If my childhood could be bottled and brewed, leather and lace would be the leaves in my tea, and the malt in my beer. If my childhood could be worn, lace and leather would be the fragrance of my finest eau de toilette. Leather and lace have the incredible ability to turn the hands of time, squeeze life’s oranges to a pulp and concentrate youth’s best bits into a glass or two of juice. Every sip is a capsule from the past - do you remember slipping on sun dried socks on washed feet, or sniffing cherry blossom shoe polish on shiny leather shoes. The taste of burnt sugar and banana flavoured medicine. I certainly do. As the years roll by, time starts to become the mind’s worst enemy. Memories burn away slowly from around the edges, until all that’s left is a camera without film; a photograph without a negative. Here I sit, writing by lamplight, as the Orient Express journeys through day and night and sunshine and showers. My journey from limbo to enlightenment will be a much harder feat than the one I am battling to overcome right now. Travel sickness and insomnia all have cures. Heartbreak doesn’t. Once the china pot is broken, no glue can fully mend the cracks from the fall. The pieces can, of course, be stuck together, but beauty is a state of the irreversible. Once it is lost, it will never return. It makes you wonder about the mercies you are spared every once in a while are really mercies at all. One day, age will bless you with a new – born wisdom, and you will realise that their reason for existing is only to inflict pain you would never have suffered if life hadn’t been so generous.
Leather and lace. They were never meant to be this complicated.
Our carriage window is open; the evening air is infused with meadowsweet and the bitter notes of burning coal. The smell is strangely therapeutic and every sharp intake of breath quells the nausea burrowing deep down in my stomach. I walk to the open window and poke my head out just enough to let the wind caress my face. Its slender fingers massage my cheeks and iron out the stress lines too many sleepless nights had scrawled underneath my eyes and forehead. Minutes are eaten away, yet the sand in the hourglass has surpassed the pull of gravity. Another of life’s short – lived mercies. A chain of pictures run past my eyes, not one identical to the other. Each one whispers a thousand different words to me. The sky is less complicated, and has only one question to ask. I however demand many answers to which the sky is forever silenced to expose. I just stand, watch and wonder, while I let the inevitable play out in front of me. I would consider this to be one of my greatest achievements if it was anyone other than Mother Nature drawing the curtains for the night. The splashes of orange in the sky begin to fade. A sea of black engulfs them. Midnight is arriving. I hail its welcome by slipping on a cardigan over my silk nightdress. Despite this extra layer, the raw winds cause a surge of goose bumps to blossom on my arms and neck. I slowly pull down the window, trying hard not to make a noise that could wake Benjamin. It would be against my last wishes to die in the presence of the living. I stare at his eyes. I can’t see his soul, but I can read his mind. Benjamin hasn’t yet said his first word. Words are worth little. His eyelids are glued together, almost as if he is making a wish. Some might call me selfish as I smother his face with my pillow. I would call it entitling my baby to what he deserves – and that is freedom. Mothers are meant to protect their children. One sip of liqueur from the goblet will only kindle a dislike towards the plentiful jug of innocence. I open the carriage door, pick my dead son up and hold him in my arms. Together. That is how we belong. Heaven. That is where.
Leather and lace. They were never meant to be this complicated.
Dear englishguru,
ReplyDeleteDue to the poor Internet connection at my local library yesterday, I had to post my task late last night at an Internet Cafe unfinished; I will be doing some necessary editing today. If you read my work before the deadline, can you please regard what I had posted as a first draft and not my final piece?
Many, many thanks,
STARDUST.
Wow! There’s some extraordinary writing here. Because of the way you’ve structured this piece (it is only halfway through that long first paragraph that the plot starts moving, in terms of who is “speaking”, where she is, and why), the initial draw is your imagery and the ideas developed through it. This works because your prose is staggeringly strong. The quality I especially admire is its restraint. For example: ‘slipping on sun-dried socks on washed feet, or sniffing cherry blossom shoe polish on shiny leather shoes’. The temptation is often to go wild with adverbs and adjectives (‘enthusiastically sniffing’, ‘deliciously shiny’, etc.), and yet succumbing to this temptation only leads to a key literary sin – overwriting. You do extremely well to avoid this. I’d consider dropping the ‘shiny’, and the repetitions of ‘on’ is a bit clunky, but this is a vivid, stark, and sensuous image. Even better is ‘the taste of burnt sugar and banana flavoured medicine’.
ReplyDeleteIf this opening verges towards being overwritten, it is not through the mechanics of the individual sentences but through all these sentences doing a very similar job. Really, just a couple are enough to show the narrator’s deep childhood nostalgia, and from there you can go straight into the ‘Memories burn…’ segment. Also, even after a few readings the significant of ‘leather and lace’ still remains a little unclear to me?
By the way, ‘memories burn away slowly from around the edges, until all that’s left is a camera without film; a photograph without a negative’ is really stunning. ‘Once the china pot is broken, no glue can fully mend the cracks from the fall. The pieces can, of course, be stuck together, but beauty is a state of the irreversible’ is also strong, although the addition of ‘once it is lost, it will never return’ makes this image slightly too “telling”. Didn’t quite follow the logic of the last sentence of this paragraph, either…
Your next paragraph takes us into the narrative present, and again does this with a sharp, sensuous image. The interaction of setting and plot (the smell of the coal calming the protagonists’ nerves means the reader senses something is “up”) is effective. The next part of the paragraph, up to the introduction of Benjamin/the plot, is a little OTT. ‘Burrowing deep down in my stomach’, ‘its slender fingers massage my cheeks and iron out the stress lines too many sleepless nights had scrawled underneath my eyes and forehead’, ‘each one whispers a thousand different words to me’… With some judicious editing you could pull some great stuff out of here, but at present I do feel this is overwrought. However, the end of the paragraph – and the story – is again a piece of wonderfully controlled writing. You do so well to avoid “MOTHER KILLS BABY!!!”-type amateur dramatics. Instead, this is a great meditation on the process of aging and the loss of innocence; a feat of imagination that is all the more impressive considering it comes from a writer so young.
The sensuality of your opening images creates a sense of overwhelming longing for the past, which is skilfully developed into a fear of aging and loss (brilliant “showing” over “telling” that allows the reader to work out the who and why of our narrator). I’d like a little more ‘what’: bringing in Benjamin so late seems like an ill-considered move, as knowing the narrator is a mother is really crucial to the impact of this piece. Also, it could do with cutting: there are whole sentences that, whilst great of themselves, do little to develop the reader’s sense of who, what, when, where, or why – and each sentence should be a development. Overall, though, this is an extremely impressive piece of short fiction. You’re such a mature writer, in terms of both your ideas (the way you got inside that mother’s head – again, wow) and your prose style (vivid but fantastically restrained). You’ve got to keep the writing up – you have a gift.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteBeautiful work, STARDUST. I'm delighted to see the quality of your prose. I would say it's surprisingly brilliant, but having seen the quality of your work before I know that brilliant is something you just keep doing. You should be so proud of your talent. Always write.
I go into more detail on a few picky bits, because that's really all there is to do.
Watch out, as Sarah said, for lines that tell us the same thing. Here: 'The splashes of orange in the sky begin to fade. A sea of black engulfs them. Midnight is arriving.' You have some beautiful imagery, but just one of the preceding images would play better off of 'Midnight is arriving.'
Make sure that sensory detail is as accurate as it is poetic. 'Slender fingers' of wind feels strange to me - it suggests small seperate touches.
You establish a good 'fictive present', of the woman writing on the train in: 'Here I sit, writing by lamplight, as the Orient Express journeys through day and night and sunshine and showers.' But that metafictional aspect of her writing this doesn't work with the ending.
'I open the carriage door, pick my dead son up and hold him in my arms. Together. That is how we belong. Heaven. That is where.'
It's paced so perfectly as an ending, but she's clearly not writing with one hand while this is happening. Ways of handling this would be to use an 'I will...' or to remove the metafiction, so it's just her thoughts. Of course she might not be writing what we're reading, but it's a conclusion that readers will be drawn to.
And that's it, really, only to say that you are already a wonderful writer, and from what I've seen you only stand to get better. Writing doesn't make life easy, in my experience, so I hesitate to say 'write, no matter what,' but I can't imagine you've got this far without seeing how difficult writing can make life sometimes, or seen the beauty in it too, so, yeah: Write, no matter what. A talent like yours carries that obligation, I'm afraid. I hope to read your work again in the future.
Take care,
Andy
Stardust, hello again, and well done on what is, i think, the best piece of writing of yours that have the chance to read. as with your previous work, this shows how much you love language, but what is really impressive about this one is the irresistible rhythm to so many of the lines.
ReplyDeleteThe first line is, in itself, quite wonderful - it deserves to read aloud on the radio by a professional actor. the same goes for "do you remember slipping on sun dried socks on washed feet, or sniffing cherry blossom shoe polish on shiny leather shoes" (once you allow me to change it to 'do you remember slipping sun-dried socks onto washed feet', or perhaps even 'just-washed feet', to get that extra beat in). 'sun-dried socks' is a little piece of poetry all of its own - and, incidentally, gives a great 'down-home', everyday note to a piece that in general - like your writing in general, in fact - is more concerned with the grandstanding, show-stopping line than the quiet and domestic one. don't sneer at the quiet and domestic. hold onto images like 'sun-dried socks' and 'cherry blossom shoe polish' and broken china pots - you don't want it all to be sand in the hourglass surpassing the pull of gravity. or i don't, wanyway.
Again, what makes this piece work so well is that the big abstract nouns are balanced out by lines that are simply reporting the evidence of the senses - 'the evening air is infused with meadowsweet and the bitter notes of burning coal' is another fantastic example. to get 'sweet' and 'bitter' so close together, and so subtly, is very well done indeed. and 'bitter notes of burning coal' is another deft little poetic phrase. more than poetic: musical. Alliteration of 'bitter' and 'burning', and assonance of 'note' and 'coal' - i don't know if was constructed like that, but for me that's why it works so well.
As for the 'content' of the piece - its story - this is for me secondary to the pleasures of the best sentences. it provides a dark twist, a justification of the writing that has come before, but you don't force it enough to make it really gut-wrenchingly affecting (which, of course, might have made it over-egged). The best bits in the second half are, for me, "I can’t see his soul, but I can read his mind. Benjamin hasn’t yet said his first word. Words are worth little. His eyelids are glued together, almost as if he is making a wish." great rhythm to the sentences, a reining in of the more intense vocabulary, and the result is a delicate balance of the beautiful child and the awful, impending act.
there are a few glitches i could pick on (her stress lines are 'scrawled on', then 'ironed out' - make your mind up, is she a notebook or a shirt?) but that's not in the spirit of the exercise at this point, i think. (what? i just did - oops, sorry). the point is, as the other moderators have said, to keep on writing and, as i've said before, to i) read everything you write out loud to yourself, to get the rhythm and ii) keep your dictionary on your desk at all times - it's not just the meaning of words, but the shades of meaning that are important when you're writing at the level that you are.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI would just like to say a few quick "thank yous" to everyone involved on the blog. I cannot stress how grateful I am to have been given such an opportunity like that of on wordvoodoo. Looking back over my previous tasks, I can clearly see how my writing style has developed over the past fifteen months since I joined the blog in November '08. I have been able to express myself creatively and have shared my work with some of the most memorable people, and likewise, they have done the same. Firstly, I would like to thank englishguru and the moderators. Without you, wordvoodoo wouldn't have been the incredible experience and learning curve it has lived up to be. It has been a pleasure in itself to read my comments for each task; being able to see what my strengths and weaknesses are from people who have more or less been in the same situation as myself is something I try not to take for granted. For the time you spent analysing and praising, "nit - picking" and advising, I would like to thank you for the hard work and dedication you installed into wordvoodoo and how you have shaped my writing into what it is today.
And as the proverb goes, "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings". Well, I think she just has.
Farewell wordvoodoo,
STARDUST.