train

bedtime story about a train.

An old train winds through the mountains in a cold wet place not marked on maps. You might only see flashes of its rusty siding through the heavy white fog that blankets the hills, but you can always hear its rattling breaths as deep as if they were coming from your own chest. And in the night you can hear the train’s long lonely whistle. No one’s really sure how many cars the train has--there used to be an old man who sat shivering by the side of the tracks with only his whiskery chin sticking out of the twenty threadbare coats bundled around him, and maybe he knew. When he was a boy he used to run alongside the train and fly clinging to the side, sometimes hanging there with the cold wind whipping his face. Other times he would slide open one of the car doors and slip inside. 

He lived to explore those cars. If he liked a particular one enough he would name it. There was the Kettle, with its cracked yellow tile walls all hung with iron pots and pans. It always smelled good in there--every time he opened the door something new would be bubbling on the stove or making the woodstove rattle and shoot steam. The honeycomb of shelves and little cabinets was always crammed with tins of tea, candy, and baskets of strange spiny or speckled-y vegetables. Once, standing on the big breakfast table on his toes, he yanked open a jammed cabinet and was rewarded with a small avalanche of elegant old bottles. A few smashed, but the ones he saved he lined up neatly and poured a little glass of each. That afternoon he sipped on sour raspberry cordial, sweet cloudy rice wine, something burning and brown, and a half dozen others that he couldn’t remember. The dreamlike drift of numbly floating through the train afterwards was almost worth the awful night spent on his knees. Best of all about the Kettle was that the fire was lit on even the dampest, most miserable days when the choking fog was so thick you could only see swirling white behind the windows. And unlike the other cars, it always seemed to look forward to his visits, never eluding him. It was always first, right after the locked conductor’s cabin.

The boy’s second-favorite after the Kettle was the Orchard. It moved around the most out of all the cars, but he noticed that it would turn up more often between the thaw and the first frost. The trees were small and stunted, but the boy liked the small sour apples they bore. He also liked peering through the thick green glass windows that made everything outside look shivery and wavy. The few days a year when the trees dripped with fragrant white flowers were his favorite days of all.

Some cars weren’t so pleasant. He once found himself in a dim bedroom with a huge canopy bed surrounded by gossamer curtains. Through them he could see the dark figure of a woman pacing, sometimes nibbling her thumb or tugging at her hair. He was too scared to open the curtains, and she never seemed to notice him. Her back always stayed turned, her face in shadow. He didn’t like the feeling the Bedroom gave him, but in it were some of the most beautiful things he would ever see: a necklace with enormous sapphires as dark and juicy as blackberries; a long thin box that held two paint brushes so soft he couldn’t even feel them when they brushed his skin; a velvet bag full of six yellow teeth carved into dice; a lovely little silver knife with black burn marks on the blade. One day he finally drew up the courage to throw open the doors of the big wardrobe, and hanging there he found dozens of nightgowns, light as spiderwebs. Some were trimmed with lace, others with ribbons or pearls, and still others with delicate embroidery. He thought they looked like ghosts, floating in the dark. The only light in the Bedroom came from tall clusters of candles that reached up from the tables and floor like waxy white fingers. The boy didn’t go in there very often, only when he was feeling quiet and wanted to touch the beautiful things. He called it the Bedroom but never considered sleeping there, for he always spent the night curled up by the fire in the Kettle.

There was also the Library. The door itself was a sliding bookshelf, so sometimes it was hard to find the way out once he was inside. All sorts of books crowded the dusty shelves--boring manuscripts, drippy collections of poems, hundreds of diaries, sprawling fantasy volumes, and, his favorite, a small book of short stories. None of them made much sense but they felt familiar in a good way. He spent many hours combing through dusty pages looking for long-forgotten four leaf clovers and faded autumn leaves tucked away by dead hands. He even grew to like the little brown mice that whispered through the shelves, sometimes brushing his fingers when he reached too far back for a book.

The Clocktower was another of his favorite places to spend rainy afternoons. Clocks of every size and shape lined the walls from floor to ceiling; even the floor was etched like a sundial. There were stately grandfather clocks, handsome little carriage clocks, round gallery clocks, elegant swinging pocket watches, and sandglasses in every color. Crowding the mantle was a little army of tambour clocks. The boy had special favorite clocks, too: the tall anniversary clock that was glass so you could see how everything worked, the tiny red alarm clock barely bigger than his thumbnail, the terrarium-like grandfather clock that was full of little growing plants, and of course the creaky old cuckoo clock that shot out a metal bird every forty-nine minutes. The boy borrowed an tarnished silver wristwatch from the Clocktower so that if he was somewhere else in the train he would know when to start racing through the cars searching for the Clocktower. There were times when it evaded him and the hour passed disappointingly, but other times he would burst in just as all the clocks (except for the cuckoo, of course) chimed, boomed, and screeched out their hourly greeting to him.

The last car the boy ever uncovered was one he simply called the Hair Room. Hair of every color and texture rippled down the walls and hung from the ceiling in long tails. There were bundles of short black curls tied up with ribbon, thick golden manes draped over chairs, shiny brown ponytails, and hair in every shade of red from rusty orange to ruby. There was also a sheet of shimmering blue-green hair that the boy suspected was the scalp of a mermaid, and a short stub of bright pink that could have been shorn from a fairy. He would brush the manes every now and then, carefully untangling and smoothing them. He also liked to drape the hair over his own head to see how he would look with wild red curls or sleek blue-black braids. And he wondered how much of the hair was given and how much was stolen, and how much the train simply grew itself.

The boy discovered and frequented at least a hundred other cars. Some he only spent a day in before they disappeared, others stayed around for longer. One, a grey little room wrapped in a heavy blanket of dust, was a hideout of his for months until it vanished when he didn’t visit it for one day. The only furniture in it was a creaky old piano. It was terrifically out of tune and the thick layer of dust on it muffled everything to a whisper, but he liked laying on top of it and banging the keys to feel the vibrations hum through him.

As the boy grew old he gave up on food after a while. Nothing tasted as satisfying as hot steamed sweet potatoes from the Kettle or sour apples from the Orchard. Nothing felt as real as discovering a new car. All day and all night he could hear the deep rattling breaths of the train in his chest, but as time went on the train rumbled past him less and less until there were whole months he spent trundling along the tracks trying to find it. He found that he felt most like himself when he picked up his head from between his bony knees and tipped his close-eyed face into the wind to hear the long lonely call of the train whistle. He was not a boy anymore. And when the old man became too hollow and birdboned to run alongside the train and leap aboard, he laid down on the tracks and closed his eyes. The blanket of white fog poured itself over him and he stayed there until the train came humming down the tracks to meet him.

Reviews

[JayG]

If your goal is to write fiction you need to think about how much you want to do that, because there are several problems, common to the hopeful writer, but which the author will never see, that will involve some significant work to fix.

Why? Because you possess two things the reader doesn’t: Context and intent. So when you read the story, before you read the first word you know where we are in time and space, who we are, and what’s going on. But because you’re using the nonfiction writing skills we’re given in our skill years, the result reads like a report. A narrator, who’s not on the scene, is talking to the reader, in a voice they can’t hear. So, when they read they have no way to know the inflection and emotion you’d place in the reading. Because of that, what they hear, as they read, is a dispassionate voice talking ABOUT things and places, giving the reader overview and summation. In other words, a report, which provides an informational experience.

But fiction? 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 a report do that. The reader isn’t seeking to know what the character you focus on did in the past. That’s history, and when was the last time you, or anyone you know, read a history book for fun? The reader wants you to make them feel as if they’re actively living the story, moment-by-moment, in real-time. How much time did your teachers spend on how to do that? None, right? But universities offer degree programs in Commercial Fiction Writing. And you have to assume that at least some of what those hard-working students learn is necessary. Right?

Let’s look at a few lines, not as the all-knowing author, who arrives already knowing the characters and the situation, but as your reader must.

• An old train winds through the mountains in a cold wet place not marked on maps.

“An old train?” That could mean a modern train that’s been in use for several decades. It could mean a train from “old times.” But, old times could be 1930, 1830, or any time between. We could be in England, the USA, or any other country. In fact, we could be on another world, or a fantasy world. You know. The boy who's not important enough to have a name knows. Shouldn't the reader know?

And what does a “cold wet place” mean to a given reader? The sun never shines? There's no summer? You’re talking generic. And in any case the wet and cold seemed to have no bearing on the story.

Here’s the thing. Forget the idea that you’re telling the reader a story. That works in kids books because whoever reads it to them places excitement into their voice, and, there are pictures to illustrate. But you don’t have that. And verbal storytelling is performance art, where how you tell the story matters as much as what you say. So you either make the reader feel they’re living that story or they turn away.

Something we all forget is that the reader knows everything that happens BEFORE the protagonist does, because we read about what’s happening, THEN find out what the protagonist’s response is. But the reader will react first. So if their reaction is unlike that of the protagonist, they'll stop to think about: “Is my response better?” And anything that pulls the reader out of the story is bad.

So how do we get around that problem? Easy. We calibrate the reader’s response to that of the character. We make them know the situation as the protagonist does; we make them know the reader’s needs and imperatives; we make them BECOME the protagonist, and therefore, respond as-that-character. And no one in your school years ever told you either than or, how to do that.

So… visit the library’s fiction-writing section. There, you’ll find the views of pros in publishing, writing, and teaching. Time spent there is time wisely invested. Personally? I’d suggest Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found to date at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free 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

For what it may be worth, the articles in my WordPress writing blog are based on what you’ll find in such a book.

So…will tha book, or another, make a pro of you. Nope. But it will give you the tools needed to become one.

Of more importance, what I said about the story, above has nothing to do with how well you write, or, talent. It’s that you’re missing critical information, without knowing that it's missing. And since you’ll not address the problem, you don’t see as being one, I thought you’d want to know.

So jump in. 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/