mr. tran is a writer of fiction, part 1
alright so now i can write about something more interesting (hopefully)...i took a fiction writing class during my senior year...most dental schools require applicants to take a years worth (3 quarters) of writing classes...i had already taken intro to composition and advanced composition where we wrote boring papers about boring topics...i didn't want to take another serious writing classes so i decided to pick something fun for my last class and that's where intro to fiction writing came into the picture...i wasn't sure if it would actually count for my dental application but it turned out it did...(my sister, whose life i've been more or less copying, took intro to poetry when she was at davis)...
anyway, this class was broken up into two halves...the first part of the quarter focused on reading assignments, in class discussions about our readings, in class writing exercises and written assignments for homework...every thing we did was different so each class period had something new to offer...the second half of the quarter required us to write two longer stories and everyday for homework we would read a few of our classmates' stories, write critiques about them and then have a big group discussion about the stories in class...
i'll save writing about my teacher for another time and go straight into our first writing assignment...my teacher started the quarter with talking about something she called "glimmers"...basically, these were nuggets of ideas about people, places, things or events that writers use as seeds for stories or incorporate into their stories...our assignment was to come up with some...seemed pointless to me...one glimmer i wrote about was something i saw on tv where someone made peanut butter and bacon sandwiches which i thought was interesting...
next we read a story about a mother, grandmother and daughter from the south going on a car trip...it initially seemed like the story was going to be about the drama in the family but then there was a twist involving the family getting car jacked by a group of bandits...so our next assignment was to write a story that had a twist or a surprise...our next class period was two days away so we didn't have much time to write it...over those few days, i thought about my story as i walked back and forth from class to class on campus and while i daydreamed during lectures...so when i finally got around to actually writing, i had the whole story already laid out in my head...it ended up being pretty long and it appeared that my other classmates wrote long stories too since my teacher complained later about how long it took to read them all...anyway, i decided to use one of my glimmers as inspiration for my story...instead of peanut butter and bacon sandwiches though, i used the more regular pb & j...so here's my story about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches:
Balance
Jim brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to work everyday. If you were to ask him what his favorite food was, he’d most likely say chicken parmesan. If you were able to read his thoughts when you asked him that question, you’d hear him think peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Jim believed that the sandwich was simple yet perfect. It was the balance of flavors that Jim liked most - the balance between the sweet jelly and the slightly salty peanut butter. It was just a combination that, for some reason, worked. Jim found that he could use jellies, jams or preserves of any kind of fruit and the sandwich would still be excellent. The peanut butter was a constant, however, so it was obviously the most important component. Clearly, Jim had given this a lot of thought. And clearly, he had a strange list of priorities in life.
Jim lived in a neat and tidy apartment which revealed little about the personality of its occupant besides the fact that he was indeed neat and tidy. He lived alone. He had no girlfriend or friends to come visit him. There was nothing terribly offensive about Jim that would cause people to steer clear of him. He just appeared to be a very ordinary and uninteresting individual. While Jim thought this was unfortunate, it wasn’t a problem he dwelled on. At least he had his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
One Thursday morning, Jim entered his kitchen to pack his lunch like he did every weekday. After placing two slices of bread into a toaster, he opened a cupboard and reached for his jars of peanut butter and jelly. The first jar was much lighter than usual. Jim had held off on buying more peanut butter until the weekend believing there would be enough left to last the week. After spending a few minutes scraping the inside of the jar with a butter knife, Jim realized he had overestimated how much peanut butter was actually clinging to the walls of the jar. He spread what he had on the knife onto the newly toasted bread and saw he covered only a third of the toast’s surface. Picking up the jar again, Jim made another attempt to gather the now rare butter. He made sure to probe the area right underneath the rim where the peanut butter liked to hide while knowing his efforts were futile. He stared at the pea sized brown glob at the end of the knife and then sadly spread it onto the toast. Jim slathered the other piece of toast with grape jelly and completed the rest of his lunch without incident. As he headed out the door, Jim thought about when was the last time he went to work with an imperfect sandwich instead of more important things like work itself.
Jim spent the majority of his day at his desk reading reports and scanning them for errors. He never took coffee breaks because he found his co-workers felt compelled to converse while doing so. Jim had no problem with talking to them. Unfortunately, his interests and their interests didn’t seem to overlap resulting in some awkward moments. Thus, coffee breaks were to be avoided. However, everyone seemed less concerned with him at lunch when he appeared to be very focused on what he was eating which happened to be what Jim was doing that early afternoon.
After unwrapping his sandwich, Jim enjoyed three sublime bites of peanut butter and jelly. Then he found himself at the border of a purely jelly sandwich. He took another bite and found the grape to be too sickly sweet without its nutty counterpart. Jim abandoned the idea of finishing the sandwich and moved on to eating the rest of his lunch. He made a mental note to pick up a jar of peanut butter on his way home from work that day. Unfortunately, a large influx of reports piled upon his desk in the following hours which made him forget all about sandwiches as he left the office later that afternoon.
The next morning, Jim stood in his kitchen holding an empty jar of peanut butter and silently cursed himself. With the large mound of work that still awaited him in his cubicle, Jim’s day was not shaping up very well. He then decided that if his work day was going to be miserable, he should try to at least salvage his lunchtime. So Jim went out into the apartment hallway and knocked on the door across from his. He didn’t know his neighbor’s name, but he did know she was pretty and polite during those rare moments they were in the building’s elevator at the same time. A few moments after knocking, the door opened and she appeared before him.
“Can I help you with something?” she asked. She wearing a baby blue sweat suit. How an outfit meant for working out and sweating in looked so cute was beyond Jim.
“Hey, I’m your neighbor from across the hall,” he said. “I know this sounds weird but would you, by any chance, uhh… have some peanut butter I could borrow?” Jim tried to smile as sheepishly as he could.
After a brief confused look flashed on her face, she said, “Uh, sure. Just a sec.”
She disappeared into her apartment and partially closed the door behind her. Jim tried to look through the crack but couldn’t make out anything significant inside. The door soon opened again, and the neighbor handed Jim a jar.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks a lot,” Jim said. “I won’t use too much of it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied. “Knock yourself out. Oh, I’m Karen by the way.”
“I’m Jim.”
“Nice to meet you, Jim.” She smiled and then closed the door. Jim retreated back to his apartment feeling flushed and embarrassed. He wondered how many couples’ stories of first meeting involved one asking the other for peanut butter. After realizing he was getting way ahead of himself, Jim looked at the jar he was holding and sighed when he read the label. Crunchy peanut butter. How could he enjoy the balance of flavors if he had to chew his way through annoying bits of peanuts? He left the jar on the counter and made his way to work, this time wondering when was the last time he left without a sandwich.
As lunch time approached, Jim was making little headway through his stack of reports. Having nothing to eat for lunch didn’t help. Suddenly, he remembered the vending machine in the break room sold sandwiches. He wasn’t sure if there were any peanut butter and jelly ones but that wasn’t going to stop him. When he got in front of the machine, Jim was delighted when he found one. Perhaps his luck was finally turning around. He quickly sat down at a table and took a big bite out of the sandwich. A smile spread across his face as he was finally able to enjoy that balance of flavors he was desperately seeking. Satisfied, Jim leaned back on his chair to get more comfortable. That’s when his chair lost balance, and he almost lost his life.
* * *
A few days later, Jim left the hospital to go home. His doctors had told him that he fell back on his chair and slammed his head onto the edge of a counter. The impact caused blood to build up inside his skull. This put pressure on his brain and made him black out. His doctors said he was lucky he fell in a public area and an ambulance was called quickly. At the hospital, they were able to drill into his skull to relieve the pressure and ultimately save his life. They warned him about the dangers of leaning back in chairs. “Evidently, I never learned that in grade school,” Jim joked. He also ended up fracturing a wrist bone when he flailed his arms trying to grab onto something. Jim didn’t remember any of this. The last thing he recalled was seeing his peanut butter and jelly sandwich stuck to the ceiling before everything went black. His co-workers came to visit him and offered their best wishes. “I just wanted to get out of work,” he told them and they all laughed. They said he could take as many days off as he needed to feel better and that his sandwich would be waiting for him when he returned. Jim enjoyed their visits and now looked forward to going back to work. Breaking his head turned out to be the best icebreaker he could ever hope for.
Jim took a taxi home from the hospital. He felt a dull throbbing ache at the back of his head ever since waking up there. He looked down at the cast on his wrist. Jim had never broken a bone before. “Peanut butter, you’ve betrayed me,” he thought and laughed. He walked into his apartment expecting things to have changed over the past few days but everything was right where they had always been. Jim noticed the jar of crunchy peanut butter still sitting on the counter and picked it up. He went out across the hall and knocked on his neighbor’s door.
“Hey, there you are,” said Karen when she opened the door. “I was wondering where you were. I knocked on your door yesterday and you didn’t answer. I thought you stole my peanut butter and were trying to hide from me. I sent a complaint to the landlord.”
“I’m sorry,” Jim said. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m kidding,” Karen said with a smile. “Hey, what happened to your arm?”
Jim held up his wrist. He contemplated telling her he hurt it when he fell from enjoying the ecstasy of a sandwich.
“I broke it stealing a truck carrying peanut butter,” Jim said. Karen laughed.
“You know,” she replied. “I’ve had an urge for a good PB&J sandwich for awhile. Ever since you borrowed it. That’s why I knocked on your door yesterday. You know what I like best about them?”
“The balance of flavors,” Jim thought.
“The balance of textures,” Karen continued.
“Huh?” said Jim surprised.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just like the combination of the crispy toast on the outside and the moist stuff on the inside. The slick jelly with the creamy peanut butter. And then there’s the crunchy nuts.” She paused. “I know, I know. I sound like a maniac.”
“No, no. It makes sense. Kind of,” reassured Jim. “Although, I’m not a big fan of the crunchy nuts.”
“What?!” she said. “They’re the best part. You must not eat many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
Jim smiled. “You’re probably right,” he said.
“You know what,” she said. “I think you need to be reeducated. Yes, that’s exactly what you need. I’m gonna make you one of my special PB&J sandwiches. I know, I know. There are only three ingredients but I have a special technique.” She grabbed the jar out of Jim’s hand. “Come on. I’ll make the sandwiches and you can tell me what happened to your wrist.” She turned around and walked into her apartment without seeing if Jim would follow her or not. Jim stood in the hallway and looked inside Karen’s apartment. He saw she had thick shag carpeting, velvet curtains and a corduroy sofa with suede pillows.
“Textures,” he thought. “She’s not normal.” Jim turned to look back to his door.
“Am I even normal?” he thought. All Jim knew was that the back of his head had finally stopped aching.
the main inspiration of this story, besides peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, is the will ferrell movie, stranger than fiction...i pretty much blatantly copied it...that movie is about a plain, boring office worker whose life begins to change for the better when he meets the girl of his dreams...i used some similar plot points but more importantly i tried to copy its lighthearted tone with a prim and proper narrator...
i named the main character after jim from the office but i didn't base the character off of him...i was going to name the female character pam but i thought that would stand out too much so i chose jim's brief love interest karen instead...the idea of a cute neighbor in a sweat suit came from a seinfeld episode where jerry had a crush on one but couldn't work up the nerve to talk to her...the idea of jim's head injury came from a story my anatomy professor told us about a baseball player who got hit by a ball during a game he was attending...natasha richardson passed away from the same type of injury recently...jim breaking his wrist while unconsciously flailing his arms to grab something while falling came from when i fell halfway down a flight of stairs once...i think those are all the main things i drew from my life...
overall i like the story...it's a little bit different than the rest of the things i wrote that quarter since i was trying to emulate stranger than fiction...there's no deeper meaning or serious themes and i don't think the story really needed them...it's just a simple story about how something good could come out of something bad and maybe that nice guys don't always finish last...
i showed this story to shiu pei awhile ago and she liked it...she got inspired to draw how she envisioned jim and posted it on her blog...she asked how i pictured jim and i had no idea...for some reason, i don't visualize the characters i write about in my head very well...so when i see shiu pei's drawing, a part of me thinks that that isn't jim...but then another part remembers that i have no idea what jim looks like...
so that's it for now...most of the writing assignments that follow are much shorter...i think our teacher just wanted a longer sample to start out with to see how we write and if anyone had any real skillz...
anyway, this class was broken up into two halves...the first part of the quarter focused on reading assignments, in class discussions about our readings, in class writing exercises and written assignments for homework...every thing we did was different so each class period had something new to offer...the second half of the quarter required us to write two longer stories and everyday for homework we would read a few of our classmates' stories, write critiques about them and then have a big group discussion about the stories in class...
i'll save writing about my teacher for another time and go straight into our first writing assignment...my teacher started the quarter with talking about something she called "glimmers"...basically, these were nuggets of ideas about people, places, things or events that writers use as seeds for stories or incorporate into their stories...our assignment was to come up with some...seemed pointless to me...one glimmer i wrote about was something i saw on tv where someone made peanut butter and bacon sandwiches which i thought was interesting...
next we read a story about a mother, grandmother and daughter from the south going on a car trip...it initially seemed like the story was going to be about the drama in the family but then there was a twist involving the family getting car jacked by a group of bandits...so our next assignment was to write a story that had a twist or a surprise...our next class period was two days away so we didn't have much time to write it...over those few days, i thought about my story as i walked back and forth from class to class on campus and while i daydreamed during lectures...so when i finally got around to actually writing, i had the whole story already laid out in my head...it ended up being pretty long and it appeared that my other classmates wrote long stories too since my teacher complained later about how long it took to read them all...anyway, i decided to use one of my glimmers as inspiration for my story...instead of peanut butter and bacon sandwiches though, i used the more regular pb & j...so here's my story about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches:
Balance
Jim brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to work everyday. If you were to ask him what his favorite food was, he’d most likely say chicken parmesan. If you were able to read his thoughts when you asked him that question, you’d hear him think peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Jim believed that the sandwich was simple yet perfect. It was the balance of flavors that Jim liked most - the balance between the sweet jelly and the slightly salty peanut butter. It was just a combination that, for some reason, worked. Jim found that he could use jellies, jams or preserves of any kind of fruit and the sandwich would still be excellent. The peanut butter was a constant, however, so it was obviously the most important component. Clearly, Jim had given this a lot of thought. And clearly, he had a strange list of priorities in life.
Jim lived in a neat and tidy apartment which revealed little about the personality of its occupant besides the fact that he was indeed neat and tidy. He lived alone. He had no girlfriend or friends to come visit him. There was nothing terribly offensive about Jim that would cause people to steer clear of him. He just appeared to be a very ordinary and uninteresting individual. While Jim thought this was unfortunate, it wasn’t a problem he dwelled on. At least he had his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
One Thursday morning, Jim entered his kitchen to pack his lunch like he did every weekday. After placing two slices of bread into a toaster, he opened a cupboard and reached for his jars of peanut butter and jelly. The first jar was much lighter than usual. Jim had held off on buying more peanut butter until the weekend believing there would be enough left to last the week. After spending a few minutes scraping the inside of the jar with a butter knife, Jim realized he had overestimated how much peanut butter was actually clinging to the walls of the jar. He spread what he had on the knife onto the newly toasted bread and saw he covered only a third of the toast’s surface. Picking up the jar again, Jim made another attempt to gather the now rare butter. He made sure to probe the area right underneath the rim where the peanut butter liked to hide while knowing his efforts were futile. He stared at the pea sized brown glob at the end of the knife and then sadly spread it onto the toast. Jim slathered the other piece of toast with grape jelly and completed the rest of his lunch without incident. As he headed out the door, Jim thought about when was the last time he went to work with an imperfect sandwich instead of more important things like work itself.
Jim spent the majority of his day at his desk reading reports and scanning them for errors. He never took coffee breaks because he found his co-workers felt compelled to converse while doing so. Jim had no problem with talking to them. Unfortunately, his interests and their interests didn’t seem to overlap resulting in some awkward moments. Thus, coffee breaks were to be avoided. However, everyone seemed less concerned with him at lunch when he appeared to be very focused on what he was eating which happened to be what Jim was doing that early afternoon.
After unwrapping his sandwich, Jim enjoyed three sublime bites of peanut butter and jelly. Then he found himself at the border of a purely jelly sandwich. He took another bite and found the grape to be too sickly sweet without its nutty counterpart. Jim abandoned the idea of finishing the sandwich and moved on to eating the rest of his lunch. He made a mental note to pick up a jar of peanut butter on his way home from work that day. Unfortunately, a large influx of reports piled upon his desk in the following hours which made him forget all about sandwiches as he left the office later that afternoon.
The next morning, Jim stood in his kitchen holding an empty jar of peanut butter and silently cursed himself. With the large mound of work that still awaited him in his cubicle, Jim’s day was not shaping up very well. He then decided that if his work day was going to be miserable, he should try to at least salvage his lunchtime. So Jim went out into the apartment hallway and knocked on the door across from his. He didn’t know his neighbor’s name, but he did know she was pretty and polite during those rare moments they were in the building’s elevator at the same time. A few moments after knocking, the door opened and she appeared before him.
“Can I help you with something?” she asked. She wearing a baby blue sweat suit. How an outfit meant for working out and sweating in looked so cute was beyond Jim.
“Hey, I’m your neighbor from across the hall,” he said. “I know this sounds weird but would you, by any chance, uhh… have some peanut butter I could borrow?” Jim tried to smile as sheepishly as he could.
After a brief confused look flashed on her face, she said, “Uh, sure. Just a sec.”
She disappeared into her apartment and partially closed the door behind her. Jim tried to look through the crack but couldn’t make out anything significant inside. The door soon opened again, and the neighbor handed Jim a jar.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks a lot,” Jim said. “I won’t use too much of it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied. “Knock yourself out. Oh, I’m Karen by the way.”
“I’m Jim.”
“Nice to meet you, Jim.” She smiled and then closed the door. Jim retreated back to his apartment feeling flushed and embarrassed. He wondered how many couples’ stories of first meeting involved one asking the other for peanut butter. After realizing he was getting way ahead of himself, Jim looked at the jar he was holding and sighed when he read the label. Crunchy peanut butter. How could he enjoy the balance of flavors if he had to chew his way through annoying bits of peanuts? He left the jar on the counter and made his way to work, this time wondering when was the last time he left without a sandwich.
As lunch time approached, Jim was making little headway through his stack of reports. Having nothing to eat for lunch didn’t help. Suddenly, he remembered the vending machine in the break room sold sandwiches. He wasn’t sure if there were any peanut butter and jelly ones but that wasn’t going to stop him. When he got in front of the machine, Jim was delighted when he found one. Perhaps his luck was finally turning around. He quickly sat down at a table and took a big bite out of the sandwich. A smile spread across his face as he was finally able to enjoy that balance of flavors he was desperately seeking. Satisfied, Jim leaned back on his chair to get more comfortable. That’s when his chair lost balance, and he almost lost his life.
* * *
A few days later, Jim left the hospital to go home. His doctors had told him that he fell back on his chair and slammed his head onto the edge of a counter. The impact caused blood to build up inside his skull. This put pressure on his brain and made him black out. His doctors said he was lucky he fell in a public area and an ambulance was called quickly. At the hospital, they were able to drill into his skull to relieve the pressure and ultimately save his life. They warned him about the dangers of leaning back in chairs. “Evidently, I never learned that in grade school,” Jim joked. He also ended up fracturing a wrist bone when he flailed his arms trying to grab onto something. Jim didn’t remember any of this. The last thing he recalled was seeing his peanut butter and jelly sandwich stuck to the ceiling before everything went black. His co-workers came to visit him and offered their best wishes. “I just wanted to get out of work,” he told them and they all laughed. They said he could take as many days off as he needed to feel better and that his sandwich would be waiting for him when he returned. Jim enjoyed their visits and now looked forward to going back to work. Breaking his head turned out to be the best icebreaker he could ever hope for.
Jim took a taxi home from the hospital. He felt a dull throbbing ache at the back of his head ever since waking up there. He looked down at the cast on his wrist. Jim had never broken a bone before. “Peanut butter, you’ve betrayed me,” he thought and laughed. He walked into his apartment expecting things to have changed over the past few days but everything was right where they had always been. Jim noticed the jar of crunchy peanut butter still sitting on the counter and picked it up. He went out across the hall and knocked on his neighbor’s door.
“Hey, there you are,” said Karen when she opened the door. “I was wondering where you were. I knocked on your door yesterday and you didn’t answer. I thought you stole my peanut butter and were trying to hide from me. I sent a complaint to the landlord.”
“I’m sorry,” Jim said. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m kidding,” Karen said with a smile. “Hey, what happened to your arm?”
Jim held up his wrist. He contemplated telling her he hurt it when he fell from enjoying the ecstasy of a sandwich.
“I broke it stealing a truck carrying peanut butter,” Jim said. Karen laughed.
“You know,” she replied. “I’ve had an urge for a good PB&J sandwich for awhile. Ever since you borrowed it. That’s why I knocked on your door yesterday. You know what I like best about them?”
“The balance of flavors,” Jim thought.
“The balance of textures,” Karen continued.
“Huh?” said Jim surprised.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just like the combination of the crispy toast on the outside and the moist stuff on the inside. The slick jelly with the creamy peanut butter. And then there’s the crunchy nuts.” She paused. “I know, I know. I sound like a maniac.”
“No, no. It makes sense. Kind of,” reassured Jim. “Although, I’m not a big fan of the crunchy nuts.”
“What?!” she said. “They’re the best part. You must not eat many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
Jim smiled. “You’re probably right,” he said.
“You know what,” she said. “I think you need to be reeducated. Yes, that’s exactly what you need. I’m gonna make you one of my special PB&J sandwiches. I know, I know. There are only three ingredients but I have a special technique.” She grabbed the jar out of Jim’s hand. “Come on. I’ll make the sandwiches and you can tell me what happened to your wrist.” She turned around and walked into her apartment without seeing if Jim would follow her or not. Jim stood in the hallway and looked inside Karen’s apartment. He saw she had thick shag carpeting, velvet curtains and a corduroy sofa with suede pillows.
“Textures,” he thought. “She’s not normal.” Jim turned to look back to his door.
“Am I even normal?” he thought. All Jim knew was that the back of his head had finally stopped aching.
the main inspiration of this story, besides peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, is the will ferrell movie, stranger than fiction...i pretty much blatantly copied it...that movie is about a plain, boring office worker whose life begins to change for the better when he meets the girl of his dreams...i used some similar plot points but more importantly i tried to copy its lighthearted tone with a prim and proper narrator...
i named the main character after jim from the office but i didn't base the character off of him...i was going to name the female character pam but i thought that would stand out too much so i chose jim's brief love interest karen instead...the idea of a cute neighbor in a sweat suit came from a seinfeld episode where jerry had a crush on one but couldn't work up the nerve to talk to her...the idea of jim's head injury came from a story my anatomy professor told us about a baseball player who got hit by a ball during a game he was attending...natasha richardson passed away from the same type of injury recently...jim breaking his wrist while unconsciously flailing his arms to grab something while falling came from when i fell halfway down a flight of stairs once...i think those are all the main things i drew from my life...
overall i like the story...it's a little bit different than the rest of the things i wrote that quarter since i was trying to emulate stranger than fiction...there's no deeper meaning or serious themes and i don't think the story really needed them...it's just a simple story about how something good could come out of something bad and maybe that nice guys don't always finish last...
i showed this story to shiu pei awhile ago and she liked it...she got inspired to draw how she envisioned jim and posted it on her blog...she asked how i pictured jim and i had no idea...for some reason, i don't visualize the characters i write about in my head very well...so when i see shiu pei's drawing, a part of me thinks that that isn't jim...but then another part remembers that i have no idea what jim looks like...
so that's it for now...most of the writing assignments that follow are much shorter...i think our teacher just wanted a longer sample to start out with to see how we write and if anyone had any real skillz...