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:
This month’s prompt was a photo of a man painted half blue dancing half-naked at a rave. I wouldn’t recognize the picture even if I went looking for it, so I grabbed this much better piece of art as a suggestion instead.
They called him the Smurf, although no one ever thought he was three apples high.
He was a lot higher than that.
A former prop master for the Blue Man Group who fell on hard times with the closure of the Toronto touring group, the Smurf found himself drifting from dead end job to dead end job to make ends meet.
As Lover Boy insisted, he was working for the weekend.
On Friday nights the Smurf swallowed a handful of party drugs, chased it down with half a mickey of rye, and then painted himself blue in the time it took his mind to absorb the chemicals. His parting gift to himself when the Blue Man Group closed its doors was several ten-gallon drums of their patented body paint, and even though the label said it was expired, he began by stripping naked, rubbing it in his genitals, and then smearing it up his belly, down his legs, around his back, over his shoulders, until eventually he was covered from head to toe, and then putting on blue-dyed shorts for the sake of modesty in the last moments where that mattered to him.
And then…
And then he danced!
“Sometimes you just gotta dance!” the Smurf would enthuse to passersby on the street as he rocked out to music only he could hear.
He danced out the door of his apartment building. He danced past the other crazies with their minds full of chemicals and despair on their faces. The Smurf danced like no one was watching, painted blue for all the world to see, and his joy shone from his blue face bright enough to light up Friday night.
Eventually he had followers, Blue Heads they called themselves, who smeared themselves blue as best they could with water colours and erasable markers and followed the Smurf on his adventures. Eventually club promoters took to hiring him on as an attraction, but he would accept no money, only Euro Dance Music and cold pizza as payment.
When the Smurf came down on Sundays…
—
Note: And that’s where I ran out of time.
I had fun with this one, I must admit. It was freeing to work from a picture instead of trying to work around a piece of prose or dialogue that doesn’t fall naturally into my own rhythm of writing. I loved the opening sentences:
They called him the Smurf, although no one ever thought he was three apples high.
He was a lot higher than that.
For an off-the-cuff start, I’m pretty pleased with how well that came together. I’ll also say I’ve seen both Lover Boy and the Blue Man Group perform in Toronto, and the Arrested Development gag of Tobias Fumke painting himself blue was a favorite of mine from that show. I also once came across a then-coworker in the club district with a head full of party drugs who enthused to me, “Sometimes you just gotta dance!”
I guess you could say it all came together pretty neatly from different personal influences and experiences.
I regret running out of time with it, although I don’t know what I would have had the Smurf do on Sunday when he came down, so maybe it’s for the best he got his Saturday night in all its glory without talking about consequences or tomorrows.
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