Chapter 1: Marooned

"Augh, my head is...pounding." Sano says in a daze 

"Where...am...I?" 

Finding yourself on an unidentified island is possibly one of the worst predicaments you could ever find yourself in, unfortunately, this seems to be the case for Sano as he wakes up on an unfamiliar shoreline with his brown side-swept hair heavily dusted with Sano. He sits up and stares at the agitated sea while trying to remember the events that led up to this,

"Something about...an investigation of a mysterious island...and...my ship getting attacked by a ...large, black, white, and red squid creature?" He blows off the idea completely, finding the idea completely ridiculous and chalking it up to the headache or possible brain trauma he had received during the crash making his memory hazy.

"Maybe if I had my...wait!"

A glint of genius sparks in his forest green eyes

"My notebook! Where is that thing?"

It was an unmistakable book with it's Burgundy leather cover, with purple and gold accent stitching, a flowery bookmark sticking out and a hibiscus themed pen attached to the side. Albeit a sleazy looking notebook, it was certainly never gonna get lost considering the ...flamboyant colour palette. Searching frantically around the beach and in his trench coat's pockets, he causes quite the scene, although luckily no one was there to bear witness to it. He collapses to the ground in defeat, bits of kelp flying off of his pale skin in the process. The stress of losing his notebook finally dies down for a bit, before being replaced by an even more vicious feeling of stress.

"Wait...Where am I!?" He says as a sick feeling grows in his stomach

The young man stood up and began his sporadic search for any clue on his whereabouts, a sign of life, a landmark or even the small, useless dingy he was using that crashed here in the first place, but to his dismay, his vision is only filled by dense vegetation and salt crusted rocks. He swats away the sand and algae on his brown coat as he furthers his investigation on the beach he finds himself on, but as his stress and adrenaline finally dies down, he finally is afflicted with the after effects of the shipwreck. The awful headache from earlier nests into his head once again, and a heavy weight washes over him, both of which causing him to tumble unceremoniously into the sand. As the oceanic sun beams radiantly down on his frail frame, the soft breeze fills his his senses with the pungent oder of sea salt , and the sound of undulating water softly echoes into his ears, he slowly begins to fade into a deep sleep.

Hours later...

Sano awakens to the same breathtaking scenery as before, the soft dunes, the extensive ocean that stretches for miles and miles, and the variety of vegetation. It would be a rather calming sight, Sano quite enjoys this kind of aesthetic, and would love to live somewhere like this, see the only issue is that he has no clue he actually is. His hopes of this whole situation just being some outlandish fever dream are viciously shattered and the pseudo-explorer is forced to assess his situation accordingly. In quick wit, he takes off a sock and ties it to a nearby tree.

"There we are! A landmark... now time to just figure out where I am."  He says with feeble confidence.

As he begins to take his first few steps towards the unknown, a deep rooted , guttural feeling springs forth, freezing him in place as his fear of the unknown sets. His knees shake and go weak as anxieties start filling his mind. However with a bout of energy , and an arm covering his face, he sprints cowardly into the forest, branches thwapping his legs and arms powerfully. Finally he arrives into a small clearing, instead of the shoreline filling his vision, it was replaced by fertile, extensive plains.

"Hey! Maybe this whole stranded thing isn't so bad!" He says striding confidently across the plains

The beautiful trees sway peacefully as the grass and flowers dance around his sand , the wind coos softly in his ears and the birds sing a graceful song throughout the field. The sight was relaxing to Sano as he slows down his pace to a brisk walk, enjoying the scenery along the way, and the scent of vegetation filling his nose pleasantly. 

"Maybe I should try adventuring when I get back hom-" 

...

*Thud!* 

"...ow."  He mumbled feebly 
 
While walking through the plains, relishing in its beautiful sights, Sano failed to realize the mine entrance that slowly crept under him as he walked forward.

After finally gathering strength to pick himself back up, Sano goes to climb out of the mine, before being rudely interrupted by an other-worldly sounding *crash* and soon followed by sudden heavy downfall, the rain causing him to slip off the rock, and land flat on his backside. 

"Well , I guess I'm stuck here for a while." He grumbles haphhazardly 

He contemplates exploring more of the cave, but the ominous threat of the abandoned mine kicks his common sense into high gear and he scoots far away from the entrance. He sits, staring up at the rain, with his knees huddled up to his torso, humming a short tune that reminded him of his home. Obviously not comforting him in the slightest he decides to take his mind off things by carving a senseless message into a piece of wood.

"First home :)"  The makeshift sign reads

The sign's cheesy etching reminds him of the ridiculous messages plastered around his childhood home, the pleasant memories try their best to swat away the threatening aura off the dark cave, it only succeeds at adding an even more foreboding feeling to the cave. While clutching a nearby blunt rock with all his force, Sano falls into a light rest.

Author's Note

Any criticism is greatly appreciated, Thank you!

Reviews

[Vertigo Cat1111]

Hey, this was great! The storytelling and writing were really descriptive and interesting to read and the dialogue was great too. Criticism is great but always write for yourself, first of all. I love how detailed this is and how likable the lead character is already. Please keep writing, because you did a fantastic job and I'd love to see more!

[JayG]

Well, you did ask...so you have only yourself to blame. 😆

• HI! Im just someone who wants to write things for the world to see, in hopes of improving my skills!

Won’t work, I’m afraid, because in order to improve our skills, we, first, need to posses them. And while it’s reasonable to believe that after more than a decade of practicing the skill our teachers called writing, via all the reports and essays we were assigned, all that did was make us really good at writing reports and essays. That’s a great help on the job, because employers need us to create reports, essays, and letters. But it’s a useless skill for fiction.

Why? Because a report explains. A narrator, whose voice we can’t hear, and whose performance we can’t see, sums things up, dispassionately, the way a history book does. And who reads them for fun? Damn few.

Fiction-Writing is a profession, one for which they offer four year majors at the universities. And you have to figure that at least some of what’s taught must be necessary. Right? It's goal is to provide an emotional experience. To make the reader feel and care, to cheer for the protagonist, not nod and say, "Uh-huh."

One of the first rules is the writing adage, "Show, don't tell." That doesn't mean to talk about the visual, it means to present the protagonist's viewpoint so deeply that the reader's perceptions are calibrated to those of the protagonist. How we perceive the situation is the mother of what we say and do. Given that, can a reader truly understand why your protagonist does and say hings is you do no more than list those actions?

For example, in your school-days no one explained how a scene on the page differs from one on the screen. Nor did they list the elements that make a scene up, or talk about management of them. Certainly, they didn’t talk about managing the short-term scene-goal, or why scenes end in disaster. But...if you don’t know what, how can you write what a reader views as a scene? How can you make an acquiring editor smile if you don’t know what they smile for?

The answer is that if you want to write fiction that your reader will see as fiction you need to pick up some of there tricks the pros take for granted, because we all leave our school days exactly as ready to write fiction as to pilot a commercial airliner.

The local library system’s fiction-writing section can be a huge help. But the best book I’ve ever found on the basics of creating scenes that will sing to the reader is available free at the address just below this paragraph. It won’t make a pro of you. That’s your task. But it will give you the knowledge and the tools to do it with it it’s in you.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

Here’s what you need to fix: Right now, you’re focused on plot events and informing the reader of them. But that’s not what fiction is all about. 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 the nonfiction skills our schooling gives us do that?

So give that book a try. It got me my first publishing contract, and maybe can do it for you. But while 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/