Summer Storms: Prologue

I thought I had everything. I thought I could trust those closest to me. Everything I thought I knew, was wrong. It was just oh so wrong. I had a family who loved me, friends who adored me. I did well in school, kept to myself, worked hard at a job I loved. It was during the summer of my high-school graduation where my life literally turned upside down. I went from being ‘normal’ (or whatever the closest thing to ‘normal’ was) to something else entirely.
            My family wasn’t poor; in fact we were well off. Not only were we well off, but we were all close. Something that was uncommon. My father Michael was an accountant. He was an average built man, with a height of 5’9” and roughly 175 pounds. He was not jacked up with muscle, but he could still definitely hold his own. Michael had chocolate hair and brown eyes. My mother, Ruby was the manager of the towns flower shoppe.  She was roughly 5’5” and 125 pounds. She too, was athletic with auburn hair and green eyes. I also had a brother, Xavier who was more like my twin. We were both roughly the same build as our parents, both with brown hair, and blue eyes.
            Remember when I said that we weren’t poor? Well, we were not considered rich either. That did not mean that I asked for everything over the moon. As someone who had her own job on top of high school, I had a habit of buying my own things. I had a job at the towns elderly center, taking care of the residents. It didn’t pay much, so I saved often, but I loved the job. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. When it came to spending my money, it wasn’t on clothes or the latest fashion or the newest gadgets like most of my classmates. If I had books, music, movies and art supplies, I was happy. I spent most of my free time in my bedroom, where I was known for creating. Be it in writing, sketching or painting-I was always creating. It was my release from the many emotions I carried. Those emotions from the stress school and work caused, the drama from friends and other family members. It was an outlet that didn’t require me to bother anyone or allow anyone to judge me based on actions or words said.
             Xavier was more of a jock in school, more outgoing than I, but still always protective of me if someone stepped out of line. We protected each other from the judgmental sharks in school. We preferred it that way. Her loved playing football and swimming, and often spent his free time chasing girls that either didn’t know he existed or were way out of his league.
            In school I pushed for straight A’s and never took a summer off. Doing this allowed me to graduate a year early along with Xanviers class. My parents were so proud, they decided to gift me tickets to a cruise for the whole family that summer when I graduated. It was the first trip I was taking since I was a young girl. Most teenagers wouldn’t want to take the trip with their parents; and I guess that’s what made me unique. I loved and cherished everything my parents did for me. I knew that without them I wouldn’t be where I was in life. I mean… Xavier and I were both the legal age of eighteen and still living at home-not because we couldn’t afford it, but because we made sure our parents knew we appreciated them.
            To say that I was excited about the trip was an understatement. We were headed on a week cruise to Neptune Shores. It was one of the places that had been on my bucket list of places to visit. Although on most cruises you can dock and get off the ship for a while, Neptune Shores was not one of those places. Its beauty was post-card beautiful; and so, the cruise line wanted to keep it that way (and honestly, I don’t blame them). There was so much mystery and myth surrounding Neptune Shores, some believed that its ancestors still lived which was one theory as to why no one could ever get off the cruise ship. Another theory was that the natives were savages and kept any stragglers left behind of those who dare defy the cruise line’s request. Some say it was the home to Poseidon ‘back in the day’ and thus it should remain undisturbed.
        Neptune Shores was something out of a fantasy world mixed with world history. Once upon a time there used to be a castle upon an island, now just rubble surrounded by a forest or jungle. It was still on an isolated island, but it seemed to be a favorite place for a vacation. You could swim among the coral, maybe even sharks or dolphins. No one knew much of the island except that it was there, and supposedly cursed. Leave it to me to want to vacation to a place like that.

We were sitting outside at the schools’ football field, parents, aunts, uncles, children and grandparents lined the bleachers. Even though we were outside, in the warm sunlight and we could hear the bustling of cars, the chatter of excitement was very loud. It wasn’t just the students that were excited, it was their family members too. The uproar was a little overwhelming. All the student slowly took their seats on the folded chairs in their caps and gowns waiting for the principal to start. As he started to speak, I felt myself slowly start to zone out, thinking about the past three years and how the school community has been shaped with tragedy.

Throughout the last three years, the school lost three students, with at least one death affecting everyone. One student went each year into the heavens, and the deaths seemed connected somehow, but also seemed like random freak accidents. One of those students I knew of was named Maleko.

Before he died, Maleko explained that his name was Hawaiian and that it meant ‘defender of the sea’. He somehow knew who I was and about my family, my real family as he pointed out, but he mysteriously died before we could have that conversation. The newspapers reported a fatal car crash, of him and his parents all dying upon impact.

However as I recall every encounter before that, I had always had a serious case of déjà vu; and it wouldn’t be until my summer vacation until I found out why. We were meant to be connected, and no one was any the wiser for it.

Author's Note

First attempt at writing a story. Please leave any and all suggestions.

Reviews

[JayG]

Well, you did ask, so you have only yourself to blame. But…it’s a good first try, and what I have to say has nothing to do with how well you write (which is better than most hopeful writers) your talent, or even the story. It’s related to what I call, The Great Misunderstanding, which, boiled down, is this: For more than a decade, in school, we honed our writing skills via an endless succession of reports and essays, and, an occasional story.

Guess what that made us good at writing. Hint: not fiction. 😋

The thing we all forget is that the goal of a good report is informing the reader clearly, concisely, and, dispassionately.

Why dispassionately? Because in all the world only you know how you want the piece to be read. Only you know the emotion to place into the reading. Only you can hear your voice as you read; Only you know your intent for how the words are to be taken. And that’s a major problem, because our goal, 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 how much time did your teachers devote to how to do that? Zero, right?

See the problem? We can’t tell the reader a story as we would in person because none of our performance makes it to the page—and verbal storytelling is performance oriented. HOW you tell the story matters as much as what you say.

We can’t explain the progression of events, as we would in a report, because that won't stimulate reader’s emotions. So what do we do? We use the tricks the pros take for granted: the emotion-based and character-centric skills of the profession we call, Fiction-Writing—which would be a LOT easier to do had we not, pretty universally, forgotten that professional skills and knowledge are acquired IN ADDITION to the general skills traditionally called, The Three R’s: Reading, wRiting, and aRithmatic.

No one told us, for example, that on entering any scene, we need to orient the reader as to where we are, what’s going on, and whose skin we wear (and do it without the reader noticing it happening). So, we don’t. No one tells us that because a scene on the page is a unit of tension, but if we continue to keep the tension rising we'll cross over into melodrama, and so, before that happens the scene must end—usually in disaster for the protagonist.

For more on why, this article, Batman is my Role Model, might help:
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/27/the-grumpy-writing-coach-6/

(Because this site doesn’t handle links properly, you need to copy/paste the address to the URL box at the top of an internet page and hit Return.)

Look at the opining section of this story, not as the all knowing author, or the storyteller playing all roles. Instead, look at it as a reader in the bookstore, who arrives with mild curiosity that fades quickly, unless we replace it with active interest:

• I thought I had everything.

So…someone we know nothing about just told us they were wrong about something unknown. Where are we in time and space? Unknown. What’s going on in the scene? Nothing because the story has yet to begin. And in fact, it never does. At the end of what’s presented we’ve been told lots of things that are irrelevant to the opening scene, in an essay that might be titled, “My life before the story began.” But… Does a reader care what the protagonist’s mother weighed before the story began? As much as you’re dying to know what my mother weighed when I was a kid. Do they care how well off the protagonist was, years before the events that opens the first scene take place?

Bottom line: Unlike nonfiction, fiction happens in real-time, and places the reader into the scene, as-the-protagonist.

A point we universally forget is that as we read, we learn what happens BEFORE the protagonist does. So we react before they do, and decide what the best response is before they do.

So, do we want the reader to react as they normally would, or as the protagonist will? The answer is obvious, but the how isn’t: We calibrate the reader’s perception of the situation to that of the protagonist. If we make the reader know what has the protagonist’s attention in the moment they call “now;” if we make the reader know the protagonist’s immediate objective, desires, and needs; if we make the reader know their view of the needs/desires/intent of the others in the scene—including their misconceptions on that—several things will happen:

1. We know everything but what will happen in response to what's said/done. That makes the future uncertain, to-the-reader. And a worried reader is a happy reader.

2. Instead of every reader having their own personal view of what to do, we all use the protagonost’s.

3. The reader begins to feel as if they’re living the events, not just learning what happened.

4. The reader begins to CARE. And unless that happens, they stop reading, quickly. As Sol Stein put it: “A novel is like a car—it won’t go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The “engine” of both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the decision not to put the book down. The engine should start in the first three pages, the closer to the top of page one the better.”

So…while this was nowhere near what you were hoping to hear, doesn’t it make sense? A lot of the tricks of fiction-writing are like that, of the kind that make you say, “But that’s so…how did I miss something so obvious?”

And if that was your reaction, I have good news: An awful lot of the tricks-of-the-trade are just like that: Logical, sensible, and obvious when pointed out. Internalizing them, and making them as intuitive to use as the nonfiction skills of our schooldays, and your working days, is a bit more difficult, because convincing your current writing-reflexes to let go of the controls and let you write in a way that feels “wrong,” is hard.

But when you do internalize and integrate it, you’ll find that the act of writing becomes a lot more fun, as the protagonist becomes your co-writer, whispering suggestions and warnings in your ear as you write. Then, your protagonist will place hands on hips, cross their arms, and say, “Do what? Seriously? You expect me to do that? Hell no. Not me, and not in this situation. What I’ll do is…” Till that happens, your characters aren’t real to you or the reader.

So, how to you get there? My personal suggestion is to devour a few books on the subject of fiction-writing. For you it's ideal. You work when you have time. No pressure. And no tests. And recently, the single best book I’ve found on the basics of creating scenes that will sing to the reader is out of copyright, and available for free download on some archive sites The address of one is just below this paragraph.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

So grab a copy and dig in. For what it may be worth, the articles in my WordPress writing blog are mostly based on that book. It’s an older book, and he talks about your typewriter, assumes all men smoke and women are homemakers—which was true when he wrote the book. And, his section on research can be stated as, “Use Google, a lot.” But that aside, the book has over 200 5-star reviews on Amazon, and is by far, the best I’ve found on pulling back the curtain on the why’s and how’s of the profession.

So was this what you were hoping to hear? Of course not. Who would? But it is what you need to know. And your wordsmith skills are up to the task, so I thought you’d want to know.

So, hang in there, and keep on writing.

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