Owen's Writing Week 10

There’s a lot that I find I want to say about One Man’s Death/When I Woke (which, of course, means I can’t put these thoughts into words). It is, after all, the piece that I have spent the most time with and the one that will probably take the longest to ‘complete’. The original draft of One Man’s Death was written during Beginning Fiction Workshop between Claustrophobic Spelunker and A Regression of Thought. A second draft was written shortly before Polyester Tears. And, with the help of my poetry and Senior Portfolio professor, I began the story over as When I Woke and submitted the first chapter(s) to my final workshop at Knox.

The story has taught me a lot about the basics of writing. From description (something that continues to be difficult) to the merits of planning out your story a bit beforehand (I think the main character, Chuck, was bald and yet still managed to have hair down past his shoulders in the first draft). It was the first time I played with the third person narrative and the present tense (the former I kept for subsequent drafts, the later I removed). It helped me to define the differences between a story and a character sketch. It is one of the examples I use when in a debate over the merits of fantasy plots for literature pieces (a huge debate within the Creative Writing department at Knox). It is in this story that I hope to accomplish what I couldn’t with Flat Planet. This is also the story I still think about when I let my mind idle and drift.

In the tentative plot that I have running through my head there are four characters: Chuck, the main character; Kelly, his sister; Jasmine (or Jaz for short), his niece; and a fourth character that has yet to be introduced and named. Beyond that there isn’t much to say about the overall plot of the story, I’m sure I’ve read my basic description on the backs of hundreds of books over the years: ‘When [event] hits Chuck’s life he thinks nothing of it at first, just another day to be noted and forgotten. As he goes through his normal routine with his sister, Kelly, and Kelly’s daughter, Jasmine, he is surprised when [character] comes looking for closure. The story, When I Woke, is an [adjective] look at a family with [a strange/unique interaction that is normal on the surface] whose lives are turned upside down and their attempt to [verb/cliché] it.’

That’s just the three sentence description though. Like I said early in this blog I’m not a fan of those short synopses, they inadequately differentiate between a perfectly ordinary story from a fantastic one (which isn’t to say When I Woke is fantastic, but I have read books with a similar three sentence synopsis that are). There is, however, something unique about this story that I have tried to explain to other people and that the three sentence synopsis doesn’t even begin to explore. A sort of fantasism that I know I haven’t seen in too many other stories which utilize a fantastical event in an otherwise mundane world to explore the characters’ reactions and interactions with each other.

All that and more are is the reasons I am so interested in this piece and keep returning to it time and time again.