Paying Attention to I-Don’t-Know-What

When telling people about my flipping back and forth from technical writing to fiction, I usually say I went for five years without writing anything at all.

That’s not exactly true. Truth is, after about four years I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t have anything specific I meant to write, but just sitting around — I wasn’t, really, but you know what I mean — was starting to make me a little crazy.

So I told The Missus I meant to get up early the next morning and I did. Staggered to the computer, bleary-eyed, with a cup of tea in hand. Opened the word processor. Let my hands hover over the keyboard and typed:

It’s 1927, late on a mid-June morning.

A few things about this very brief sentence:

• I just about never write in the present tense. From the first word, I was already surprising myself.
• What the hell did — do — I know about 1927? My only connection to that year remains tenuous: my dad had been three years old then. But I had no stories about his life as a little kid that I was preparing to channel. (Really, I had no such stories at all.)
• The morning on which I wrote those words was not in mid-June, and the time was certainly earlier than later. But we’d been wallowing in one of those weeks of high heat and humidity which periodically drag their lazy way through North Florida regardless of season. And that environmental influence, in retrospect, certainly had something to do with that first sentence and what followed.

The story which came out of that brief fling with an early-morning routine — it lasted maybe a week, maybe two — is called “The Running Boy.” I never finished it; got a little over 6,000 words into it and just ran out of steam. Not abandoned by the Muse, not tired of the story itself. Just plain tired. (I hadn’t adjusted my bedtime to allow for the early morning schedule, instead counting on the adrenaline rush of writing again to carry me through a day on four hours’ sleep. Say it with me: Duh.)

But “The Running Boy” continued to interest me for a number of reasons (some of them hinted at in that opening sentence).

The plot itself — or rather, the thing-which-the-plot-seemed-to-be-about, what Hitchcock used to call the MacGuffin — caught me completely unawares. I wish I knew how it turned out.

I experimented (again, no idea why) with writing dialect. While I often give my characters characteristic rhythms of speech and other little verbal tics of their own, what I’ve got of “The Running Boy” represents my only attempt to give characters what you might call accents. And I don’t think it’s too heavy-handed. (We’re not talking Joel Chandler Harris here.)

The story has three main characters — probably two too many for a short story. But while it lasted, I had great fun working out their relationships. (In the back of my mind, they’re continuing their adventures with one another somewhere.)

Finally, the genre is one which I’d never seriously attempted. At that, the genre itself was a sort of MacGuffin; “The Running Boy” — at least its first 6K words — has even less to do with the genre than it does with, say, computers and the Internet. The story more or less announces its genre within the first few paragraphs and then more or less forgets it; the point, as it happens, seems to have been the characters after all.

Anyway, for what it’s worth — and for the sake of whatever my mind thought itself to be achieving — here are the first 1700+ words of “The Running Boy.” (I haven’t edited this at all, just copied-‘n’-pasted it from the document, so it doesn’t take long to make me cringe at stuff I wish I’d rewritten.)

Enjoy!