Among the Gargoyles

I am doing a fiction writing challenge for myself using the Inktober challenge. This is the first piece for it based on the word "Gargoyle". I wrote it in an hour but I want to expand it eventually.

Adrien climbed the stone steps of Notre Dame carefully. Each step felt as though he was swimming through water, his limbs heavy with the exertion and the pain. His cancer often made his body feel that way. 

Adrien paused for a moment to consider whether or not he should continue his climb, finding it hard to catch his breath. When his breath caught and sent him into another coughing fit, he felt the decision was made for him and continued. 

It was a long while before Adrien finally made it to the top of the steps, with several more coughing fits causing him to pause. It was then another good few minutes before he was able to force the heavy balcony door open. His breathing now shallow, the crisp October air pushed him back causing him to stagger. Adrien’s lungs struggled to keep up, choking on the air. He had never been this high up before. 

Slowly, he approached the ledge and put one leg over and then the other. He paused for a moment, and balanced there, the wind threatening to make his final choice for him. Paris was sprawled out before Adrien like he had never seen before. Everything looked so much smaller from this height, and the city was bustling with Sunday morning traffic. 

Adrien decided to sit down and watch the world go by for a minute. He was in no rush. One way or another, he would die soon enough anyways. 

The day passed quickly as he sat on the ledge amongst the gargoyles that watched over the city. The night lights came on and Adrien became transfixed as the view before him changed. He became frozen to the ledge with the effort of holding on, and the fascination of watching. Time passed without Adrien realizing and a single day and night turned into weeks, then months. 

He hadn’t noticed that his limbs had begun to petrify and that a sickly gray color  was slowly creeping up over him, turning his skin hard as stone. Adrien began to grow deformed and hunched like his companions on that ledge, his normal features becoming monstrous and disfigured. 

As a particularly slow day caused Adrien to remember what he was doing, he realized what had happened to him. By then he was immovable. All that was left uncovered by the gray was his eyes and his mouth. He could feel the gray closing in and decided there was no point in fighting it. This was the first place he had been happy since the diagnosis and would be content to remain watching over the city.  It wouldn’t be long now anyways. Any second he would be frozen forever. 

Adrien took a deep breath and smiled.

Author's Note

Any notes on how to expand on the world building or scene would be appreciated but I am not too concerned about an in-depth review since it is just a silly 30 day challenge anyways.

Reviews

[JayG]

Whoops...I just checked my list and it seems I've beanten you over the head with this sort of thing before. But since it's written, for what it may be worth...

Olivia, I was impressed. You write very well, better than the vast majority posting on the various online writing sites.

It’s hard to judge from this sample of one, especially as it’s for a specific purpose. But I do have some comments, for what they may be worth.

In this, you’re alone on stage, talking TO the reader, so the viewpoint is always yours, and the information second-hand. The reader learns what happens as a chronicle of events, but there’s no emotional involvement for the reader, just a progression of events—a well-written history.

It will always work for you, because you have context, backstory, and performance data. So the voice of the narrator is your voice, filled with the emotion that only you know to place there.

The thing is, our medium doesn’t support vision or sound, so the immediacy of film is missing. We do have something that film lacks, though: the ability to take the reader into the protagonist’s mind to the point where the reader literally becomes the protagonist, and lives the story in real-time, from within the protagonist’s moment of “now.” And THAT’s where the joy of reading lies.

Remember, the reader literally learns of all that’s said and done before the protagonist does, and if they react as themselves, when they do read of the protagonist’s reaction, will often disagree. So to avoid that we cheat. Without their realizing it, we make the reader know the situation as-the-protagonist-does, in all respects. In other words, we calibrate the reader’s viewpont to that of the protagonist.

Doing that makes a huge difference, because now, the reader’s reaction will match that of the protagonist, and when the protagonist acts, it will be what the reader feels they should do/say—as if the character is taking the reader’s advice. Done well, if someone throws a rock at the protagonist the reader will duck.

This article outlines a hugely powerful way to do that, by making use of what are called Motivation/Response Units:
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/scene.php

If, after you read it, it seems something you want to know more about, grab the book it was condensed from, Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It recently came out of copyright protection, and 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

So...hopefully, I haven’t wasted your time by telling you what you already know. But if you haven’t run into M/R U before, It’s well worth looking into, and that book is filled with such tricks.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

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

[Olivia Schroeder]

Thank you so much for the review! I really appreciate the resources.