Ideas about Revision/Workshopping

FURIOUSLY IS THE ONLY WAY ONE CAN EVER DRINK TURNIP SOUP: A terrible story to revise.

FURIOUSLY IS THE ONLY WAY ONE CAN EVER DRINK TURNIP SOUP


He was 175cm tall and was wearing a blue jacket, red slacks, white gloves, a white shirt, a black tie with white spots and a hat. He weighted about 200 lbs. He was Scottish. His parents were tremendously wealthy and his mother was descended from a Scottish Queen but had lived in Norway since early childhood. In his wallet, he had a credit card, a driver’s license from Manitoba, and $46—two twenties, one five, three quarters, two dimes and a nickel. Outside the weather was cold. How cold? It was cold enough to freeze the monkeys off a goose. It was snowing and outside large slow flakes swirled about the sky and then gradually slammed onto the ground. It was 2018 and the world was continuing as usual, each of us with our small and petty problems, though some of us with quite big problems and the world itself a mess with war, climate change and many social issues unresolved.

“I’m not feeling happy,” he said. “I’m quite sad. My girlfriend hasn’t phoned me in ages.”

Brinnng! Brrrring! His cellphone buzzed ironically. The sound was off.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” a voice on the other end said.

“Who is this?” he asked timidly.

“It’s your girlfriend,” the voice said, surprised.

“Who?” he questioned.

“Gladys,” she said. 

“Oh. Gladys,” he responded. “My girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Gladys said.

"Oh," he said. "Gladys. Hello."

He asked her where she was. She wouldn’t tell him. “Are you at a party?” he asked. “Maybe with my best friend?” His best friend was called Charlie. Charlie was a research scientist who worked at the university and explored the connection between the use of fossil fuels and the rise in water temperature in the world’s oceans. “It’s bad,” Charlie would say. “I think we’re doomed.”

“Doomed?” he’d ask.

“Yes,” Charlie would say. “I’m a scientist. I know. Also…”
“What, Charlie,” he’d ask.

“I’m in love with your girlfriend,” Charlie said sheepishly.

“Oh,” he replied. “Really?”

“Yes,” Charlie asserted.
“Oh no,” he answered perturbedly. 

Charlie was 5'8" and weighted 175 lbs. He lived in on the third floor of a modestly priced apartment near the river. Sometimes, large boats floated down the river and in the night blew their horn which made a sad sound that made Charlie sad when he thought about his mother and father who had died as well as his brother and his dog, Sniffer. 

But back to the phonecall and the falling snow. His girlfriend Gladys told him she was in Fiji, a small and beautiful island in the South Pacific. She had left everything to be with the flowers. She was a painter and wanted to paint. She liked to paint bright canvasses filled with bright flowers. “Flowers,” she said. “Their delicate petals represent the fragility of the human heart, the contingent experience of being mortal here on this fragile blue marble floating in an infinite unknowable universe the purpose of which we cannot know unless we believe there is a God who guides us, who guides what happens in this infinitude of space, who makes the material as well as the spiritual discernable to us, we poor souls who live on the surface, on the lakes, fields, valley and mountains of this earth. Oh, flowers,” she exclaimed. “I am only in love with you and the fragrant delicate nighttime air of this Fiji. What a wonder it is to be alive. Also, to be far away from Charlie and my boyfriend, also.”

She took a large ladle and helped herself to a large bowl of turnip soup which she drank furiously in view of the ocean and its slapping waves. And also shared with her dog who she loved more than life itself. Then she carefully wiped her mouth with a napkin made of woven treebark and turned to her easel where she was painting a painting of a flower. “Oh, flowers,” 
she said. “I think I will live forever.”

*

NNNNNNNNNNNNOTETAKERS NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDED

The Werewolf by Angela Carter

“The Werewolf,” a short story by Angela Carter (collected in The Bloody Chamber and Burning Your Boats):

It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives.To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as reals as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naif style and there are no flowers to put in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forests to snatch away. At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that.Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St. John’s Eve will have second sight. When they discover a witch – some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours’ do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time, they strip the crone, search for her marks, for the supernumerary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death.

Winter and cold weather.

Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I’ve baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter.

The good child does as her mother bids – five miles’ trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your father’s hunting knife; you know how to use it.

The child had a scabbby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her knife, and turned on the beast.

It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineer’s child would have died of fright at the sight of it. It went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her father’s knife and slashed off its right forepaw.

The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when it saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on towards her grandmother’s house. Soon it came on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured.

She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning and shaking so that the child guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold compress, and the wolf’s paw fell to the floor.

But it was no longer a wolf’s paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart in the index finger. By the wart, she knew it for her grandmother’s hand.

She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began to struggle, squawking and shrieking like a thing possessed. But the child was strong, and armed with her father’s hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been, festering already.

The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and come rushing in. They know the wart on the hand at once for a witch’s nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell dead.

Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.

Billy Bragg: Song of the Iceberg 

The True Story of the Big Bad Wolf


Note:
The change in tone or register Using more literary language (Carter) or modern slang (Scieszka) which is different than the usual "Once upon a time" folk talk diction. How is the different character's experience reflected in their language?

The change from a stereotype or stock character into a surprising different character. What additional details does this bring to the story? What new ideas, motivations, thoughts, experiences does this bring to the story?

The change from their point of view/perspective, taking familiar events and recontextualizing them. What new events does this bring into the story? What does it leave out? What would the POV character notice? What would they not notice? What is important to them and how do they understand things different than the source story POV?

Change from third (objective w/aspects of limited) to first person (Scieszka.) What does "getting inside the character's" head bring to the story? How does this affect all of the above? What does it allow you to do as a writer?

Two images to write about

Write from perspective of two characters with different perspectives on a situation.

1. Use images above.

2. Take two characters from the "Little Red Riding Hood" story.

wolf, grandma, Red Riding Hood, Brothers Grimm, ax, woodman.

What do they know? How do they feel? What is their perspective on the events.

Write from a key moment in the story. Or from after the story. Or…?

You could also update the story and set the Little Red Riding Hood story in the modern world and have the characters be realistic humans (e.g. the Big Bad Wolf is actually a human predator, conniver, etc.)

*
Negative Capability

"I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man [sic] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason..." 

—John Keats

Portrait for Writing

http://www.bjp-online.com/2018/03/when-shooting-portraits-i-often-feel-awkward-and-i-invite-that-awkwardness-to-begin-with-harry-flook-on-creating-a-compelling-portrait/

Dragons

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

― Neil Gaiman, Coraline (adapted from G.K. Chesterton)