Natalie Walker

My struggles with fiction

When I began thinking about a type of fiction story that I wanted to write I was stumped from the beginning. I had no idea of what I wanted to write about. I remembered the advice from the reading of using a memory, as the basis for a story but that didn’t seem to work either. Finally, I had the perfect opening sentence. Once I had that sentence I was able to create a story from that, because the sentence started the story of in a melancholy way I knew that I wanted this story to be a flashback on a past relationship.

When I wrote the story I had to decide what kind of person the lead character would be and since I wanted there to be some humor in the story I wanted to make my character a bit of a mess, mentally that is. She needed to have just enough neurosis to be lovable and not annoying. So I had to keep that in mind as I wrote her thoughts and dialogue. I also had to make sure that everything that was happening was as realistic as possible. She couldn’t be so confident that she never even dreamed that the guy wouldn’t like her and she couldn’t be so needy that the guy recoiled in disgust. I wanted to make her an average woman with average doubts about herself.

This story could really be turned into a much longer story because I have put in many questions that I did not answer in this version. I have not decided if I am going to continue to work on this story yet, I probably will after I have some time to think about which direction I want to take the story in and how I want to develop the characters; especially the characters of Christy and Daniel.

When I read my story to the group I had many comments and one of the comments that stuck in my mind was that I kept going back and forth between past and present tense. As I revised my story I made sure to go through and correct that mistake, but as I was doing this it brought up a new question for me, which part is past and which part is present. The first time I wrote the story during the flashback when the characters are talking and interacting there are times when I used present tense and the reason I did that was because I wanted the reader to feel that they were in the moment with them and not separated from the action. However, as I revised the story I decided that I would use present tense for the very beginning and the very end and past tense for the flashback sequence. I never would have thought about that type of voice change if I had not gotten that comment from the group and I think that made the story a little stronger.

I also changed the title to my story, that was also one of the comments from the group that the title was a little sappy and I agreed wholeheartedly with that. After rereading the story I decided to call it Fried Cheese because that was one of the happy memories that she associated with her first meeting with Daniel. I thought that would be a much better title because even though it is only mentioned briefly and in passing during the story it gives the flavor of the story right away.

Another suggestion that I decided to try was to italicize the thoughts of my main character so that it would be easier to see when she was thinking to herself and when the regular narration was taking place. I didn’t want to do that at first because I thought it would look cluttered with italics but after putting them in the story they really do help and don’t seem to clutter the look or sound of the story at all. This suggestion I am glad I went against my own judgment and put them in.

There were some comments that I did not use because they would not have served my story better than what I had already written. Some of the comments had to do with changing wording and phrasing, which I did not implement into my story because I felt that it would change the characters and their motivations and that was something that I wasn’t willing to do.

This experience has been very instructive and enlightening, it has really helped me to work on my writing skills and to learn to trust my instincts and write what is true and honest. That was what I tried to do while writing this story and even though I made some mistakes along the way I still managed to create something that I am proud of and would continue working on.