It won’t make a pro of you. That’s your task. But it will give you the knowledge and the tools to do that with it it’s in you. So grab a copy and dig in. And as 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/

[Nicole]

Thank you so much for this genuine and detailed review! As I said previously, this was a very rough rough draft and I was needing some honest feedback for when I went through it and completely redid it. This is helping a lot and I think the redo is coming together very nicely. Feel free to take another look in the next day or two when I have the revised version up.

[Julie McCarthy (juliesp..]

Love it
Keep going !!
I mean it