Photo Prompt: (C) Marie Gail Stratford

“From up here you can see more clearly.” The mayor steered Vincent out onto the viewing platform.

Wind whipped the patriarch’s improbably black coif, creating a wild buccaneering air.

“Look at my city, Vincent,” he said. “From here you inspect the whole animal. Where it’s snarled, which bits are diseased and must be replaced. You’ll never grasp that from ground level.”

“Father,” said Vincent, “you and I will never think alike. You picture profit while I see lives.”

“That’s too bad, boy. I always hoped you would take over from me.”

With a tender shove, he toppled the diseased branch.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find It here

Photo Prompt: (C) Ted Strutz

Patrick was a hoarder.

“Never can tell when something could come in handy,” he would say, scratching his chin and grinning. “They call it upcycling now.”

Rubbish, other people called it.

But the heaps grew. What happened was inevitable. They emerged, composed at first entirely of sound, not substance. In drifts of old papers and precarious castles of rust they rustled and scampered. Moving inexorable, always along the edges of sleep, always on the borders of consciousness, they came. Patrick knew now just that embarrassment God must have felt, noticing the first stirrings in some untidy little swamp.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find it here.

They say write about what you know about. And that’s good advice. But your characters are slippery little eels. They start to live lives of their own and do things you’ve never experienced.  I had this difficulty with Reuven, the everyman character in my novel A Prize of Sovereigns. In this week’s serialised chapter  published on Wednesday, he returns from war, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I have never been to war, though I have worked in conflict zones. I have never suffered from post-traumatic stress. How was I going to write that?

Research, of course, is the answer. I read extensively, both clinical accounts and memoirs of war induced stress.  Reuven suffers most of the standard symptoms, which are, as listed on a veterans’ website:

• Feeling upset by things that remind you of what happened
• Having nightmares, vivid memories, or flashbacks of the event that make you feel like it’s happening all over again
• Feeling emotionally cut off from others
• Feeling numb or losing interest in things you used to care about
• Becoming depressed
• Thinking that you are always in danger
• Feeling anxious, jittery, or irritated
• Experiencing a sense of panic that something bad is about to happen
• Having difficulty sleeping
• Having trouble keeping your mind on one thing
• Having a hard time relating to and getting along with your spouse, family, or friends

Plus, Reuven is prone to taking excessive risks.

Apart from research, the big help was writing the chapter not from Reuven’s point of view, but that of his wife, Jyoti (though an earlier chapter takes Reuven’s point of view).

“The man who came back from the war to Jyoti the second time stumbled to a broken rhythm. He limped on a stick. He found it difficult to grasp things with the remaining two fingers of his right hand. He could not hold a mattock or a hoe so easily anymore, and fieldwork came hard to him. Swinging a scythe was near to impossible. It wasn’t just his amputated fingers that made a scythe impossible. His broken ribs had healed wrong, and when he swung his body, the pain in his side was as if the scythe was cutting through his own flesh, not the hay. Jyoti had to do the hay-making for him.

But this was not the thing that troubled Jyoti most. Something was broken inside her man. He started at sounds. In any room he insisted on positioning himself with his back to the wall, facing the door. He would say with a laugh that this was so nobody could sneak up on him. But Jyoti did not think he was joking. He was alert the whole time to dangers that only he perceived, as if he was still at war.”

Writing from Jyoti’s point of view simplified the problem. This is Reuven, as she sees him. She suffers because he is withdrawn and snaps at her. She blames herself. And then one night he confesses the incident that is at the root of his self-loathing. He has still not told her everything that the reader already knows – not about the battles, nor about his fear of what he might do, nor still yet about his pathological risk-taking.

It’s through Reuven that we see the excitement of war. “For common folk like us, war is exciting,” he tells Jyoti . “You can do anything, take anything. It felt like I had some power.” And, it is through Reuven that we see the cost of war.

Photo Prompt: (C) Rochelle Wisoff Fields

Below Jeno’s window, three girls washed clothes in the Vltava River. Voices raised in teasing laughter drifted through the open casement, along with the first warm breeze of spring. He ignored them, bending to his astrolabe and astrological calculations. The new Dutch telescope was trained, not on the stars but on Prague Castle across the river, on Countess Maria’s window. Jeno’s mind could span the heavens, but his heart feared the short crossing of the Vltava. This horoscope had to be without error if it was to gain him entry to the Emperor Rudolf’s court.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find It here.

The Girl on the Train was one of the big publishing sensations of 2015. So it’s worth paying attention to how Paula Hawkins did this (apart from good writing and the normal quota of luck, of course). The novel is a thriller. But it’s a women’s thriller. By that I mean that it’s a confessional first-person glimpse of the emotional mess of the three main female characters. There’s a murder, but there’s also voyeurism, and the Barbie and Ken fantasy Rachel constructs about the couple she sees from the window of her commuter train every day.

Two things probably explain the book’s novelty. The commuter train is a masterstroke. We’ve all done it – peering from the train windows down other people’s back gardens and through their patio doors, comparing their lives with ours. This is a book written to be read on commuter journeys. The other thing that makes the book distinctive is that nobody, absolutely nobody, is likeable. Some readers hated that, but the truth is successful characters don’t have to be likeable, they just have to be interesting. That’s on trend. These days, we like our characters dark – black is the new white.

The requirements of the thriller format are scrupulously followed – secrets, mysteries, red herrings and danger. The plot gradually develops, folded-in with care like egg whites to the meringue of the confessional. In truth, the plot is not that complex, and it’s possible to glimpse the outcome from early in the read. But the inter-weaving is skilful.
The confessional style is also not new, though it is more Sylvia Plath than Brigid Jones.

And so, what about character? The story is told through three different points of view. Their narratives follow distinct timelines, converging on the climax. But the three characters, despite their different lives, are all very much the same person. This is probably intentional.

There is little by way of character development, which also disappointed some readers. Though, to be fair, Rachel emerges stronger at the end. Yet Hawkins’ crisp writing manages to keep us interested in the characters and the unfolding plot. She even manages, and this is no mean feat, the conceit of describing the murder in a first-person diary account by the victim and make it convincing.

Next long rail journey, pick up a copy of The Girl on the Train.