Different

Never had fall been more beautiful, a symphony of warm colors, like a nature’s embrace, and it made her feel loved by a love higher than this world.

Mary made her way sheepishly through the small park, lowering her eyes as she passed the rare visitors, because the fire in them scared people who didn’t understand it. It had scared her too at first, but not for a long time now.

Their unusual color, a muted glow of embers, echoed the ruby of burning bushes and sugar maples like their color turned with the seasons as well.

She’d been born this way, hair snowy white, her porcelain skin the palest shade of alabaster and eyes of fire. 

It’s strange how physical appearance shapes one’s fate: Mary had spent her entire childhood knowing herself to be different from other humans, in ways nobody deemed to acknowledge. 

She believed the secret of her arrival to this world had been kept hidden behind a wall of silence by the grown-ups in her life, who tried to convince her she was just like anybody else, a fact one furtive glance in the mirror was enough to contradict.

Her mother kept giving her scientific explanations with complicated terms like amelanism and genetic mutation, but Mary knew in her heart she wasn’t like the rest. 

This truth came to her in her dreams and she’d heard it in her heart, that hers was a special destiny, to embrace fire and tame it, like a present day Prometheus, to harness its transformative power.

She walked the earth in silence, with the bearing of a fairy, barely touching the ground, weightless like breath. In that silence she felt her connection to the wind, sun and rain whom she considered her kin more than she did humans, and she had no bitterness about it, because that didn’t make her feel odd, but rare, and powerful, and special.

The shy little girl who secretly believed herself a salamander had grown into a young fire goddess, whose ember gaze made the sugar maples glow brighter in the October light. 

She found a bench and sat down in the shade of birch trees. Their bark was still peeling off in the unusually mild fall; nature wanted to give Mary a backdrop worthy of her flaxen tresses. It was still warm in the middle of October, too warm for the cozy sweater she was wearing and whose white glowed even brighter against the silver of her hair.

Those dreams she had dreamt as a child she shared with no one, they were her secret dwelling, her palace, fit for an elemental, a place where she danced free, undaunted by fear, conformity and customs, to a music only she could hear, which seemed to resonate from all around her and from herself as well, fitting her inside reality like a jewel in its setting.

The young woman lifted her eyes to watch the sunlight sift through the golden trees, shielding her vision with her palm and smiling to a passer-by, who, like most people, was so dazzled by their unusual color he forgot the norms of polite society and fell straight into her soul, lost and mesmerized, until his walking companion called his attention back to the real world. 

The fire in her eyes mellowed and her smile grew brighter, and she realized she was happy for no reason, other than, maybe, the soft silver of the birch branches and the sunshine that covered them in copper and gold.

Brassy leaves landed at her feet and she watched without thinking as the wind carried them away. She caught a colorful one before it reached the ground and its brilliant copper, amplified by the sunshine, made her feel like she was holding fire in her palm, tamed to purr at the touch of her white fingers like a kitten.

A ray of light flashed in the mirror of a windowpane, and for a moment she saw her own reflection in it, looking back at her like through a veil.

“What are you looking at, Mary?” her grandmother used to ask her when she was little and got lost in her dreamworld, fascinated by its wonders.

All those treasures her sight had uncovered patiently in time were still there in her eyes, an open secret offered to anyone for a price: the audacity not to avert one’s gaze for fear of their fire.

She got lost in thought again, resting her sight on the turning foliage overhead, and another passer-by followed it for a few moments before he asked her what she was looking at, like an echo from her past.

Mary smiled and shook her head no, to let him know she wasn’t looking at anything in particular, and the momentum loosened a red maple leaf which had gotten trapped in her hair. She smiled and stared into his eyes, and her magic gaze shook him to the core with the uncanny feeling two roses were watching him intently from under a blanket of snow. Something more than human, but still of this world, a part of nature and its equal as well.

“What are you looking at, Mary?” her grandmother's voice echoed endlessly inside her head.

Clouds. Sunlight. Leaves carried in the wind. Dogs. Pigeons. Birches. Seasons. Life. Cars passing in the distance. Earth. Air. Colors. Nothing.

“I’m looking at nothing.”

And she smiled.

Reviews

[JayG]

• Never had fall been more beautiful, a symphony of warm colors, like a nature’s embrace, and it made her feel loved by a love higher than this world.

Were this a submission to an agent or publisher, here is where the first reader would turn away.

Why? First, because the viewpoint isn’t that of the unidentified “her.” It’s the narrator talking about her in a dispassionate voice. In writing, we call it “telling.” And the technique, fact-based and author-centric is pretty much the definition of the nonfiction writing approach.

Second, she doesn't rate a name? She's our protagonist and you introduce her as a generic "her?" Right here is where you tell the reader that the viewpoint is yours, not hers. She's your focus character, not the protagonist.

What you’re doing is telling the reader a story as a chronicle of events, intermixed with authorial interjections. But that’s how history books are written, and who reads them for fun? It’s also why you’ve not gotten the response you hoped for on Amazon, for your released work, even the one you paid a service to provide reviews for.

The reason you have the problem is that no one ever reminds us that in our school days we’re given only nonfiction writing skills because the purpose of public education is to ready us for the needs of employment, like writing reports, papers, and letters. Professions, like Commercial Fiction-Writing, are acquired in addition to that set of general skills.

They never even mention the goal of fiction, which is emotion, not fact-based. 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.”

Unfortunately, using our book report writing skills, the best we can do is provide the weather report.

So it’s not a problem of talent, or how well you write. It’s that your writing tools need an upgrade to those the pros take for granted. And as someone who was in your situation—I wrote six, many times queried for but never sold, novels—I can tell you that they not only make a huge difference, they make the act of writing fiction a LOT more fun. And one year after finding the book I'm recommending, I was offered my first contract.

Instead of telling the reader what happens in the story, we make them live it, in real-time, and from within the moment the protagonist calls “now.” That makes the future as uncertain to the reader as to the protagonist. And readers literally feed on worry. If you can make a reader stop reading to say, “Damn…now what do we do?” You have a 5-star customer.

Not good news, I know, after all that work, but since we’ll never address the problem we don’t see as being one, I thought you should know.

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. Like the proverbial chicken soup for a cold, it might not help, but it sure can’t hurt.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

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