MacAllister
Tired and worried.
El Jefe
Administrator
Super Moderator
Moderator
Kind Benefactor
VPX
Super Member
Registered
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2005
- Messages
- 22,039
- Reaction score
- 10,839
- Location
- Out on a limb
- Website
- macallisterstone.com
Okay--I was going to post a section from a King short, then thought better of it. Instead, I've slapped up an old flash piece that I've never done anything with. In terms of messing about with it, I thought we could all take a crack at it.
The main problem with the piece is that nothing friggin' happens...it's a decently literary 1K words, so it's fair game to blatantly sacrifice on Cthulu's literary altar...and muck about with to our hearts' content.
I was originally going to post a few paragraphs from a Stephen King short, so we could take it apart and figure out what made it scary--then I decided perhaps we could take a crack at making something fairly homogenous into downright creepy, instead.
Then maybe we'll go back and take a look at scary as done by a master.
So, to get the ball rolling, I'm slapping up an old flash piece. I am not emotionally attached to these words...but they belong to me, so we can do any old damn thing we wanna do to them, at will. <insert evil grin>
This is a writing exercise, open to anyone who wants to play--I am not looking for a crit.
It's a faily boring little thousand words, as is. So lets make it really creepy/evocative/tense/scary. Let's do so with word choice and pacing--not by introducing a serial-killer boogeyman in the closet, or making major plot changes. Let's also keep it PG-13.
Take on as much or as little of it as you care too--if it sinks without a trace, that's fine too.
(edited March 4th, to make more user-friendly
Okay--I did mention that this was an experiment. The clicking back-and-forth is frustrating and counterproductive. So I'm moving the flash piece over here, so we can work with it better:
___________________________________________________________
She came to the little old house in early spring. The shabby and weathered ship-lap siding reflected sun off snow, like the bottom of a sterling silver plate left too long a-sitting. Snow filled the yard, and lay drifted over the crazy tilting pickets of the garden fence.
She stood where the gate once hung. She sorted the strange keys on the ring, and dropped the note the realtor gave her into the snow. She sighed, tugged one glove off with her teeth, then bent and picked up the scrap of paper. She carefully brushed wet snow away with her gloved hand, and saw the words brush away, too, in bleeding smears. She shrugged and wadded up the little yellow note in her cold hand.
How important could Lenny-the-realtor’s advice really be, she thought.
So she put her hand in her coat pocket and let go of the note.
“I’ll need to shovel the walk,” she said. She rather liked the firm, decisive tone in her own voice. Before she spoke aloud, she feared she would sound unsure. Worse, perhaps she would inadvertently use a rising inflection at the end of her sentence, rendering it a question, instead of a statement. But she did not. Her own voice pleased her.
Michael would pull a folding shovel from a handy inside pocket and whack a path through the heavy snow, efficient as a tractor, before he even looked for his keys.
She did not shovel the walk. Instead, she went inside.
“What will you do there, alone?” her sister asked her yesterday. She had not answered her sister.
“I shall think. And take long walks in the countryside,” she said, now.
Damp chill filled the house. She noticed it immediately when she removed her coat and her remaining glove. Her other glove, she suspected, lay somewhere in the yard. She looked in all the likely places for a thermostat, and saw none. However, an iron stove squatted on a hearth of crumbling bricks in the corner of the sitting room.
She looked at the stove carefully, sizing it up as a potential adversary. She gripped the wooden handle on the lever that secured the stove-door and pulled. The fine hairs on her neck stood up when metal shrieked against metal, as she pulled the handle. The heavy door swung open on stiff iron hinges. She crouched to her hands and knees and stuck her head through the opening into the belly of the stove. She tried to turn her head enough to see if the sky showed through bottom of the stovepipe, that led to the roof. She could not.
“This was probably covered, in the damn note,” she said. She stood up and brushed the soot from her hands against her thighs.
She went outside without her coat to look for firewood. In a lean-to shed on the back of the little house, she found it, dry and split and stacked, with a box of kindling just to one side. The axe rested on its head, against a huge round of wood someone once used as a chopping block.
She picked up the axe, experimentally. It seemed terribly heavy to her. Michael would've used it to singlehandedly clear-cut the north woods for next year's firewood.
Back inside, she built a fire. The stove smoked a bit, at first. Michael would have laughed at her, watching her pushing and pulling at the moving parts on the stove and stovepipe, burning her fingers, her eyes watering from the smoke. But once she figured out how to open the damper, her fire burned neat and hot.
When darkness fell, so did the temperature. She stepped into the yard, wearing her coat again. She held both hands around a mug of tea that steamed wet and white against the distant sky. The stars were out, the sky black and very far away. It seemed terribly cold. Snow crunched and squeaked beneath her boots.
“I should go for a walk,” she said.
She stood in the yard in the snow, slowly rotated a full circle, her head tipped back to scan the sky. She thought she’d like to see the northern lights, but she wasn’t sure which direction was north. And she wasn’t sure what time of year she should expect them. She saw lights from her neighbor’s house, twinkling nearly a mile down the lane. No one tells you how very dark the nights are, here, she thought, and I never thought to ask.
She had left her desk lamp burning in the little house, and the soft yellow light glowed through the window. So she went back inside, where it was warm.
She removed her coat, set her mug on the white porcelain drainboard, then went to stand in front of the wood stove–which seemed so friendly now, with the fire banked safely behind the thick iron door.
She glanced at the dark rectangle of door between sitting rom and bedroom. She walked to the doorway and stood. She looked at the corner of the bed in the triangle of light spilling from the sitting room behind her. Two steps carried her to the foot of the bed, and she reached down and grasped the comforter covering the bed, pulled it to herself, wadding it into a soft bundle in her arms.
She fell asleep that first night curled into the loveseat, comforter tucked about her, reading a book she’d long been trying to finish.
The first morning of her second week in the little old house, she stepped into the yard with her tea. She caught and held her breath, mouth slightly open, filling with moist spring air and surprise. Hundreds of tiny, broad, stiff, green spears were pushing through the rotten snow. All along the house, beneath the single apple tree, along both sides of the silly little picket fence–not hundreds, thousands. Michael could have said if they were crocuses, or daffodils, or whatever. But she found she didn’t care.
“I’ll know, when they bloom,” she said. And she went back inside.
The main problem with the piece is that nothing friggin' happens...it's a decently literary 1K words, so it's fair game to blatantly sacrifice on Cthulu's literary altar...and muck about with to our hearts' content.
I was originally going to post a few paragraphs from a Stephen King short, so we could take it apart and figure out what made it scary--then I decided perhaps we could take a crack at making something fairly homogenous into downright creepy, instead.
Then maybe we'll go back and take a look at scary as done by a master.
So, to get the ball rolling, I'm slapping up an old flash piece. I am not emotionally attached to these words...but they belong to me, so we can do any old damn thing we wanna do to them, at will. <insert evil grin>
This is a writing exercise, open to anyone who wants to play--I am not looking for a crit.
It's a faily boring little thousand words, as is. So lets make it really creepy/evocative/tense/scary. Let's do so with word choice and pacing--not by introducing a serial-killer boogeyman in the closet, or making major plot changes. Let's also keep it PG-13.
Take on as much or as little of it as you care too--if it sinks without a trace, that's fine too.
(edited March 4th, to make more user-friendly
Okay--I did mention that this was an experiment. The clicking back-and-forth is frustrating and counterproductive. So I'm moving the flash piece over here, so we can work with it better:
___________________________________________________________
She came to the little old house in early spring. The shabby and weathered ship-lap siding reflected sun off snow, like the bottom of a sterling silver plate left too long a-sitting. Snow filled the yard, and lay drifted over the crazy tilting pickets of the garden fence.
She stood where the gate once hung. She sorted the strange keys on the ring, and dropped the note the realtor gave her into the snow. She sighed, tugged one glove off with her teeth, then bent and picked up the scrap of paper. She carefully brushed wet snow away with her gloved hand, and saw the words brush away, too, in bleeding smears. She shrugged and wadded up the little yellow note in her cold hand.
How important could Lenny-the-realtor’s advice really be, she thought.
So she put her hand in her coat pocket and let go of the note.
“I’ll need to shovel the walk,” she said. She rather liked the firm, decisive tone in her own voice. Before she spoke aloud, she feared she would sound unsure. Worse, perhaps she would inadvertently use a rising inflection at the end of her sentence, rendering it a question, instead of a statement. But she did not. Her own voice pleased her.
Michael would pull a folding shovel from a handy inside pocket and whack a path through the heavy snow, efficient as a tractor, before he even looked for his keys.
She did not shovel the walk. Instead, she went inside.
“What will you do there, alone?” her sister asked her yesterday. She had not answered her sister.
“I shall think. And take long walks in the countryside,” she said, now.
Damp chill filled the house. She noticed it immediately when she removed her coat and her remaining glove. Her other glove, she suspected, lay somewhere in the yard. She looked in all the likely places for a thermostat, and saw none. However, an iron stove squatted on a hearth of crumbling bricks in the corner of the sitting room.
She looked at the stove carefully, sizing it up as a potential adversary. She gripped the wooden handle on the lever that secured the stove-door and pulled. The fine hairs on her neck stood up when metal shrieked against metal, as she pulled the handle. The heavy door swung open on stiff iron hinges. She crouched to her hands and knees and stuck her head through the opening into the belly of the stove. She tried to turn her head enough to see if the sky showed through bottom of the stovepipe, that led to the roof. She could not.
“This was probably covered, in the damn note,” she said. She stood up and brushed the soot from her hands against her thighs.
She went outside without her coat to look for firewood. In a lean-to shed on the back of the little house, she found it, dry and split and stacked, with a box of kindling just to one side. The axe rested on its head, against a huge round of wood someone once used as a chopping block.
She picked up the axe, experimentally. It seemed terribly heavy to her. Michael would've used it to singlehandedly clear-cut the north woods for next year's firewood.
Back inside, she built a fire. The stove smoked a bit, at first. Michael would have laughed at her, watching her pushing and pulling at the moving parts on the stove and stovepipe, burning her fingers, her eyes watering from the smoke. But once she figured out how to open the damper, her fire burned neat and hot.
When darkness fell, so did the temperature. She stepped into the yard, wearing her coat again. She held both hands around a mug of tea that steamed wet and white against the distant sky. The stars were out, the sky black and very far away. It seemed terribly cold. Snow crunched and squeaked beneath her boots.
“I should go for a walk,” she said.
She stood in the yard in the snow, slowly rotated a full circle, her head tipped back to scan the sky. She thought she’d like to see the northern lights, but she wasn’t sure which direction was north. And she wasn’t sure what time of year she should expect them. She saw lights from her neighbor’s house, twinkling nearly a mile down the lane. No one tells you how very dark the nights are, here, she thought, and I never thought to ask.
She had left her desk lamp burning in the little house, and the soft yellow light glowed through the window. So she went back inside, where it was warm.
She removed her coat, set her mug on the white porcelain drainboard, then went to stand in front of the wood stove–which seemed so friendly now, with the fire banked safely behind the thick iron door.
She glanced at the dark rectangle of door between sitting rom and bedroom. She walked to the doorway and stood. She looked at the corner of the bed in the triangle of light spilling from the sitting room behind her. Two steps carried her to the foot of the bed, and she reached down and grasped the comforter covering the bed, pulled it to herself, wadding it into a soft bundle in her arms.
She fell asleep that first night curled into the loveseat, comforter tucked about her, reading a book she’d long been trying to finish.
The first morning of her second week in the little old house, she stepped into the yard with her tea. She caught and held her breath, mouth slightly open, filling with moist spring air and surprise. Hundreds of tiny, broad, stiff, green spears were pushing through the rotten snow. All along the house, beneath the single apple tree, along both sides of the silly little picket fence–not hundreds, thousands. Michael could have said if they were crocuses, or daffodils, or whatever. But she found she didn’t care.
“I’ll know, when they bloom,” she said. And she went back inside.
Ready for the axe? 
Joanne
OOPS. Sorry. 
out and beat me for adding elements. I'll try to stick with the program. 
behind the screen door on the porch that wasn't there, and trying to find that dang axe.