pc-help me edit this-advice-don't just dog it...

[Axanderdeath]

The day Sam went mad

I was driving in to town. I had been driving around just checking out the country. The country was starting to look just like the rest of the world, like a gas station. Any way I saw Sam on the side of the high way and picked him up. He was not hitchhiking. People just picked Sam up when they saw him, a man in his mid 20’s. He really looked ragged today.
“Sam what happened?” There were cuts all over his body and a couple on his face, I noted in my personal log, were gushing. The gushing was not good in my clean car. I gave Sam a Kleenex.
“Thanks Dave. Oh shit I am sorry your car. But man! I was having a good hike this time.” Sam had grown up with me. He was one of the popular kids. Well, up until his girl friend at 16 died one night when they were out at the lake, a short drive out of town.
“I would like to go out with you some day.” I said not thinking. But Sam was over joyed. Me? I was too nice then to say I was making a kind of conversation I always use to do.

At home that night I started to think of high school days. I was a stranger to Sam, but we always acknowledged each other in the hallways and at parties. I was, with long and black hair over my eyes, excepted by the others. I started to bang up heroine in the 11th grade and ran of across the country and came back a mess, by that time Sam had already checked out himself.

I came back shivering in my folk’s house. Screaming for the drugs. The drugs that my parents blamed for my uselessness and hate. a hate I see in pictures from those days, a hate that has made me bitter and soulless, in my more matured years, which I would say are now. I remember, and I hate to remember it, hitting my father in the face saying, “I wish he were dead.” That is the big difference between my shit and Sam’s, mine is self-inflicting, and I have no excuse.

Sam had driven out to the lake with Trish his girl friend. It was dusk, a nice purple night (this affect was added by Bill the bar tender, who told the story at the bars since the town is growing so fast and really had no interesting stories) You could hear a slight rustle of wind in the trees. They were throwing, or rather, Sam was throwing rocks while Trish watched in her smart way. Trish was a straight A student, but some how managed to go off and be crazy. They were drinking. Trish went swimming, and Sam continued throwing rocks, then passed out. Trish never came out of the lake. Although there was no proof that it was one of Sam’s rocks that killed poor Trish, he never forgave him self.
XXX XXX XXX
The morning of July, yesterday Sam knocks on my door. Hello. Hello. I said I would drive us out. He had a case of beer. On the way I bought two more. He wanted to go to lake.
“ Why would you want to go there Sam? I know what that place means to you.” This was the wrong way to say it. Of course I had no Idea.
“ You know do you? Look it is a nice day, and there is a party out there. I know that you have not really been having such a great time since you got back. If you were referring to Trish, well that is completely over with me now, and to be frank, you have no idea!”
“Your right. But I heard that you have not been doing so well, to tell you the truth. Do you have a job Sam?”
“No”
“ I can help with that, I have a concrete company, with the growing….” Sam put up his hand.
“Just drive to the lake.” I did.

We came to a clearing by the lake, there were a lot of people around; it was the “party” Sam was talking about. The man from the clinic was their smoking a bat that was going around in circles. What clinic, it had slipped my mind, had I been in a clinic lately. I did not think so.
“ How are you doing Dave?” He said to me.
“I am fine, how are you Sam.” I was concerned for him, coming back to a place that hurt him so much. He got in to the beer quick, quicker than I did. We sat on the grass. The Clinic man was bugging me with his questions. Apparently he thought we were some kind of unrelated brothers.
“ Man you know, experience, man.” The clinic man said as if that was some kind of divine statement that should have been understood. I had plenty of experience.

I remember getting back home; it had been at least two years. Mom and Dad grudgingly excepted me into their home. I remember thinking that their bathroom was the very thing that made me feel like a prick. Using the washroom for me was never comfortable out on my own, and here back home it was almost so comfortable I felt so happy and so comfortable that felt like a demon. A demon, shiting in their lovely, loving home. Friends came around, but it was clear that I had gone to far away from them, the eyes looked wet and concerned all the time.
XXX XXX XXX
I woke up, and the clinic guy was past out next to me. It was dusk and the party was still going on. I saw that Stephanie was talking to some other guy. I had been trying to pick her up earlier, and was to be completely honest, it was working a bit, and this fuck was moving in on my territory. I said nothing and moped. In my mopping I noticed that Sam was not around.
“Where is Sam?”
I asked and it echoed around the party. Where was Sam? “ He the guy who killed his girl friend here” some fuck said, and I walked up to him.
“What’s your problem man?”
I said standing over him (I am 6’3 feet tall). He knew who I was and I him.
“Fuck off Dave, no heroine here” This enraged me. What kind of fuck? I swung at him. A quick fuck he was and ducked and got me in the belly. Now I was not one for fighting but I knew enough to know that the one who throws the first punch is defenatly at the disatvantege.

In some town of far off memory I remembered looking across some street that I now forget the name of, and is not important. There was this guy there, just minding his own business, and I walked over and just smacked him in the face. My so called friend at the time, the people I was getting high with at the time, and they liked me because I was trained and could support my habit and theirs, said:
-Why did you hit him-He was out cold.

He was out and maybe this is why I thought this aproch would work at this time.

I was rolled over, and when I came too in the bright lights, desperately needing to a take piss, I cried. I just let it out like a girl, sobbing, with moments I thought the sneeze-crying spasm would come and did not. The nurse came, I asked her how I came in, what happened? She told me I came in yelling and swearing at everyone, but said it understandingly. I took from this and her black eye that she was use to drunks. She must have seen my piss boner because she then got standoffish. I broke the okward silence with:
“Is there a washroom I can use?”
“Yes Mr. Toll down the hall and follow the red red line, to the blue, 60 passes and the down the reddish brown, and the first right.” I took from that that they the hospital took my wallet.
XXX XXX XXX
After the hospital, after some hopeless inquirers about Sam I walked down to the poor part of town where all the whores were. I bought me one, and asked her to talk it over with me.
“You get the same time as the rest of them” I was determined to get her to give me the time she gave the old and very drunk. Sally a girl, probably about my age, with sores and crack pipe burns on her face was more than she seemed.
“I have this friend, and he is real depressed. Have you ever been depressed?” I asked her and she smiled. It was a real fake smile; it was probably the first time any one actually asked her something like that. Not like her pimp that probably told her he loved her and then beat her.
“Well that is a strange question. What do you want me to call you mom or something big daddy?” This girl as destitute, and was not the girl to talk to. I let her give me a blowjob; because that is the kind of guy I am and sent her on her way. I was worried about Sam, but I was also a drunk, and X-junky. Then it hit me! My car, where the fuck was it! I had to lay some Concrete shit for the school that Sam and me had went to in the morning. I sat down. I thought, it must be at the lake, so I caught a cab out there, I walked the long path, the sun was coming up. Sam was walking towards me.
“Sam! You’re not… How are you doing?”
“Dave buy me a beer.” Sam said in a low drunk voice, he was not him self.
“Yes yes Sam, you see my car?” And then I saw it, right where now remember parking it. There was a note on the widow, an apology from someone that drank it all all night. I got in and Sam next to me. We drove back in to town, a short drive. I pulled in to Mcdonald's because there was a payphone there. I got out and Sam stayed in the car. He took out of his pocket a small knife, and made like he was going to kill him self. I opened the door tiredly and said:
“Sam you will have to do better than that!?”
“HA! What you think I was doing?”
“Nothing Sam, come get some breakfast.”
“More booze, Dave, you said.”
“Yha, why do you think we are at a place like Mcdonald's.”

It is hard to judge, for me at least, when a person snaps. The worse part is you may think the start is half way down the spiral. Sam is still a drunk, and I am to to be serious, and drinking with Sam the day I lost my car just proved it. I lost my job, gone freaked out, and live on beans now….





A story by:
Geoffrey Alexander Parsons

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear Ax (Geoff):

Since you asked for "real" criticism, I'll make a couple of comments.

Your tale has the potential to become effective: the drug confusion and tragedy and hopeless, lost feeling you hint at in this draft shows promise as a subject.

Think of this version as a first draft.

Try to follow the first rule of prose fiction: show, don't tell.

When a character climbs into a car, or goes home after experiencing a shock, don't baldly state that this is so. Slow down and actually try to render the experience for the reader. Ask yourself how things smell: Like vomit? Perfumed? It's a "nice purple night", but what does that consist of, specifically-- how have the senses informed you that it's "nice"?

Remember, Sam is "gushing" from wounds. Then, suddenly, the scene switches abruptly and he's left gushing.

Straighten out your sequence of narration to make maximum use of dramatic events.

If you try some of these things, the good story line you already have will be enormously enhanced.

We'll be able to think about Sam more clearly, see him lucidly, and feel what he feels.

The writer must become a little bit of an actor. Hemingway used to get up from his chair while he was writing and walk around the room, acting out whatever his characters were doing, just to know how they felt.

That's enough for now. Try making another pass through your work and bringing it to life a bit more in the way I suggested above. Study how Hemingway did it. And read F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was an expert at writing about doomed characters.

There's a lot of labor involved, I know. But if you want something to improve, you've got to work over it until it's right. Every professional writer will tell you that.

Try to get yourself a copy of this book by Rust Hills:


http://www.secondaryenglish.com/writing ... cular.html


and read it carefully. My students always found it useful.

Your local library may have it.


Good luck, and write back again.



Zlatko

[Zlatko Waterman]

Geoff:


Here is an example of the quick, but concentrated rendering of a character in motion, a description that reveals her intent and fits her into an urban landscape efficiently and serviceably for the author's purpose, which is to reveal something about how Tokyo has changed while remaining essentially the same:

(paste)


Here in my Akasaka hotel, I can't sleep. I get dressed and walk to Roppongi, through a not-unpleasantly humid night in the shadows of an exhaust-stained multilevel expressway that feels like the oldest thing in town.

Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I'm waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She's probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer - equally sheer, skintight, and microshort - and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There's a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami.

This ghost of the Bubble, this reminder of Tokyo from when it was the lodestar for every hustler on the face of the planet, strolls on and then ducks into a doorway near the Sugar Heel Bondage Bar. I last came here right on the cusp of that era, just before the downturn, when her kind were legion. She's old-school, this girl: fin de siècle Tokyo decadence. A nostalgia piece.



--William Gibson, "My Private Tokyo"


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[Axanderdeath]

I thank you for your responses--show and not tell--I did know that before, but I just need to work on these things. Any suggestion of the story--like the charitors--did you think the bit about the death of the guy girl friend was too short? Or should of I cut it out all together.

As for hemingway I have read quite a bit of him, fitzgerald I only read "this side of paridise" I think it is his frist book, but the last bit of it is defantly doomed.