I whipped this up last night as an entry for Evil Editor’s latest writing excercise. Thought I might as well post it here as I have nothing else at the moment.

The theme is “300-word scene from end of evil overlord novel involving someone gloating over his own brilliance only to look like an idiot moments later.” Yeah, we have lots of fun over at E. E.’s place.

Henry had never believed until now. As Shortcake drew him into his garage, locked the doors, and unbound him, he realized that she really was the Strawberry Fairy.

How else could his garage have been transformed into a spotless white room filled with a mountain of the most gorgeous berries he’d ever seen? Oh, the fragrance! Although Henry had been told he was about to die, he wanted a bite. A mere bite. A mere juicy brimming mouthful.

Shortcake was glinting at him.

“Doesn’t the poet say, ‘Beware the Love of the Strawberry?” she mocked.

Henry quoted reverently:

“I walked the aisle of the grocery store
And suffered desire for luscious gore,
For scarlet gloss and spurting glory -
The sacred Berry.”

“And would you like to guess how you are going to die? No, really. Take a guess.”

“My stomach won’t be able to hold another Strawberry?” Hopefully.

“You will feed them to me one at a time. Frustrate Desire will overcome, punish, slay you, long before I’m through!” Shortcake giggled, bounced up and down and asked, “Any questions?”

“Only this: Why, Shortcake? Why?”

“Ah, my favourite question.” She bent over, whispering. “You love them more than I do. I won’t be surpassed.” Then she was giggling again. Her firm, impossibly red lips. Her slightly hairy face. And were those…seeds embedded in her skin?

“What are those?” he asked, pointing at the seeds.

“My children. Why?”

Then it was that Henry knew: he would never want another Strawberry.

Shortcake giggled between every bite of the first 500 berries. However she looked pale during the next 300, and at last seeds began popping from her face and thin red-brown sweat trickled after them.

“Die” she gasped, then ate her Last Strawberry.

Henry was only fifteen minutes late for dinner.

Enough.

I’m through with these silly rules.

I can’t help but notice that a Short Story or Novel is composed entirely of words. I must therefore conclude that a story-writer’s methods ought not to be polluted by the methods of Screenwriters.

Admit it, friends. “Showing” vs. “Telling” has very little to do with good writing as millenia of authorship demonstrate. With which you start you story has even less. I rebel. I don’t give a flying tinker’s wingfeather about whether today’s publisher will view my work with the skeptical eye of a mass-marketer.

Therefore I am putting up the following two pages of introduction from the first draft of my 20-page story called The City of Wells and Stars. It is not perfect and no one may wish to read it. I am putting it up as a way of saying that I reserve the right to introduce my own stories by way of long, careful, and detailed introduction, with no action or dialogue whatever.

My story, in short, is no blasted film!

 (I furthermore reserve the right to intrude upon my own story in the capacity of Witty Narrator.)

***

Well-stars, that city of ancient establishment, lay (as every eight-year old geography student was required to know) to the east of a great desert and to the west of a sea. The city  was as massive as its reputation - both were solid and did not look as if they would vanish in the near future.

The city was divided into three sections. The first division was quite sharp: a Green Waste filled with fruit trees and old stone structures now uninhabited, separated the palace complex (which included the temple to the city’s Goddess) from the City of the Nobles. This Green Waste had become a preserve for the homeless, where they might sleep at night and from which they might present petitions at the temple windows even if they did not have the clothes or offerings which would permit them to enter.

The next division was more rough. About the place where the great stone wells began to appear at every street corner, servants of the city’s rich and noble met every day - or stared across a well at - the impoverished nobles; the poor, and the destitute. The wells, at least, were free to all.

The Goddess (though she kept many prostitutes in her own establishment) was very particular about the necessity of certifiable chastity before marriage, among both rich and poor. The question of how exactly this was to be accomplished she left to the parents, tutors, and governors of said youths, who managed it according to custom and financial ability.

The poor, who lived south of the Wells, did it inexpensively. According to their need at the moment, they either castrated their offspring quite young and sold them as slaves in the palace complex, or they married them off before puberty - as young as 15 years old, it was rumored in the City of the Nobles - and hoped devoutly that the young couple paired thus apart from their own volition would grow into one another. The gossip of the entire city, from palace to temple, from the City of the Nobles to beggars on the street, was always full of some young wife who had become a prostitute because she had matured two years younger than her unfortunate, baby-faced husband - or a father who was suing his son-in-law on charge of seeking solace for his burning inwards from someone else than his still in-the-bud daughter.

This method, whatever its faults, was less expensive than the complex method rigorously followed in the City of the Nobles. There, once their offspring turned seventeen, parents hired or bought guards and chaperones who could swear an oath as to the young person’s whereabouts and activities during every minute of the day or night. At that time also, when parents knew that their children could be expected to bloom in as little as a year, they introduced them to The Salon, where they could spend their days interacting with one another when not shut up in their parents’ houses or escorted about the city by guards. 

In the lower part of the Salon quiet, temperate, well-bred youths of seventeen years old and upward gathered every day to form friendships and discuss the astronomy, religion, history, geography, and philosophy which they had spent all the previous years of their lives working so hard to acquire. Their tall statures, mature expressions, and quiet pursuit of life’s more serious subjects belied their babyish voices and innocent stares. Around the edges of the room eunuch soldiers from the Goddess’ own army stared silently at them all day long for any sign of maturation.

In the upper part, guarded well by yet more eunuch soldiers, a rowdier bunch with boiling faces, hot breath, and desperation in their eyes, bid for one another’s will to marry in a race against time. From the day that each young man or woman declared himself as “out of the bud” (or was so declared by the stern-faced watchers down below) he had exactly six months to find a willing life-partner, declare his betrothal, and depart the Salon forever. Occasionally, very wealthy noblemen watched from behind a screen for a few hours and returned the next day with some desperate girl’s even more desperate father to fetch her home and expand his collection of concubines - which was respectable, if not ideal.

Across the city, from palace to streets alike, the penalty for not being married six months after coming out of the bud was castration for both male and female. Likewise anyone who reached maturation without being either married or entered in the lists of the Salon was subject to castration if the Goddess’ guards came across him. Many useful places in society were filled by such unhappy people - or happy people, in the case of over-philosophic youngsters who, appalled by the rowdy crowd in the Upper Salon, volunteered for The Quiet Life and took a station as a nurse, orator, musician, or the like without ever having felt the heat of manhood or womanhood within.

Maerion had been coming to the Lower Salon for three years when he entered one sunny day soon after his twentieth birthday. He was not likely to become a voluntary eunuch, nor was his friend Hugo. Both were known for their joyful enjoyment of all that life sent their way, and it was not unusual for the Goddess to receive petitions at nightfall from hopeful but as-yet flat-chested girls that one or the other of the boys might remain in the bud until such fortunate moment as they themselves would burst out of their long childhood into the full glories of womanliness.

Lately, Maerion and Hugo had been engaged in a delightful series of public debates (about the old myth that the city’s Wells had been planted by a Star in the shape of some famous constellation) with two willowy girls just their age. These girls, Perspice and Cyrulla by name, had only recently revealed their developing powers of wit and delivery, and while the boys may have been winning the debates in terms of pure reason, the girls were by far the favorites of all audiences. Even the Upper Crowd leaned down from their balconies to hear the entertaining repartee between the two teams. (Bets were being made as to which girl would marry which boy.)

As yet unconcerned about that question, the four sat this day about a table, engaging in friendly talk after the most recent debate. Maerion raised a toast to the Goddess, and Hugo to her worthy followers (the Goddess was known for her debating abilities) and both girls returned the compliments with fresh, uninhibited gazes.

Then in an odd moment, Maerion turned his head toward the doorway and became silent, gazing at a shaft of sunlight illuminating the mosaic floor. His three friends, in sympathy to his change of mood, fell silent as well.

Even though my own education was self-directed and patchy, I do have very pretty ideas about how people learn to write.

I am presently taking a distance writing class and I had a course or two at college. What I find is that those kinds of sources have a limited but very important function.

Their limitation is that they will give you fairly generalized instruction, but the benefit is that someone is going to see what you write and point out exactly where you deviate from that instruction. (Hopefully you gain the ability to decide, on mature judgment, which deviations are to the purpose and which are merely oddities.)

Technical excellence is admirable. But I think that the real difference between a good and a bad writer usually comes from less formal influences.  In my own case, homeschooling with an emphasis on language was the big one. I have been journaling since the age of eight, when my Mom handed me a marble school notebook and I discovered the forbidden pleasure of discussing myself and my feelings at length.  But the most important thing of all - and anyone can tell you this but it is too true not to mention - is the benefit of reading. You have to read better stuff than you hope to write yourself. 

I have a theory about how to read poetry. In brief it is that I should only read the poems I succeed in enjoying. Now any worthy enjoyment (this excludes most entertainment) requires some effort. So I like to try enjoying anything I pick up. But if I am not succeeding in enjoying a poem I do not force myself to finish it; rather I go look for something easier. Even if that is only Dr. Seuss. 

I believe that people should read for delight; and what’s more I think there is a trail of delight that leads from each good thing to each greater good thing. Starting at the first place where you are able to taste that delight (it is the tang of Truth) and then following that trail will be at the heart of forming good critical skills. (This process is also part of the journey of our souls and it will lead us to better religion and family and society as well.) 

Sam asked specifically about precision. In my opinion, the best authors from whom to learn precision in writing are British… Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkein, Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers,…and going further back Jane Austen, but her especially.

And there is one great exception to this Brits-only rule. Many people find Jonathan Edwards to be rather cold and sterile…but I think he was simply a master of precision. It was his writing as well as his theology that captured me in my twentieth year. I think the fire is there but it is forced to run along lanes so miniscule and perfect that you have to fall in with them to catch the fire. 

But then to counteract the enchantment of that inessential perfection you have to read and re-read the magnificent imprecision of St. Paul so as not to forget that the fire comes first.

(And where does this fire come from? It is the product of pursuing metaphysical knowledge. Nothing else will do. We must acheive conviction that there is, in some sense at least, a world beyond the obvious material arrangement of our lives; and we must acheive the highest ideas we are able to attain about what that world means and what our world means in relation to it.)

Notice how these writers (St. Paul being an obvious exception) often favour combinations of short, Anglo-Saxon words. While it is true that you can generally say in one Latin-derived word what would require six or ten in the more homely English, that is not always a more precise way to write. Sometimes it robs a writer of the opportunity to make fine distinctions by tweaking a word here and a phrase there.   

Crossing disciplines is also important - both in reading and writing. The most important things I learned about writing prose came from trying to fit a complex thought that would normally have devoured a page into four lines of iambic pentameter. There’s nothing like it to make you look at each word in a sentence and exhaust all its possible relationships with all the other words. 

Then there is essay writing as opposed to novels or short stories and chatty articles or humorous anecdotes as opposed to speeches…we who hope to be good at any of these disciplines must read and try our hand at all of them if we are to know our tools thoroughly. 

Even outside wordworking, crossing disciplines encourages greatness. The confidence we gain from succeeding at downhill skiing; the ambidexterity needed to practice piano; and the awe induced by trying to keep up in a physics or theology class; these can all translate into greater confidence, flexibility, and imaginative powers in our writing.

And speaking of tools, I believe that it’s important to develop a consciousness not only of words but also of larger packages of meaning, which are phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.  

Sometimes saying what you mean requires moving the phrases in a sentence around until the thing balances properly. Sometimes an essay won’t make sense unless you tell your ideas in the right order; in which case it’s important to be able to keep track of your flow of thought throughout the piece of writing. In other words you have to be able to split, re-combine, and move sentences and paragraphs around.  

Sometime when you are writing a sentence try how many different ways you can arrange it.  

If you do this, your awareness of the possibilities open to you will expand.  

You will become more aware of the many expressions at your disposal. 

You will learn that there are many ways to say something and they all mean something slightly different.

Many possible expressions wait on your every thought; if you do this exercise you will become more sensitive to the weight and presence of each one.  

Ultimately, if you have something to say you will find a way to say exactly what you mean, and that’s what precision is. Good writing is honest writing; it tells the truth. This requires the skill and labor to recognize that reality has its own structure and shape and to ensure that one’s text reflects in its own structure the shape of those realities which it is expressing. 

So eventually we must get down to it: practice, practice, practice.

Oh yes: and when we are practicing, we must never become unconscious of how our words, phrases, and sentences sound. Meaning is wrapped up in sound, both tonal and rhythmic. Sometimes the emotional impact of a long word with an ’s’ in it vs. a shorter one with an ‘f’ is the difference between a acceptable sentence and an effective one.