I wrote this morning some dire prose.
Dire it is. Honestly. Genuinely. Absolutely dire.
I was on the train, I was bored, and I had my notepad with me.
I had absolutely no thoughts in my mind at all.
I decided I would write down words as they came to me.
The sentence that emerged…
“In late April, an unexpected snow fell.”
I type that out, and it looks so normal. Certainly not dire.
But it took whole minutes to form. For my hand to make the motion, for the pen to scratch the paper, leaving a trail of ink behind.
Then a man appears. I wrote out: “He leaned on his…” but his… what? Axe? Was he a lumberjack? Mallet? Was he building a fence? I couldn’t decide!
A mallet, I decided. He leaned on his mallet. He looks into the sky, and silently watches as the snowflakes fall. He pauses as he builds his wooden fence.
The man has a wife!
This came as a shock to me. The snowfall would come as a shock to her. She’d planted flowers! Daffodils and marigolds.
The writing rambled on, filling the front side of a piece of notebook paper. There was nothing interesting about what I wrote. It was aimless, purposeless. It wasn’t even a good sketch of a scene. There were details, but they were all surface.
I’ll be the first to admit that not every sentence I write is golden. This was a page of not-golden. I’ll probably never look at this page again. I’ll file it away, forget about it. For the best, I think.
Such was how I spent St. Cedd’s Day. 😐