“Look hard at what pleases you and harder at what
doesn’t.” – Collete
Write a scene, using third-person
narration, that opens with your main
character having just done something despicable. Despite what he or she has
done, find a way in writing the rest of the scene to make your character
sympathetic without letting him or her off the hook. Consider that even when a person is mostly altruistic and selfless in their love for something or someone, they will still take actions that would horrify someone else. Why?
A Story about the Body By
Robert Hass
The
young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for
a week. She was Japanese, a painter,
almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the
way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made
amused and considered answers to his questions.
One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she
turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you
that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost
both my breasts.” The radiance that he
had carried around in his belly and chest cavity – like music – withered very
quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his
own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on
the porch outside his door. It looked to
be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals
were on top; the rest of the bowl – she must have swept them from the corners
of her studio – was full of dead bees.
No comments:
Post a Comment