(a young man aged between 20 and 30 sits in an old oak rocking chair, around him is the stench of rotting flesh and he sits there past midnight)
WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!!!!!!!
Did this young defenceless man deserve to feel my rage and wrath? What did he do to me? Could I have stopped this from happening?
NO, NO
There was nothing more I could have done to stop myself, ah yes I remember exactly what this impotent fool done to me, he raided my wife’s riches and ravaged her violently before heartlessly savaging her to the brink of her life.
BUT WAIT, COULD I NOT HAVE LEFT THIS MAN FOR THE AUTHOROTIES TO PUNISH?
NO, WAIT
I had originally gone to the police and the police reports had implied that there was not enough evidence to prove him guilty, that’s what struck a nerve and that’s what enraged me, so in reality there are multiple blames for his death not just me, First if he hadn’t done anything to my wife and let her be then I may not have gone on the violent streak after him, yes, and if the police had just done the damn right thing and put that man in prison for the rest of his life or even just given him the death sentence then I wouldn’t have need to intervene and take matters into my own hands, yes…. It wasn’t my fault It would have absolutely nothing to do with and my wife would still be here if he hadn’t picked on the wrong couple yes, everything would be normal, my wife and I would be enjoying nice strolls across the river bed and great nights together.
THOUGH THAT MAY BE TRUE I COULD HAVE RESISTED, I SHOULD HAVE RESISTED.
WHAT SHOULD I DO??
Well done.This is really good.I like the way that he has a battle going on in his head and how it isn't resolved but is still eating away at him.Keep up the good work.
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ReplyDeleteThought this a good first effort but you could make things stronger by asking questions of the text you have already written. When you talk of 'the stench of rotting flesh', how are you going to show this to the audience? Is this the body of the murdered man? If so, and it stinks, then it has been dead for a while, so why is the body still with your narrator?
I also think you should lose the 'blame' bit at the beginning and have the confidence to allow your narrator to say what he did and why in a less evasive language. The same when you say 'he raided my wife's riches...'
Say what he did, if your narrator can face saying it. He may not be able to even say it, to re-live the awful event, so this avoidance of being able to describe what happened is drama too. So you could show how your character responds to having to re-live what happened.
Be human about his response to the police's failure to act. Just how would you feel about this? A lot angrier than the pragmatic explanation you gave him to say. And his reaction is as much to do with the police refusing to help as it is to do with what this person did to your narrator's wife.
In the long section when he justifies his actions, there is the suggestion that through this endless justifying he is realising perhaps that he should not have done what he did. You could explore this emergence of guilt and knowledge that he deliberately killed someone and perhaps he never realised he was capable of such a thing!
As for ending on a climax... Who was the dead man in relation to your narrator? How was your narrator able to find him and murder him? This is what I mean about asking questions about the text. It gives you more material to work on. I'm sure that when you look at your writing in this way then you will come up with lots of different ideas to develop it further.
And some general advice. Just imagine your narrator onstage with the dead body. He sits there in some agitated state. He still hasn't got rid of it. He has to tell someone what he did and why. Just imagine him actually living through this, his actions and how his words and actions betray his state of mind. He will be living it in front of you and you will be writing it down and telling us about it.
Best Wishes
ann g
Take note of Ann's comments, from which you could learn a great deal. This is good, powerful stuff, but there is not a sufficiently powerful sense of character - we just don't know them well enough...
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