Thief at Night - Ch. 1

A girl tries to hide from a man on her tail until they meet and find the attraction hard to resist as she's helping an old friend going through cancer.

  "You need to be careful" Mable said as she smoked a blunt in her red velvet recliner, watching the smoke linger around her dry withering face.  

   "I am" Nicky said, pulling her hair in a tight pony tail, watching Mable rock back and forth as though she knew everything about life.  The trials, the struggles, the snakes and thieves discuised as royals like they own the world.  People were snakes according to Mable.  Sneaky with poison but a friend in disguise.

  "That man is a worry, trouble with a capital T young lady" she lectured as though she was her grandmother giving advice.  "He's seen a few things young girls like you haven't.  Smoking pot is just the tip of the ice burg sweety."  She inhaled a bit more, coughing and weezing from her lungs being weak.

   "Granny, stop worryinng.  I'm almost thirty and know a few things.  I've got ammo and a gun if he tries anything stupid and he knows it."  

  They both sat iin silence for almost a minute, Granny's eyes darting as she peeked at the window.  Cars would drive by late at night there in Chicago, making her nervous even after she lived there for eight years now.  She knew a few things from her younder days that she never told anyone.  

  "What is it?" Nicky asked, seeing the worry deep in her eyes.

   Looking back at Nicky, she asked "What's his last name?  Do you know?"

  Nicky just smirked and replied "Jackson, David Jackson from the hood.  Kicked out of school for having a gun but girls loved him and lathered him up with neck rubs and drinks whenever he wanted.  He's got an ego that won't let go."

  "Good girl" she said.  "You do your homework and you've got the upper hand.  Never let a man see you weak.  He'll swoop in and stay til he gets what he wants."

  "Yeah, I know" Nicky sasid as she pulled out a card from inside her purse.  She flipped it over as though she was checking to make sure everything was correct.

   "What is it?" Granny asked, squinting her eyes as she reached out her hand.

   Nicky gave her the card and said "Just read it".  She watched as Granny took it to read, pushing her glasses up to the bridge of her nose and lifting her chin with curiosity written across her wrinkles.  

   "Where did you find this?  Does he know?"

Author's Note

Chapter 1 of a novela

Reviews

[JayG]

• "You need to be careful" Mable said as she smoked a blunt in her red velvet recliner, watching the smoke linger around her dry withering face.

First a minor point. When appending a tag, you replace the period with a comma, you don’t drop it.

That aside, after reading this sentence we have all kinds of irrelevant visual information, but have not the smallest shred of context. We know she’s smoking a “blunt.” Can we see it? No. Would the story change in the slightest were it a cigarette, a glass of scotch, or nothing at all? No. So why waste the reader’s time with it? It's what happens, not your interjections, that matter. How about the chair? Who cares what color it is, what it’s upholstered with, or that it’s a recliner? That’s detail, not story.

The print medium is serial. Everything you mentioned would be seen in an eyeblink’s time. But on the page it’s serial, and read one item at a time, placing the story in slow motion.

And she can’t “watch the smoke linger “around” her own face because her eyes don’t face that way.

But of more importance, at sentence end, while we know lots of irrelevant things we don’t know where we are in time and space. We don’t know who she or the one she’s talking to are. And, we don’t know what’s going on that made Mable say what she did. So the words, so meaningful to you who know all that, are no more than words in a row, meaning and purpose uncertain to the reader.

You write well, far better than most on this site. but you're still thinking in terms of telling the reader a story, so you spend a LOT of time, as yourself, talking to the reader about irrelevant backstory, when you should be in the prompter's booth and working in support of the protagonist.

Try something; hop over to YouTube and watch the trailer for, Stranger Than Fiction. It shows what would really happen if like was like the fiction you're presenting. It's a film only a writer can really appreciate.

Think back to your school days. Nearly all your writing assignments were for reports and essays. Did even one teacher spend even a second on a basic like the three issues we must address on entering any scene, so the reader has context? If not, your reader is lost. Did they talk of the short-term scene-goal and its management? How about something simple, like why a scene on the page is so unlike one on the screen, and the elements that make it up?

My point? If not, how can you, even with the best of intentions, write a scene?

The goal of a report or any nonfiction writing is to inform the reader. Its methodology is to have a narrator, alone on stage, report and explain—talking TO the reader.

But do you read fiction for the details? If you read a romance do you want to be told that the protagonist has fallen in live? Or do you want the writing to make YOU fall in love with that person, and envy the protagonist? Do you want to learn that the protagonist cried, or have the writing make you weep?

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.” And no way in hell can nonfiction writing skills do that. Try and all you’ll do is give the weather report.

It might be nice if we learned the skills of fiction by reading it. But does viewing sculpture tell us how to choose the right chisel, and how hard to strike it? Of course not. We see the result of using the tools, not the tools. And, we expect to see that in what we read. More to the point, your reader expects to see it in your work. And that’s the best argument I have for picking up a few of the tricks the pros take for granted.

You have the desire. You enjoy the writing. And, you have a really good handle on dialog. So, add those missing tricks and tools. Once you make them as intuitive to use as the skills you now own, the act of writing becomes a LOT more fun, because the protagonist becomes your co-writer, whispering suggestions and warnings in your ear. And writing the scene becomes living and reliving the scene till it’s real to both you and the reader.

The library’s fiction-writing section has lots of books on the subject—though I suspect that you've looked at a few. Personally? I’d suggest 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 and few chapters. You’ll find yourself often saying, “That’s so obvious. How could I have not seen it myself? That’s fun till it becomes, “I’m an idiot for having missed that!” 🤨 But at that point you’re beginning to make real progress.

If a sort of short overview might help, the articles in my WordPress blog are based on what you’ll find in such a book.

So…I know this was pretty far from what you hoped to see, and that it can hurt. I’ve been there more than once. But, it has nothing at all to do with how well you write, or, your talent. And, every successful writer has faced and overcome the same problem. So jump in and give it a try.

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/

[Throwing Romeo]

Cut and paste a mile
for the status points
and narcissistic supply.

[JayG]

Make the same mistake you get the same comment, kid.

And if you're as good as you think, sell something. Since you feel you know more than I do, it should be a snap.