After years and years of teaching literary analysis and proper organization, I really wanted to try my hand at teaching VOICE and craft, which of course I always stress to the kids, but never really teach to. So after examining what voice is and watching some you tube comedy videos (and Maya Angelou, and the bad teacher from Ferris Bueller), we tried to figure out what voice means and how it changes depending on the audience, but regardless, writers should "show not tell." Hence the following. I wrote this during the same time period that my kids did and I am really happy with the way it turned out!
Assignment:
After learning about the id, ego, superego, and defense mechanisms such as denial, repression, regression, projection, etc, and then after reading three short stories in which the main characters employ some sort of defense mechanism, often leading to their downfall (To Build a Fire, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and The Black Cat) kids had to write their own 4 page max short story in which a main character is in a moment - so no big plot junk - and deals with a psychological conflict that either leads to their demise or helps them in a healthy manner. Of course, most of the time, not so healthy!
Here is my shot at it...
Author's Note:Sometimes I like to complete the assignments that I give along with my students. It's partly to model the writing experience along with all of its successes and roadblocks so that they realize that writing is most certainly a painstaking process, a work of art sculpted over time and with intense attention to detail But...I admit that I really wanted to write again - it's been such a long time since I wrote creatively, and I just wanted to see if I could. After struggling with a topic for awhile, then settling on a girl who was in the open water and would inevitably drown or maybe even already be dead, I just started writing. From there evolved a bunch of new ideas - the seduction/protective juxtaposition, the different layers of understanding and layers of the air and sea, the loss we feel at her death. Then it occurred to me .... more after the story...
With an electric, explosive effort, and with the echoing beating of her own heart playing as a drummer's intense percussive rhythm in her clogged ears, she breathed. She surfaced. She convulsively inhaled the salt-licked air that fused with the depths of the unknown that cradled her. Rocking back and forth, up and down, the frantic panic still possessed her with a daunting omnipotence, a dominance that both frightened and seduced her. Something unfathomable and primal haunted her still, an eerie sensation that at any moment something might have the courage to nip at her toes, to caress her arms, to envelop her soul. A kiss in the dark, taking her breath away. <span style="font-weight:bold;">But her memories were a frighteningly cold and heartless leviathan, immeasurably angry, and betraying to a shocking degree</span>. And that was only at the surface. Darkness blanketed the sky above in various hues of deepened blues and pinks, the twinkling stars in a furious dash around the world, racing against the sun, failing at their charge day in, day out. Diamonds in the sky teased her with their freedom, their speed. Lured into a slumb’ry dream, the persistence of the watery clouds bleeding across the sable velvet of the evening heavens waned, content to relinquish their form to the winds once more. But in the undertow of her soul and at the core of her liquid heart she drowned in the knowledge that what lay beneath lurked ominously - a predator, a force parasitically preying on optimism…softly, gently, rhythmically. Threshing within inches, with smooth, musical strokes, the precision of the movement cast a current of energy through her veins. Lustful, charming, with fiery purpose and hunger, the desire consumed her entirely as she relinquished her soul to the knowledge that eluded her until now.
Tempted by her innermost secret and dark desires, she floated on the bed of waves, the cooing sway of the water playing with her hair as it would the grassy seaweed. <span style="font-weight:bold;">She did not, for many moments, think, or otherwise dreamily peruse on it; but sleepily--so sleepily--she came to doze upon it with flirtatious moaning, and to cling hungrily to its presence, as towards the scent of her mother.</span> Down, down, she drifted deliriously through the frenzied shadows of the dark and deceptive deep; quiet, quiet was the roll of thunder upon her heart lost in a storm of pressure; still, still seemed the murky below, the warmth a mere mist, frozen in seas of solitude. Far, far went the siren's swan song, falling gently with mermaid-like grace. Below the cold, into the dark, beyond the light, without a hope.
Fathoms below, the haunting remnants of the light danced and tickled each other through the invisible currents. There, the chill of the deafening silence was warming and tender. One could easily get lost in the prismatic lure of the beast’s belly, with its enticing amniotic hum of the deep and the safety of knowing that the outside world was miles away. <span style="font-weight:bold;">It was the seductive desire of her soul to release itself--to offer salvation to its own torment--to crave love for love's
Washed away.
Author's note cont: that there was a pretty girl named Natalie Holloway who went missing in Aruba, and that a guy she met may have either killed her or she had an epileptic attack - but when he dumped her body at sea, she may have still been alive. That haunts me...
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Mimic Phrases: From Poe's "The Black Cat"
“This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.”
I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually -- very gradually -- I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.
It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself -- to offer violence to its own nature -- to do wrong for the wrong's sake only -- that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; -- hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; -- hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; -- hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin -- a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it -- if such a thing were possible -- even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.
