Tim Steffen contributed a few First Lines to the Quicksies blog. I'll post them over the next week or so. I'll also post what I wrote from his first lines. Below is what I wrote from today's First Line by Tim.
My thought process while writing this was kind of interesting. A bunch of ideas sprang to mind, and I ended up dismissing a few and running with the ones I liked best. At first glance, that seems to contradict the purpose of Quicksies: write for ten minutes without judging what you write. But I wasn't judging. I was selecting. It's a subtle but important difference.
I kept my fingers moving for the entire ten minutes. I never stopped typing. I type very fast, and I think very fast. Ideas came to me in bunches, not single-file. I want to admit that when I get multiple ideas at once, I don't necessarily go with the first one just because it's the first. I pick one over the others, yet never let my fingers stop moving. That's the important part. I didn't judge the ideas that cropped up, or take time to analyze and judge. I made a decision, but it was an instant decision to go with one over another, for whatever reason.
I realize this decision-making process is a sign of growing as a writer. We all have loads of ideas which come to us at any time. I think the mark of a true writer is the ability to commit to an idea and develop it, instead of fretting over which idea to pick and, as a result, never committing to any of them. That's what I used to do. Quicksies have helped me get past that.
So, here's what I wrote from Tim's suggestion. I like it. If I wasn't me, I'd read me.
~Lisa
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The cup fell off the table and shattered. Karen cowered under the table as items fell and crashed to the floor around her. She’d lived through tornadoes and earthquakes. She could handle those. These were acts of nature. Acts of God, if you believed in that sort of thing. But this was a direct attack. This was a direct attack on her neighborhood. This was a direct attack on her HOME. HER home.
How could this be? How could she have moved to a “nice” neighborhood 20 years ago only to have it turn into a frightening slum now? She was close to retiring. Her children were grown and her husband was dead and she was alone and loving it. She came and went as she wanted. She made her own schedule and answered to no one. For someone born in the 50s and married early, that was a whole new world that she welcomed. Three kids all before she was old enough to drink. Her entire life had been dedicated to home making.
That term always made her laugh. She didn’t make a home. She provided love. That was all. She nurtured, and got nurtured in return. Her children were fabulous adults who came to visit her at least once a week. They had begged her to move. They moved out to the suburbs as soon as they got married. But she wanted to stay in her house her near the city. The house she and her husband bought together after years of scrimping and saving. The house where her children had all of their firsts. She grew up here and she wanted to die here.
But not today.
She would not die cowering under her table from a bunch of thugs who decided to wreak havoc because some dirty cop had beaten some lawbreaker to death, and some lay-about with nothing better to do had decided to capture the whole thing on his iPhone and post it online.
Rodney King was supposed to have taught the world something. Karen also just wanted everybody to get along. But this new wave of kids, these new malcontents, these weren’t poverty-stricken rebels storming the castle. These were well-to-do kids who had never known want. Their lives had been smooth. Featureless. Now they were becoming adults and in dire need of making some features on the landscape.
But why did they have to destroy things? Why destruction instead of creation? That’s what Karen couldn’t understand.
Karen crawled out from under the table and peeked outside. Some scrawny guys were trying to turn over her car.
That was the last straw. Without thinking, Karen grabbed the baseball bat her son-in-law made her keep behind the front door. She ran outside in her sweatpants and t-shirt, aging tits sagging with no bra to restrain them.
She screamed at the scrawny boys in her driveway. More out of shock than fear, they stopped and stared at her. She ran at them, bat swinging. She didn’t remember what she said, but knew it had something to do with “damn kids” and “get a job” or something banal and trite like that. If she wasn’t so angry, she would have laughed at herself.
In fact, she did laugh at herself when, the next day, her granddaughter emailed her a link to a YouTube video that had gone viral. “Raging Granny” already had over 200,000 hits. Apparently, the spirit of Rodney king was alive and well in the 21st Century. Her neighbor’s little boy had recorded Karen going ballistic on the scrawny boys, and lord did Karen ever get a kick out of that!
And it certainly kept the boys away. The cops could see quite clearly who they were, and within days, the boys no longer bothered anyone, and would not be bothering anyone for a very, very long time.
The cup fell off the table and shattered. Karen cowered under the table as items fell and crashed to the floor around her. She’d lived through tornadoes and earthquakes. She could handle those. These were acts of nature. Acts of God, if you believed in that sort of thing. But this was a direct attack. This was a direct attack on her neighborhood. This was a direct attack on her HOME. HER home.
How could this be? How could she have moved to a “nice” neighborhood 20 years ago only to have it turn into a frightening slum now? She was close to retiring. Her children were grown and her husband was dead and she was alone and loving it. She came and went as she wanted. She made her own schedule and answered to no one. For someone born in the 50s and married early, that was a whole new world that she welcomed. Three kids all before she was old enough to drink. Her entire life had been dedicated to home making.
That term always made her laugh. She didn’t make a home. She provided love. That was all. She nurtured, and got nurtured in return. Her children were fabulous adults who came to visit her at least once a week. They had begged her to move. They moved out to the suburbs as soon as they got married. But she wanted to stay in her house her near the city. The house she and her husband bought together after years of scrimping and saving. The house where her children had all of their firsts. She grew up here and she wanted to die here.
But not today.
She would not die cowering under her table from a bunch of thugs who decided to wreak havoc because some dirty cop had beaten some lawbreaker to death, and some lay-about with nothing better to do had decided to capture the whole thing on his iPhone and post it online.
Rodney King was supposed to have taught the world something. Karen also just wanted everybody to get along. But this new wave of kids, these new malcontents, these weren’t poverty-stricken rebels storming the castle. These were well-to-do kids who had never known want. Their lives had been smooth. Featureless. Now they were becoming adults and in dire need of making some features on the landscape.
But why did they have to destroy things? Why destruction instead of creation? That’s what Karen couldn’t understand.
Karen crawled out from under the table and peeked outside. Some scrawny guys were trying to turn over her car.
That was the last straw. Without thinking, Karen grabbed the baseball bat her son-in-law made her keep behind the front door. She ran outside in her sweatpants and t-shirt, aging tits sagging with no bra to restrain them.
She screamed at the scrawny boys in her driveway. More out of shock than fear, they stopped and stared at her. She ran at them, bat swinging. She didn’t remember what she said, but knew it had something to do with “damn kids” and “get a job” or something banal and trite like that. If she wasn’t so angry, she would have laughed at herself.
In fact, she did laugh at herself when, the next day, her granddaughter emailed her a link to a YouTube video that had gone viral. “Raging Granny” already had over 200,000 hits. Apparently, the spirit of Rodney king was alive and well in the 21st Century. Her neighbor’s little boy had recorded Karen going ballistic on the scrawny boys, and lord did Karen ever get a kick out of that!
And it certainly kept the boys away. The cops could see quite clearly who they were, and within days, the boys no longer bothered anyone, and would not be bothering anyone for a very, very long time.
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