Charlottes sunset

A Story by Tamara

I step out of the grey block of a building and onto the just as dull, crowded street, my bag hanging over my shoulder. This time around this kind of work is exhausting. I can‘t take this anymore, this job is draining me. I look at my bag, thinking I might have enough, but I erase that thought out of my head. It probably is enough but I need more. I know I have to keep going.

As I begin walking down the street I reminise my old life. Images of a bright countryside fill my mind, my family‘s barn and her… I shake my head to loose these thoughts as fast as possible. I have to stay focused if I ever want the chance of having happiness like that again.

It is Saturday so I turn the usual corner to the train station, just as I notice someone following me. Most people wouldn’t recognise this, it takes years of training to notice the swift movements through the crowd, the piercing eyes that look at you every once in a while to reassure your location, the tic they get when you catch them.

Captain Camden warned me that someone would find me sooner or later. I knew it myself, but I didn‘t care. I would do anything for this cause, anything to win this horrible war. I would do anything to revenge my Charlotte. But doing anything now would be foolish. I have already spotted the others �" there are five people on this street in total, and even if I could take them there will for sure be more coming. So I decide to do the thing I have been doing for the last few years. Staying low and running.

The train station is already in sight and so is my train, so I act like I have seen nothing and continue casually walking towards the platform. I can feel their stares burning holes into my back, but they are not making a move on me meaning they don‘t know about my next one.

I hear the whistle signalling the passengers that the train is about to leave. Smoke is coming out of the train and the wheels slowly begin to move. “This is my cue,” I think as I suddenly begin sprinting towards the train. I hear shouting behind me but I won’t let it irritate me. I have to get this train.

The train gains speed by the second, but I am almost caught up to it. I reach for the rail at the end of the train and manage to pull myself up in time. I breathe heavily and tuck my hair behind my ears as I look back to the people who were just chasing me. The looks of disappointment on their faces will forever be my favourite.

After two minutes on the train I lose sight of them and instead I‘m looking at a gorgeous sunset. All kinds of colours from pink to red to yellow mix up together and reach from the horizon until above me, where it turns into a mixture of different shades of blue. I remember something Charlotte once said to me. “Every time an artist dies he gets to paint the sunset”. It was one of the most beautiful sentences I have ever heard and I feel honoured to watch this artists work from down here.

This sunset feels a little too familiar. It seems a little like how the sky looked the day they got her. I remember how I laid in bed all day, wishing this wasn‘t happening, that she was downstairs creating another masterpiece. Then, in the evening a sunbeam hit my eye and I looked out of the window. A warm feeling coated my tortured heart as I saw the sky. Turns out she did paint a masterpiece. It just wasn‘t from downstairs, but rather from up there.

I take off my bag and take out the documents. Captain Camden will be so proud when he sees what information I have gathered. I am assured that this will help us win and finally get revenge. Finally everything seems to add up. I look back up at the sky, where a few stars have begun to form. “See Charlotte? I promised you I would get them. And now I will,” I whisper, hoping she is somewhere among them.

© 2021 Tamara

Author's Note

Hello, this is my first time publishing on this website. There will be more short stories and poems in the future. Hope you‘re having a great day!

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JayG

• I step out of the grey block of a building and onto the just as dull, crowded street, my bag hanging over my shoulder. This time around this kind of work is exhausting. I can‘t take this anymore, this job is draining me.

1. “You” talk to the reader in a voice filled with emotion… But they can’t hear it or see your expression, because our medium doesn't reproduce sound or picture.

2. You say "you" have your “big bag” over your shoulder… But how big is a “big bag?” and what’s in it? And by “Over my shoulder, do you mean the bag, itself is over your shoulder, or that this unknown person is a woman and means a large shoulder bag of the kind that women carry? No way to tell as we read, and since there is no second, first-impression...

3. You complain to the reader that "you" can’t take such exhausting work… But the reader has no idea of what the job is, where it is, or the smallest thing about it.

4. "You" step onto a “crowded street,” But where? When? Is this our present, the future, or the past? No way to tell.

My point? It’s the opening line, and it’s meaningless to the reader because they lack two critical things that you have as you read: Context and intent. You know where we are, what’s going on, and who we are. The unnamed person knows. The people in the story know. But the one you wrote this for? Not a clue.

We cannot transcribe ourrself telling the story as if to an audience because verbal storytelling is a performance art, where HOW you tell the story—your performance—matters as much as what you say. With no actors or visual aids, the verbal storyteller must substitute their personal performance for the live action of stage and screen. But how much of your performance makes it to the page? NONE. Not a trace. All the reader has is the emotion that punctuation suggests (and they see that AFTER they read the line) and what the words seem to mean, based on their own life-experience, NOT your intent.

Bottom line: It’s not a matter of talent or how well you write. It’s that the nonfiction writing skills we’re given to prepare us for the needs of employment are unrelated to those of the profession of Fiction-Writer. Why? Because all professional knowledge and technique is acquired IN ADDITION to the set of general skills we get in school.

And what that means, in practice, is that you need the skills that the pros take for granted. Readers don’t have those skills, any more than does the art-lover posses the brush techniques of the painter. But they expect to see the result of using them in your work because they see it in every piece of fiction they normally read—and have seen the result of them being used since childhood. And that means that you need to do a bit of study and practice, because using the skills of nonfiction that we acquired in school to write fiction will result in what reads like a report.

The local library’s fiction-writing section is a great resource. So time spent there is time wisely invested. And if you’re up to a university level book, the best book on writing fiction that will sing to the reader is free to read and download on several archive sites. The address of one, Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the selling Writer, is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

So…I’m pretty certain this was nothing like what you were hoping to get, which was a hint or two, plus, “But it's a great story idea.” So something like this can sting...a lot. But since we pretty much all fall into this trap, you have a LOT of company.

Why? Because the problem you face is that we leave our schooldays believing that writing-is-writing, and we’ve got that taken care of. We never realize that we are exactly as prepared to write fiction as to pilot an airliner. But who’s to tell us? Our teachers learned to write in the same classrooms. Somehow, we realize that we’re not ready to write a script without more training, or work as a journalist. But we never apply that reasonability test to fiction. It's one hell of a "whoops," but it hits us all. We know that the universities offer a degree in Commercial Fiction Writing, but somehow, never say, "Well, at least some of that must be necessary," and apply it to yourselves. Before I learned it, I'd written six unsold novels. So you're getting an earlier start of fixing the problem.

So...now you know something that most hopeful writers never learn. And it matters, because it’s the reason the rejection rate is 99.9% in the publisher/agent’s office And if you fix that…

So dig in. I think you’ll find the learning fun—like going backstage for the first time in a professional theater—and filled with “Oh…so THAT’S how they do it!” And 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/

Posted 2 Years Ago

1. “You” talk to the reader in a voice filled with emotion… But they can’t hear it or see your expression, because our medium doesn't reproduce sound or picture.

2. You say "you" have your “big bag” over your shoulder… But how big is a “big bag?” and what’s in it? And by “Over my shoulder, do you mean the bag, itself is over your shoulder, or that this unknown person is a woman and means a large shoulder bag of the kind that women carry? No way to tell as we read, and since there is no second, first-impression...

3. You complain to the reader that "you" can’t take such exhausting work… But the reader has no idea of what the job is, where it is, or the smallest thing about it.

4. "You" step onto a “crowded street,” But where? When? Is this our present, the future, or the past? No way to tell.

My point? It’s the opening line, and it’s meaningless to the reader because they lack two critical things that you have as you read: Context and intent. You know where we are, what’s going on, and who we are. The unnamed person knows. The people in the story know. But the one you wrote this for? Not a clue.

We cannot transcribe ourrself telling the story as if to an audience because verbal storytelling is a performance art, where HOW you tell the story—your performance—matters as much as what you say. With no actors or visual aids, the verbal storyteller  must substitute their personal performance for the live action of stage and screen. But how much of your performance makes it to the page? NONE. Not a trace. All the reader has is the emotion that punctuation suggests (and they see that AFTER they read the line) and what the words seem to mean, based on their own life-experience, NOT your intent.

Bottom line: It’s not a matter of talent or how well you write. It’s that the nonfiction writing skills we’re given to prepare us for the needs of employment are unrelated to those of the profession of Fiction-Writer. Why? Because all professional knowledge and technique is acquired IN ADDITION to the set of general skills we get in school.

And what that means, in practice, is that you need the skills that the pros take for granted. Readers don’t have those skills, any more than does the art-lover posses the brush techniques of the painter. But they expect to see the result of using them in your work because they see it in every piece of fiction they normally read—and have seen the result of them being used since childhood. And that means that you need to do a bit of study and practice, because using the skills of nonfiction that we acquired in school to write fiction will result in what reads like a report.

The local library’s fiction-writing section is a great resource. So time spent there is time wisely invested. And if you’re up to a university level book, the best book on writing fiction that will sing to the reader is free to read and download on several archive sites. The address of one, Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the selling Writer, is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

So…I’m pretty certain this was nothing like what you were hoping to get, which was a hint or two, plus, “But it's a great story idea.” So something like this can sting...a lot. But since we pretty much all fall into this trap, you have a LOT of company.

Why? Because the problem you face is that we leave our schooldays believing that writing-is-writing, and we’ve got that taken care of. We never realize that we are exactly as prepared to write fiction as to pilot an airliner. But who’s to tell us? Our teachers learned to write in the same classrooms. Somehow, we realize that we’re not ready to write a script without more training, or work as a journalist. But we never apply that reasonability test to fiction. It's one hell of a "whoops," but it hits us all. We know that the universities offer a degree in Commercial Fiction Writing, but somehow, never say, "Well, at least some of that must be necessary," and apply it to yourselves. Before I learned it, I'd written six unsold novels. So you're getting an earlier start of fixing the problem.

So...now you know something that most hopeful writers never learn. And it matters, because it’s the reason the rejection rate is 99.9% in the publisher/agent’s office And if you fix that…

So dig in. I think you’ll find the learning fun—like going backstage for the first time in a professional theater—and filled with “Oh…so THAT’S how they do it!” And 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/

Rating /100

alanwgraham

This is an intriguing story Tamara. You have done a good job of conveying a dark mood but you have left us puzzling over the detail of what is happening. I think there is scope to develop this if you wish.
Good luck with your storytelling!
All the best,
Alan