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:
The silence around her was absolute. But on the edge of town, hoarse dogs were howling in the soundless night.
We called her a witch, and maybe she was one.
The harvest was bad. The weather was poor. The young and old died at more than the usual rate. Our prayers went unanswered, and there she stood through it all, never a tear, never a frown, never a word of comfort of anger or grief.
It was like she was carved of stone, but of course our town could not afford anything so fine. She was of wood —oak—at least we found the money for oak. Our Lady of the Sacred Heart she was christened at the unveiling, but that year we took to calling her Our Lady of Sorrow as she watched over our grief, and then when our luck turned from bad to worse, we started calling her a witch.
It was a joke at first.
The statue is a witch?
The statue of Our Lord’s Holy Mother, Mary, a witch?
Pick yourself up, young man, you’re talking nonsense.
But we kept dying, and the rains drowned the seeds out in the fields, and the hail beat down the few green shoots to thrust up against a leaden sky, and we started looking forward to a bad summer, a bad autumn, and a winter and spring of desperation.
A winter and spring with no harvest to carry us over.
And that wooden bitch smiled her quiet smile down upon us, like she knew something we did not know.
As we suffered on and on, our weeping and wailing fell silent, as did our prayers. Still she watched us.
The silence around her was absolute. But on the edge of town, hoarse dogs were howling in the soundless night.
We drove the dogs away when we could no longer feed them.
When the leaves came off the trees and we faced six cold, hungry months, words were whispered.
“Burn her. Burn the witch. Burn Our Lady of Sorrow!”
And we did.
The pyre was so high, it almost obscured her face.
We tore down the thatch from the houses of the dead for her kindling.
She smiled at us even as she burned, and in the crackling we finally heard her cackle, heard her hiss.
Damn her. Damn that witch.
In her silence she gave us a curse.
In her words, she told us the truth: We were only people, and she was only wood, and the energy we spent hating her might have saved ourselves instead.
—
Note: I rather like this one. Worth saying my current writing project is a murder mystery set in an English Village in 1347-48 when the Black Death happens, so I felt very comfortable going into that space mentally to imagine this scene that really doesn’t have any connection to my hopefully sixth novel.
A few things I might have tried to do differently if this wasn’t a ten-minute exercise? I wonder if there was a way to make the reader think the person they were blaming was a person, not a statue? Having that as a twist at the end would have been fun. I would also like to have done more with the dogs from the prompt. Right now they inspired the mood of the piece, but they are not really characters. I have caught myself from time to time disregarding the details in a prompt if they don’t serve my purpose. Is it more challenging to work around them, or through them?
Anyway, an interesting prompt and a decent exercise. I have definitely done worse.
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