Writing Request: The Bravest Kid in Town (Original Prose-Poetry)
So, the last (and sinfully late, and at 200 words, sinfully short) writing request, for hmpf. Thanks for helping me out with this project, and I'll be posting thoughts on what I've learned through completing it soon(ish). So - for now - onwards with this piece of weirdness.
The Bravest Kid in Town.
We say it's not the monkey. We say it's Tommy Tenny screaming. We say smoke a whole pack on her boat's back porch while she's sleeping, then slide down, under the lilies.
Do that and you're the bravest kid in town.
Do it and the doojoo grants you wishes.
Tommy Tenny held the record. Eight before he slid, before he sunk, swimming, on his last lungful of smoke.
We said it was a curse. What we said was junk. Truth is, we saw him drowning.
We were too afraid to jump.
I swam out at night. I had a knife between my teeth. I beached up on her deck.
I crouched low in the galley. I swayed with the waves on the moving floor so I wouldn't trip.
I snuck through her boathouse, through cobwebs and cages - the barnacled turtle in her bathtub, the moulting parrot on her wardrobe, the spitting cat uncurling itself from her cooling kitchen hob - I snuck through with a knife between my teeth, and found her on the prow.
Tommy Tenny wasn't there. No soul in a jar. Just two melting candles. And the dark. And her.
Just one old lady, crying.
* * *
Authorial ramblings, ahoy!
Firstly, apologies to hmpf for writing poetry for your request as I know it's not really your thing. Also apologies if it's just plain bad. This thing beat me up so much, I can't tell anymore and decided that 24 hours of tweaking wasn't going to fix it so I should just bloody post it and have done with.
(I try to tell myself that a day late isn't bad given my usual amount of procrastination, though then I remind myself it's the second day-later I posted, and that does count as a 100% extension of said deadline. But feh! It's the last request, I've been working overtime and I'm about to move and am therefore, hopefully entitled to being a little rundown.)
SO, anyway, self-pitying excuses aside, I should probably talk about what I actually did write, and why.
The original prompt is: "There is a turtle in the bathtub and a parrot on the wardrobe. I have smoked all my cigarettes and the carpet is beginning to move."
So obviously I didn't take this one as literally/wholesale as some. I changed carpet to "floor" for the sake of the poem, too. But still, I used it as an inspiration and starting point.
Actually, once I got past the "well, I don't want to do drugs because that's too obvious," mental block, it was quite a minefield of imagery.
My first thought after that was "Someone petsitting in a houseboat. The guy who owns the pets has just been sectioned in a mental institution and the state won't pay to look after his exotic pets (ed: this is a genuine problem, and I once had to watch a nurse try all afternoon to get someone to take care of a patient's pet baby alligator...), so the narrator is stuck there and then someone shows up looking for the owner."
But I couldn't come up with a concise and nice way to finish that plot. All the ideas I had sprawled out into plotless messes pretty soon after the next plotty element I added so I abandoned that one.
So the next thing I thought of was basically the above poem, except more detailed. About the crazy old woman and all her animals living on a houseboat. You know, like the crazy cat woman at the end of the street and all the kids dare each other to go up and touch her door?
Except I thought I'd have the tragedy seen above included. Then the dead kid's best friend/brother confront the old woman to discover she's just...an old woman and is utterly destroyed and horrified by what's happened because of who she is and how she lives.
But without one extra plot element that continued to elude me, there just...well it would have 'degenerated' into those things I'm so good at writing - a few thousand words of tense emotions with a sob-story background. And I was frustrated with my inability to come up with an original way to write it. A way that wouldn't be very...stock...me.
So I thought, well, if it's going to be an emotional sketch, then just sketch it. Write a poem.
So I did. But I think it works better in paragraphs (albeit usually extremely short ones) and standalone sentences than it did when I tried using line breaks to my advantage.
So. Prose poem.
And it occurs to me that this piece got a lot more literal explaination than my previous ones and I'm not sure if that's good, but certainly it was one of the trickier ones I had to write. Though that I don't think is bad. Just...interesting?
Anyway, I guess I'm done now. And this is the first piece I haven't been sure how I feel about (and I think in some ways it's because I was so overly emotionally invested in the non-poem version of this story that it's overshadowing my capacity to react rationally?) which I suppose isn't bad odds?
Still...there you have it. Weirdness. Don't say I didn't warn you!
The Bravest Kid in Town.
We say it's not the monkey. We say it's Tommy Tenny screaming. We say smoke a whole pack on her boat's back porch while she's sleeping, then slide down, under the lilies.
Do that and you're the bravest kid in town.
Do it and the doojoo grants you wishes.
Tommy Tenny held the record. Eight before he slid, before he sunk, swimming, on his last lungful of smoke.
We said it was a curse. What we said was junk. Truth is, we saw him drowning.
We were too afraid to jump.
I swam out at night. I had a knife between my teeth. I beached up on her deck.
I crouched low in the galley. I swayed with the waves on the moving floor so I wouldn't trip.
I snuck through her boathouse, through cobwebs and cages - the barnacled turtle in her bathtub, the moulting parrot on her wardrobe, the spitting cat uncurling itself from her cooling kitchen hob - I snuck through with a knife between my teeth, and found her on the prow.
Tommy Tenny wasn't there. No soul in a jar. Just two melting candles. And the dark. And her.
Just one old lady, crying.
* * *
Authorial ramblings, ahoy!
Firstly, apologies to hmpf for writing poetry for your request as I know it's not really your thing. Also apologies if it's just plain bad. This thing beat me up so much, I can't tell anymore and decided that 24 hours of tweaking wasn't going to fix it so I should just bloody post it and have done with.
(I try to tell myself that a day late isn't bad given my usual amount of procrastination, though then I remind myself it's the second day-later I posted, and that does count as a 100% extension of said deadline. But feh! It's the last request, I've been working overtime and I'm about to move and am therefore, hopefully entitled to being a little rundown.)
SO, anyway, self-pitying excuses aside, I should probably talk about what I actually did write, and why.
The original prompt is: "There is a turtle in the bathtub and a parrot on the wardrobe. I have smoked all my cigarettes and the carpet is beginning to move."
So obviously I didn't take this one as literally/wholesale as some. I changed carpet to "floor" for the sake of the poem, too. But still, I used it as an inspiration and starting point.
Actually, once I got past the "well, I don't want to do drugs because that's too obvious," mental block, it was quite a minefield of imagery.
My first thought after that was "Someone petsitting in a houseboat. The guy who owns the pets has just been sectioned in a mental institution and the state won't pay to look after his exotic pets (ed: this is a genuine problem, and I once had to watch a nurse try all afternoon to get someone to take care of a patient's pet baby alligator...), so the narrator is stuck there and then someone shows up looking for the owner."
But I couldn't come up with a concise and nice way to finish that plot. All the ideas I had sprawled out into plotless messes pretty soon after the next plotty element I added so I abandoned that one.
So the next thing I thought of was basically the above poem, except more detailed. About the crazy old woman and all her animals living on a houseboat. You know, like the crazy cat woman at the end of the street and all the kids dare each other to go up and touch her door?
Except I thought I'd have the tragedy seen above included. Then the dead kid's best friend/brother confront the old woman to discover she's just...an old woman and is utterly destroyed and horrified by what's happened because of who she is and how she lives.
But without one extra plot element that continued to elude me, there just...well it would have 'degenerated' into those things I'm so good at writing - a few thousand words of tense emotions with a sob-story background. And I was frustrated with my inability to come up with an original way to write it. A way that wouldn't be very...stock...me.
So I thought, well, if it's going to be an emotional sketch, then just sketch it. Write a poem.
So I did. But I think it works better in paragraphs (albeit usually extremely short ones) and standalone sentences than it did when I tried using line breaks to my advantage.
So. Prose poem.
And it occurs to me that this piece got a lot more literal explaination than my previous ones and I'm not sure if that's good, but certainly it was one of the trickier ones I had to write. Though that I don't think is bad. Just...interesting?
Anyway, I guess I'm done now. And this is the first piece I haven't been sure how I feel about (and I think in some ways it's because I was so overly emotionally invested in the non-poem version of this story that it's overshadowing my capacity to react rationally?) which I suppose isn't bad odds?
Still...there you have it. Weirdness. Don't say I didn't warn you!