edie - a 100 word novel
Yeah, it's another one of these.
Edie - a 100 word novel
Edie lay on her back watching the clouds. They were too much clouds, changed too fast to resemble anything else.
Often her life felt like a dream. Not that she could be woken by a pinch, but hazy. One moment suspended, riding drifts of time.
Her left side started to feel cold, a stone dug in her buttock. She tried to ignore them, get back among the clouds. Instead she shifted, aware of her body,concentration broken. The clouds were clouds again, distant. The ground solidified, and suddenly, briefly, she felt lonely and cold.
Edie stood and brushed her clothes.
.
Edie - a 100 word novel
Edie lay on her back watching the clouds. They were too much clouds, changed too fast to resemble anything else.
Often her life felt like a dream. Not that she could be woken by a pinch, but hazy. One moment suspended, riding drifts of time.
Her left side started to feel cold, a stone dug in her buttock. She tried to ignore them, get back among the clouds. Instead she shifted, aware of her body,concentration broken. The clouds were clouds again, distant. The ground solidified, and suddenly, briefly, she felt lonely and cold.
Edie stood and brushed her clothes.
.
Comments
Edie in particular was a very cinematic experience for me, the scene set, my mind skywise fluffy floating. me, an onlooker, an observer, brief glimpse of Edie enmeshed in that rollercoaster-tummy feeling only nice morphing clouds can offer, i wanted to say "hi, i was just watching you look at the beautiful clouds today, i have a bottle of wine, let's drink it & toss pebbles in the pond." but i said no such thing, my observation of her contemplation was merely a quick glimpse, passing.
i like the contrast you introduced, the diversion from laidback cloudwatching to the cold pebble. from airiness back to the hurting earth, our bodies.
What may also be interesting is that with these pieces I sometimes know exactly what I want the events to be (carpet, and a couple of others from August 08), because the story is the expression of the ideas I want to get across. With other pieces, like this one, I have an image and a situation in mind (lying on your back looking at clouds: the way clouds for me never make shapes like horses or saints), but no idea of where that will go. On another day this might have been a different piece. As it was I thought it was interesting to look at how when you lose concentration the world refocusses and you can't get back to that place.
In truth I'm still figuring out what this form is, what it can do, and why I keep coming back to it. I mean plainly none of them are novels, although a few share characteristics with the novel. They're not short stories, although a few get closer than I'd like. They may be a kind of prose poem. One of the other things I'm not sure of is whether they have to be about people. So far they've all been about character, but it might be interesting to explore more abstract places:
As a child I was good at two things in writing, imitating styles, and description. I could mimic or pastiche any writer you put in front of me. I was always surprised when people found it impressive. What I enjoyed more, and much more as I got older, was to write descriptions of scenes, animals, plants for no particular reason. No context or attempt to place them in any story, setting or meaning, just description. And I was good at it, again it was easy to come up with descriptions that nobody had thought of. We had a lot of art-history books with a lot of illustrations at home, so I was pretty familiar with the Western canon from Giotto to Cezanne, albeit in miniature, half-tone, slightly inaccurately coloured form. I thought of my descriptive writing as having more in common with that than with any narrative or poetry I read. I knew the style of an artist was not a representation of the world, it was a filter (more or less deliberate) applied to a representation. So Picasso fractured, El Greco elongated and used slightly sick colours, Warhol flattened, and so on. When I created images I did the same thing. I hadn't developed a 'voice' yet, but my images deliberately applied specific filters to scenes. This is something I haven't really exercised in almost 15 years, and it would be nice to try again.
Watch this space.