Subject to Change

That previous post about Stephen King reminded me of something. I used to enjoy writing stories. Occasionally I still get an idea that I think should be published. Blogging helps with that a little. When I was in high school I thought taking the creative writing class, in spite of its reputation, would be a good idea. In retrospect I think that class may be what killed my desire to write. It definitely destroyed any dream I had of ever becoming an author for a living. Do you hear that, Homestead High School?

Nothing destroys the creative process faster than applying rules. This class was loaded with them: deadlines, demands, and pressure. The most frustrating requirement involved journal writing. Take a high school male, who’s never written a diary entry in his life, and tell him he’s got to produce so many entries a week. That’ll work well, right? It wasn’t light work, either. The requirements were steep enough that writing journals actually required some prep time and felt like real homework. Eventually, I just learned to be creative about my journal entries. I had quantity at the expense of quality. If I treated this blog like those journal entries I’d be posting every day, but there’d be no joy in it.
We would also write impromptu in class and read our work out loud. Twice I remember sharing something that left the class stunned. One time I think it was because I punctuated a story with a cuss word and they were watching the teacher for a response. Did I mention that I read a lot of Stephen King back then?

The other time we were doing an exercise where the teacher briefly showed us a few images and we were supposed to pick one to write about. I’ve been looking for my creative writing binder, to find the story that I wrote in those five minutes. I was really inspired when I wrote it. I had to cheat to finish it though, because I wasn’t done when the teacher demanded that we put down our pencils. I’ll try to summarize what I wrote, but it’s not going to have the same impact.

The image that chose me was one of a dark hand, presumably African American, shaking a lighter skinned one. Something in the back of my mind snapped and my cynical side kicked in. I saw a hidden agenda in that photo, so I decided to develop selective amnesia. Rather than writing the story that I though the picture was intended to inspire, I chose to rebel against PC nonsense in favor of something darker. It’s not that I was being entirely radical. The images were displayed quickly, with the intent that your mind’s eye might see something different. I simply decided to test the waters, and the teacher.

I decided that I hadn’t seen race, or two adult hands for that matter. I wrote a story about a fireman (the darker hand). In five minutes I managed to set up a dramatic rescue attempt. The fireman heard cries in the blaze and rushed toward them to find an infant, alone. The ladder rescue began and turned horribly wrong. This is the part where I decided the picture wasn’t about racial harmony. It was the final image of the infant’s hand in the fireman’s dirty paw, right before the child’s shoulder dislocated and he tumbled to his death.

It wasn’t really the photo that inspired the story, though. Once I started writing the ending came to me. I envisioned the child falling and the reaction of the firefighter. I had the words to put in his mind long before I got to that point in the story, and that’s what drove me to finish it. I wish that I could find the story, because it was the fireman’s final thought that ended it so perfectly. It was those words that caused a few of the people in my class to gasp. I knew from that response that I’d gotten my story exactly right.