Hello again everyone,
Here’s another example of fast fiction from my monthly writers group’s warming up exercises. For anyone interested in a full explanation, here’s a link.
A quick rundown of the rules:
Rule #1: These pieces of fast fiction were generated from a prompt chosen at random during one of my monthly writers group meetings. I will label that prompt at the top and where I use it in the prose.
Rule #2: WordPress allows me a ‘click here to read the rest of the story’ break, and that will be used before the fast fiction begins in earnest so people browsing through this blog are not overwhelmed.
Rule #3: The prose of the fast fiction shall be transcribed from my handwriting accurately: Line breaks, grammar, punctuation, spelling, what-have-you. The point of showing a 10- or 15-minute first draft is saying what you tried to do in that time, so what does editing really get me? The very rare changes I really do deem necessary shall be noted with an asterisk and an apologetic explanation at the end.
Rule #4: After the fast fiction I will include a few sentences about my first thoughts of the prompt. These entries are less about the actual prose and more about the exercise as a whole. Post-gaming that exercise will be a big part of the end result.
And that’s it. Here we go.
Prompt:
She’s had so many misfortunes recently that she’s been on my mind a lot of the time.
The year we burned her down to the waterline began with an ugly truth: My father’s boat wasn’t just a money pit; she was unsalvageable.
“The two happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day you buy her and the day you sell her,” my wife said in sympathy as we contemplated caulking the cracks that had appeared over the winter while she was supposedly safe in storage.
“I never bought her. I inherited her,” I reminded Alice.
“I know,” she said, as she said every time I said that. “I never would have let you buy that thing if I’d had any say.”
“We fell in love on that boat,” I mused.
“You fell in love on that boat. I fell in love on dry land, out of sight of the ocean. I didn’t expect you’d have a boat that would take half my earnings to keep afloat,” Alice said.
“It hasn’t been that bad,” I protested weakly.
“We talk about her every fall when she goes into storage, and every spring when she comes out, and all summer long, and it’s never good news,” Alice said.
I confessed she’s had so many misfortunes recently that she’s been on my mind a lot of the time.
If it wasn’t the hull, it was the engine.
We talked about selling her, but there was no one stupid enough to buy her.
So we decided to give her the Viking Funeral the old girl deserved.
I took out the engine and the fuel tank and anything really noxious; I stuffed her with tinder, and then some friends and I towed her a mile offshore.
Alice held my hand as we watched her burn.
God, I loved that boat.
—
Note: This exercise was from the first meeting for a new member of our writers group who I had recruited and wanted to impress. Because some people showed up a little late, we decided to only spend seven minutes on the exercise instead of the usual 10 or 15. When I had finished reading it, one of the long-time group members muttered, “How do you have time for adverbs?”
I enjoy it when I impress the group, and it felt even better to do so in front of our new member.
Anyway, on to the meat of the exercise. I didn’t care for the awkward wording of the prompt. I felt it was steering me into talking in Received Pronunciation or a Mid-Atlantic Accent about some woman whose front room would include a fainting couch, and I really did not want to go that route. I opted instead to make the ‘she’ a boat, and what misfortunes can befall a boat? Well, why don’t I vaguely say all of them and get to some dialogue where the owners recall fondly and not so fondly their life together, and the third member of their relationship: A boat neither of them wants anymore.
It was only as I was typing this up that I realized I never actually named the boat, so I decided that would be a fun title for this exercise.
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