It was Wednesday morning which means it might be our writing group, and yes, indeed it was. The topic was to write something which had a narrative from two different points of view. I thought a lot about this, and had various scenarios in my head, but nothing seemed quite right. I started writing something which had the narrator standing on a bridge over a river when she saw three girls walking along the towpath. She recognised them straight away, people from her school but definitely not her friends. The ‘leader’ of this little trio was a girl who for no reason attempted to make her life a misery in school – but fortunately the unnamed main character had a strong enough group of friends outside school that she was able to withstand her tactics. Now, as she stood on the bridge she saw that the mean girls had another person with them, and they were attempting to push her into the river. Immediately our heroine shouted and ran back over the bridge to interfere with what they were doing. Did the girl get pushed in? Did our heroine dive in to rescue her? I don’t know, I didn’t get that far, because I suddenly realised it had nothing at all to do with our topic. If it could be skewed to fit, then it would have to be a longer story than we usually share.
Dilemma!! I looked through story notes I’d made to see if anything would fit, which could be written from two points of view, but no. Once again my procrastination, my stasis, had run free and once again I’d not done what I should have done. I solved my immediate dilemma by finding another story which i could share, which sort of fitted, but I was shamed by the quality of the work my friends shared today. We are meeting again in a month’s time (if not before at story night in the Black Cat pub) and i will make sure I have a freshly written story to read which complies with the topic. It’s to be Hallowe’en themed, subtitled ‘Terror/vile creatures‘. It’s not a genre I’m very familiar with or interested in, which of course should be an extra challenge – and I’m a person who sets themselves writing challenges! Meanwhile I will go back to the story I started about the girl on the bridge – the beginning feels as if it is a fairly conventional story of someone saving someone else from bullies, but it must be more than that otherwise it’s not only predictable but uninteresting!
PS my friends stories were absolutely on point, each very different, each matched the criteria and were original and different. Fingers crossed that when we meet in October, mine will be too.
Lois Elsden 