It’s a good kind of crazy after a massive downfall to pick yourself up and keep trying. That tenacity that drives you to be successful. But sometimes we stand at a crossroads – and we reflect – is the thing we are doing still viable? Should we continue endlessly pursuing it? Will it get to a point where it just becomes something we grow comfortable with and just do it out of routine to the point it just becomes a part of our lives? What if it’s an unhealthy urge and it takes years and years to scrape away the false armour of security we built for ourselves?
I sometimes wonder why I do writing. After a long time – when it just felt like I was writing in the air because things weren’t getting published – I gave up. I was known to be a talented, creative writer. That was my identity. That was what people knew me for. Even all the way back when I was in primary school – teachers insisted I should be a journalist. I wrote an opinion piece rather than reports when politicians came to our primary school. My grade 6 teacher told me that I had a really strange way of words – but it made me stood out from anything she’s seen. My year 8 teacher loved the stories I wrote and said I had a really creative way of expressing the world. My year 10 teacher told me that it was a gift and she saw so much potential either being a journalist or an author.
It was this kind of reputation that carried throughout pretty much my life. My friends somehow knew this about me without actually reading my work. Even today, they are like “you’re so good at writing!” when most of them have hardly read anything from me. So when the inevitable rejections came – it was tough to handle. And I quit.
A very, very serious life event occurred two years ago which caused me to reconsider what was going to be my indefinite hiatus from writing. I placed value in the final outcome rather than the process. If I wasn’t getting published, it didn’t mean anything. But now – rather than going for the clever plots or the fantastical- I decided to try and be more personable with my writing. How I felt rather than how to impress others. Every sentence had to mean something to me, rather than trying to make it mean something for the audience.
And funnily enough – when I started doing these things – stuff started getting published. What I thought was a critical sin of unbearable self-absorbed nonsense started to become a validation of self-discovery.
But that’s another thing for discussion on a separate blog post.
July 2019 Prompts
- The story had to take place on a TRAIN.
- The story had to include something FROZEN.
- The story had to include three 3-word sentences in a row.
You can read the winning entry, shortlist and see the long-list of this month’s furious fiction here.
Japanese Jazz and Funk by Charles M.
We found ourselves trespassing an old relic from the past.
It was midnight and we ran from the pouring hail and rain trying to escape what felt like endless jabs from the cosmos. The sound of thunder were the warning drums from the heavens to punish us from the sins we weren’t aware we committed.
I had constantly insisted we needn’t bother people in their homes to give us any accommodation from the storm. But Nino ignored my pleas. We were on the receiving end of endless rejections from people either shouting at us or nervously treating us like crazy individuals to be feared. To be fair, Nino wasn’t exactly gentle in his approach. He was bashing the front doors of the home of strangers with his fists and yelling for help.
But I couldn’t blame him.
We were desperate. We were homeless. We had nothing.
I tugged at the sleeve of his worn-out, drenched sports jacket.
“Nino. Please, let’s not bother people anymore.”
I tried to find any semblance of approving reaction or agreement. But he didn’t give me anything. In fact, I felt like he was a little angry at me for suggesting what I did.
There was a heavy silence between us until we came across a series of train carriages left on what seemed like an abandoned rail. Nino pried the doors with a knife he found nearby. I saw the fierce determination in his eyes and such an unwavering sense of focus despite his many failed attempts.
I had desperately tried to disguise how cold I felt by suppressing any temptation to cough, sneeze or shiver.
A-choo!
I couldn’t help it.
Without any hesitation, he dropped his knife and took his sports jacket off and covered me with it and embraced me for a few seconds. There were no words. I felt his cold skin piercing through his rapidly soaking white shirt. He then went back attempting to pry open the doors once more.
“Finally!” he celebrated. But I stayed quiet, frozen in awe of him. He looked back at me and I smiled warmly in response.
The lights of the train carriage automatically turned on from our presence. The words “Ride on Time” plastered behind what looked like a bar. It was an abandoned diner.
He immediately closed the doors and I turned on the jukebox that was filled with Japanese jazz and funk music from the 80s. I think it was called city-pop. I couldn’t help but smile at him impersonating their earnest attempts of singing in English. And we danced in celebration at the rather happy-go-lucky melodies and gasp at their cheesy saxophone solos that were so reminiscent of that epoch in time.
It was always one of my fantasies to dance like nobody’s watching at a diner. Nino raided the alcohol and cheered me on as I danced and sang to the melodies.
And that’s when I realised.
We were alright. We have city-pop. I had Nino.
Writer’s Commentary
It was funny, I remember for a while I wrote prophetic stories. An instance of this was an old story I eventually shared with a former friend that was actually based on our friends – and was an observation piece about our time at year 10 around that time. I explicitly wrote about my feelings about my crush although coded it in such a way that I was disguising it as something else, the rather mundane aspect of just sitting around and talking. This was possibly after we had finished high school and in our holidays before university – we had read our old stories – had a great laugh about how shocking they were but we stumbled on that particular story.
And the conversation got awkward.
“So did you base this character on me?”
I sheepishly reply. I couldn’t refuse – I did. It was a character who prided themselves on revealing random facts. And I recalled he did speak about a particular type of fish that lives in some specific area of the world that did a certain thing (come on guys, it’s 10 years ago – and the only person that has that copy of that story now is that former friend).
This he was absolutely fine with. But it was the next startling revelation that sort of shocked him out of his system.
“How did you know I had a crush on her?”
This was in response to the fact that I wrote about a diligent, studious long-haired girl who was the charmer of our group – and that seemed to be absolutely good at everything.
I admit too that at the time, I was thinking – “I don’t know I just got a feeling.”
“I never told you I had a crush on her.”
He proceeded to sound really scared. I put it down to just possibly having a sound observation about how he responded to and about her. Maybe it was just a fluke or an embellishment. But the conversation kept going.
“How did you know?”
At the time, I really didn’t. But we then had a long discussion about the fact that he did and why.
I did a little homework looking at all the unpublished stuff I did and there seemed to be a trend. Things were coming true without me realising it.
Slowly, I started to realise my past works were coming to life. So I aspired to write a rather nice, simple love story. I’m really with this story – there’s a reference to Italian and Japanese pop (Ride on Time was a popular single by Black Box and was the name of a Tatsuro Yamashita album which I was listening to while writing this).
Of course should this happen to come true, I don’t wish to be homeless at all, but it’s definitely a big fear I have. But it’s the kind of love that I aspire – not words, but actions. Nino is a popular name in the Romantic, Slavic and Japanese languages – which I loved. So Nino (or if you’re kind of like Nino), call me.
C.
The Olive Brunch 