The New Student

Damon meets the new student at his school.

Chapter 1: Damon

Now, I know what you’re thinking. The son of a mafia boss must be a bully, thug, brute, punk. 

But I am not any of those things. 

I am the top student, physics enthusiast, chess player, winner of the academic decathlon and piano player. Although my father is a ruthless gang leader he has never once diminished mine or any of my siblings’ dreams or interests. 

He’s actually really proud of us in his own weird way.

A very tall muscular man is squeezing the life out of Damon with a hug. Damon has dark black hair and villain-like facial features. His eyes make it look as if he is always glaring, he has a long pointed nose, and a sharp jawline. This created his soft green eyes to look bright green. His hair was long enough to cover his eyes but just barely, he is wearing a school uniform. Damon is nearly a miniature version of his father, although Victor stood much taller and covered in the tattoos. 

“Dad… l-let go.” Damon gasps.

“But my baby boy is starting his first day of senior year!!! This is the last year of high school, my boy!!!” Victor cries. Two little girls, one a pre-teen and the other a very young girl, are standing around them watching with concern. A woman walks by, she has soft features and caring eyes. She has sandy blonde hair and soft green eyes similar to Damon’s. Her name is Violet. 

“Dear, let him go. He needs to take the girls to school.” Violet says softly, stroking Victor’s head gently He becomes calm from this action and relaxes; giving Damon the chance to slip from his father’s grasp. Violet walks to the girls, the older girl wears her hair in two high buns. Her hair is sandy blonde similarly to Violet but brighter and her eyes are dark black similarly to Victor’s, her name is Delphie. The younger girl standing next to her is a tiny version of Damon, Demi went as far as even having the same hair cut like him. 

“I don’t want Del to walk me to school!” screeches Demi at Violet. “I want Damon to take me!” 

“He’s walking you there today sweetie.” Violet says softly cradling her face. Demi smacks her hand away. 

“No! I want him to take me every day!” Demi screams, her face is bright red and her eyebrows furrowed as far as can go.

“That’s enough screaming Demi,” Says Damon bending down to look at her level, “I can’t walk you every day; but when I get the chance, I will, okay?” 

“Pinky promise!” Demi exclaims holding up her pinky. They interlock fingers and she turns to Victor quickly, “I get to cut off his pinky if he doesn’t keep his promise!” Damon’s face goes white.

“What the heck!” Damon exclaims.

Victor chuckles, “Maybe I do have a child that will go into the family business!”

“Can we go please?!” Yells Delphi. Everyone looks at, Delphi is by the door holding the knob waiting for her brother and sister. The two quickly follow her and simultaneously waving goodbye to their parents. Damon walks his sisters’ to each of their schools and then heads to his, Damon has headphones in and zoning out watching the sky. 

This year. It is the last one until I leave for college. To not be labeled as a delinquent but as a model student. I love my dad… but he isn’t a good person. I don’t want to follow in his footsteps, but his name has given more advantages in life than most people.

For instance, my friends.

My father taught that in life you need a group of friends that are more like family. That a good group of friends will bring nothing but joy. So I started a group. Let’s just say… we’ve developed quite a reputation.

When Damon arrived at his school his friends were in their usual spots awaiting their leader’s presence. James, he is the brute of the group he may be skinny but he’s quick and his punches are packed. James is waving eagerly at Damon, he has long light brown hair and silver eyes. 

Behind James, there was Torey. He is only slightly shorter than the rest, he has a short hair cut, red hair, and blue eyes; he’s our informant. His appearance attends to attract people towards him. 

Next to James was another tall boy, Corey. He is dark-skinned with light blue-green eyes and a unique haircut with a design on the side. I guess you could call Corey the face of our group, he’s super charismatic and is also the student body president now three years running. 

Behind all of them stood the tallest of the group, CJ. CJ is dark-skinned with grey-blue eyes and short black hair, he is extremely muscular with a 5’oclock shadow.  CJ is our muscle, although he looks scary and mean… CJ is actually really shy.  He isn’t violent either, which makes him our last resort.

Not that we’ve ever needed it. This isn’t your typical group of friends, but we are a gang either. We are more of an organization that is leading our school in the direction of being among the great. We live in the capital of our great country, it is our responsibility to show the nation only best come from this city. So what does that make me? Damon?

Well, I am the brains. 

Damon walks up to the group, “Hey guys! Are you ready?”

“You mean the year that everything changes?” James smirks.

Corey walks over to Damon, “Did you really spend the summer planning for senior year?”

Damon shrugs, “Yeah, why not?” Damon crosses his arms and lowers his eyes, “There is a long list of things we need to do before leaving this school.”

Corey sighs taking a sit on the bench next to them, “No fun and games for you?”

“I’ll have time for that later in life, right now, things need to be done.” Daman says flatly. Corey sighs and looks away from him.

“What’s the plan this year?” James asks eagerly.

“It’s too much to get into now, but we can start slowly.” Damon points to Torey who is staring blankly into his phone, “Torey I need you to do the regular beginning of the year stuff. Make sure no one is starting drama, fights, or dealing… Torey!” Damon yells but Torey just stares at his phone with mortified eyes.

“What’s going on?” CJ asks, his voice incredibly deep. Torey’s eyes just tear up, he begins to groan and shoves his phone into CJ’s chest. Torey runs into the school crying. There was a sudden silence, then gasps. Damon turns around to see many people looking at their phones with mortified eyes, others crying and the rest standing around wondering what was happening. 

“What’s happening?” Damon asks turning to CJ, who has a look of wonderment on his face. He shows the phone to Damon. The article title read, “Skrymir Retired… AND OFF THE GRID?” Damon raises the eyebrow, everyone is upset about this celebrity? “Who is Skrymir?” he asks. James suddenly grabs Damon by his arms and shakes him, James has tears in his eyes.

“Dude!!! She is the singer I was showing you all the time!!”James exclaims.

“She was in all those movies too,” Corey says looking at his phone dissatisfied, “She was a good actress.”

“Isn’t she insane?” Damon asks, recalling something he saw on social media.

“NO!” James yells, “She’s just misunderstood!” Corey stands up and pats James on the back.

“Relax dude, nothing you can do about it now.” Corey reassures softly. 

“But she’s off the grid too! N-n-” James begins teary up holding back the tears, “NO MORE SOCIAL MEDIA!” Suddenly the other sad fans of Skrymir begin gravitating towards James sharing in the grief.

“No more singing videos.” One kid says.

“No more little updates on how she’s getting through life!”

“No more pictures of her pets!”

Everyone started in and crowd formed before it got bad Damon and CJ slipped away while James and Corey shared in all the grief.

“What am I missing?” Damon asks CJ looking at the crowd.

“She was good at what she did… but I don’t think it’s this heartbreaking…” CJ replies. “Class is starting soon, we should probably get going.”

“Agreed.” Damon replies, they both walk away.  

The boys sit down in their homeroom class, as usual, they sit together; their presence causing some people around them to be uncomfortable. Everyone is talking about the Skrymir quietly as they wait for the teacher to begin class. 

Suddenly, the door swings open. Everyone goes silent as they watch the final student walk into the room. He is short and wore a sweatshirt with the hood up, under that a beanie. His eyes look strange, almost like they were diamond-shaped and dark purple. He has thin arched eyebrows and glare across his face. Some of the girls start to gasp and begin to gossip about the new student. The group of boys look at each other and realize the only open seat was in front of James. They looked at the seat and then looked at the student, who was already looking back. The student is so slender at the frame, almost doll-like. He started towards the seat and sat down making no effort to look at the group. 

James leans forward, “Hey, it’s nice to meet you!” Damon glares at James who is completely ignoring him.  The student turns around slowly and stares at James in the eyes. James begins to turn red, the new student didn’t leave his gaze.

“I am not looking to make friends so buzz off!” The boy turns around and crosses his arms. The rest of the group looks at each other then to James, who was very red. Damon has a concerned look on his face as he looks at his binder. 

Well… this wasn’t planned...

Reviews

[Christoph]

Okay, this is pretty remarkable from where I'm sitting.

Any helpful sort of feedback here would have to be focused on minor things, things that aren't even important, things you would catch without a denizen of the Internet coming along to offer his services.

What makes it great, for me, is that midway through I realized I was sitting in this world, I wasn't parsing the text at all, I was just in it. That's the feat of magic great authors perform, and it's more rare than I care to admit on sites like WritersCafe.

Your characters feel like people you've known a long time. Maybe you have, or maybe you've just been imagining them long enough to fake it. This is a fully realized world, and we're seeing the teensiest tip of the iceberg, and that's very easy to fall in love with.

That's it. Wish I had something useful to offer. I just really like it, unfortunately.

[Jenn Wathen]

Thank you!!!

[JayG]

You’ve worked hard on this, and it shows. And, you write well. But were this a submission to an acquiring editor or agent it would be rejected, and I thought you’d want to know where and why.

Here’s the problem: You, the author, are telling the reader a story as if they can hear the emotion in your voice and view your performance. But they can do neither. When you read this, the voice you hear is alive with emotion—your voice. And as the one who’s center-stage you take all roles, using body language, gesture, and facial expression to make the story exciting.

That’s all there as you read this. so, for you, every line acts as a pointer to images, emotion, and your intent for how the reader should take your words, all stored in your mind. Anything missing from the printed record of your performance is provided by that knowledge without thought. The reader? For them, every line acts as a pointer to images, emotion, and your intent for how the reader should take your words, all stored in *YOUR* mind. But since your mind isn’t there when it’s read, the reader must make due with what the words suggest to them, based on their background, not your intent. Have your computer read the story aloud to hear how different what the reader gets is from what you intend.

There’s another problem with that approach, which is that because your mind does fill in so much you’ll leave out things that the reader needs but which you see as obvious.

And why are you doing all that? Because it’s how they teach us to write in our school days. Every report you wrote was fact-based and author-centric, intended to inform. You provided an informational experience as you passed on the necessary data, accompanied by authorial interjections to clarify—just as you do in this story.

You’re using present tense and first person, in an attempt to “jazz” up the writing and give a feel for immediacy, but that doesn’t work because tense and person are authorial choice, and irrelevant. Since the narrator lives at a different time than the character living the scene, the narrator cannot appear on stage with the protagonist. And telling is telling, be it the author as narrator or the author pretending to have once been the one living the scene. Change your story from present tense to past and the same people will do the same things to the same people at the same rate. And in neither case is the reader with the protagonist, and in his viewpoint. Instead, they're with the narrator, who is talking TO the reader ABOUT the events. That's far different from making the reader feel as if the protagonist is their avatar, and living the story in real-time.

Look at a few lines from the opening as an acquiring editor, or a reader in the bookstore will:

• Now, I know what you’re thinking.

How in the pluperfect hells can you know what I’m thinking? How could I know that someone I can’t see and know nothing about is the son of a mafia boss?

Dump this whole section. First, because it’s not story. Story happens, and this is someone we know nothing about talking about things for which we have zero context. In short, a guaranteed and instant rejection.

• A very tall muscular man is squeezing the life out of Damon with a hug.

I give up. Who’s Damon, and why should I care that someone, of an unknown age—someone I know nothing about—is giving him a hug for unknown reasons, in an unknown place? That’s not story, it’s visual detail that only you can see. In Damon’s viewpoint a “tall muscular man” isn’t hugging him. In his viewpoint his father is. That's also true of the protagonist at the moment the story takes place. So who’s viewing this and talking about it? No way to tell.

• Damon has dark black hair and villain-like facial features.

I don’t know where we are in time and space. I don’t know whose skin I wear. I don’t know what’s going on. Given that, why do I care about the visual details of someone I can’t see? You’ve placed effect, the hug, before the cause. Now, you abandon that to talk about visual details of someone I can’t see and know nothing about. Would it matter if his hair was brown? No. And why “dark” black hair. Light black is called grey. And…when you become a “villain” you acquire a “look?” Naaa.

Think about it. Were this a film, I would know all about him in parallel with seeing the hug take place. And in that time I'd know his age, where we are, and the general social status of the characters. But on the page, which is serial, you're slowly and painfully spelling out detail after detail, and slowing the action to a crawl. But if it takes longer to talk about someone crossing the room than to do it in life the story moves in slow-motion. What that means in real-world terms is that every line must either move the plot, develop character, or meaningfully set the scene. And in this case, and at this point in the scene, why does the reader need to know this?

My point is that true to the nonfiction training you received all through school you’re focused on detail. But…in all the years of schooling did even one teacher explain the role of the short-term scene-goal? It’s vital, but if you don’t know what it is and what it does, will you make use of it? How many hours did your teachers spend on dialog and tag usage, or the nuance of viewpoint? Did they explain why a scene ends in disaster for the protagonist, and must? How about something like why a scene on the page and one on screen and stage are so different, and the elements that make it up? My point? If we don’t know what a scene is, and why, how can we write one?

Here’s the problem: we all leave school suffering from a major misunderstanding. We think we learned to write. Sure we learned one kind of writing, as part of what’s often called, The Three R’s. But the purpose of public education is to provide employers with a pool of workers who have a predictable, and useful to them, skills. And what kind of writing do most employers require? Isn’t it exactly what you spent so much time writing? Essays and reports?

But is the goal of fiction informational or emotional? Do you want to learn how the protagonist feels or be made to feel that emotion? When you read a horror story, do you want to be informed that the protagonist feels terror, or do you want the author to terrorize you, and make YOU afraid to turn out the lights?

See the problem? Nonfiction is fact-based and author-centric—useless for fiction because it explains, and the voice of the narrator doing that explaining is, of necessity, dispassionate. You can tell the reader how a character speaks a given line via a tag. You can make the reader know their mood, so they'll know the emotion to place into the line. But you cannot tell the reader how to read your lines. And if you’re the only one on stage…

The thing we universally forget is that ALL professions are learned IN ADDITION to the skills we’re given in our primary education years. And fiction-writing is a profession. For fiction, with its goal of providing an emotional, not an informational experience, the techniques are emotion-based and character-centric, a style of writing not even mentioned as existing during your school years. And as Mark Twain so wisely observed, “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.”

Think abut this quote from E. L. Doctorow: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” Apply that to the story, as it stands today. Are you making the reader feel the rain or pointing out that it's raining?

Bear in mind that nothing I’ve said has to do with your talent or potential as a writer, only things you, like all hopeful writers, are missing. And while fixing the problem isn’t an overnight thing, every writer who succeeded faced and overcame that problem. So it’s more a rite-of-passage than a disaster. And, how to overcome the problem is simplicity, itself: Add the techniques of fiction to the skills you already own, and practice them till they’re as intuitive as the ones you use now.

It might be nice if simple and easy were interchangeable words, but because they’re not, there is a fair amount of work, study, and practice involved. But that’s true of any profession, and I think you’ll find the learning fascinating. Certainly, you’ll spent a lot of time slapping your forehead and saying, “But..but that’s so obvious. Why didn’t I see that for myself?” And as a bonus, once you do master it, the act of writing becomes a lot more fun as the protagonist becomes your co-writer. And when they do, they’ll keep you honest. Try to make them do something that’s not in their nature because you need it for plot reasons and they’ll tell you, “Hell no! I wouldn’t do that.” That makes them real to you, and the reader. Another result is that the characters won’t all speak with your voice; won’t be smart when you need smart and dumb when you need dumb. In other words, be a lot more real.

There’s a lot to it. For an idea of the number and kind of issues involved, as I often do, I suggest you dig through a few articles in my writing blog. They’re meant for people in your situation, and most were written for one of my publisher’s newsletters.

The local library system’s fiction-writing section is filled with books by pros in publishing, writing, and teaching. So time spent there is time wisely invested. My personal suggestion, based on your writing, is to download a copy of Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It’s an older book, one that talks about your typewriter. And the pages on research could be replaced by, “Use Google a lot.” But that being said, it has over 200 five star reviews on Amazon, and is the single best book on the nuts-and-bolts issues of writing fiction that I’ve found. In fact, it's the book that resulted in my first sale.

So…was this something you were hoping to see? Hell no! Who would want to? But it is something you need to know. And writing is a journey, not a destination—one that lasts a lifetime. So have at it. And while you do, hang in there, and keep on writing. If nothing else, it keeps us off the streets at night.

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

[Sami Khalil]

Very descriptive and straight forward. You have a penchant for handing out details which is good and informative. I like the part about the singer too.

[Sami Khalil]

“Dude!!! She is the singer I was showing you all the time!!”James exclaims.


“She was in all those movies too,” Corey says looking at his phone dissatisfied, “She was a good actress.”

[Sami Khalil]

"My father taught that in life you need a group of friends that are more like family. That a good group of friends will bring nothing but joy. So I started a group. Let’s just say… we’ve developed quite a reputation."