Standard characters and a story.

Hiya!

Long time no post--and for that I am very sorry. I would have another 5 posts from Project ECA to post, but I'm actually editing 11 (33%) right now. So that will have to wait a bit. :(

Instead, today I have something short that's a few weeks late, but I was reminded to post by a few encouraging comments from a fellow writer friend. :) She knows who she is ^_^.

Below is a short short story (830 words) that I wrote during a Writer's Circle (creative writing club) meeting before. We were playing a game where we were given a noun, adjective and place and told to write a story from it. The point was to make each sentence count, regardless of the length of the story. So...Read the story and guess the words ^_^! They'll be posted at the end too, along with a few comments. :)


***

She stood in the snow, her gray eyes fixed on possibly any of the glass figures that sat past the frost-covered window, or maybe even the snowflakes that fell between her and the window. Behind her, people hurried to work or school, their hoods drawn low over their faces and their ears hidden by their collars. The girl in front of the shop window though, stood eagerly, a small flame floating between her white-mittened hands for warmth.The gray scarf wound tightly around her neck read “Poughkeepsie High School Ice Skating Team”. 

“Good morning, Qualia” the shopkeeper greeted, unlocking the door. 

She loosened the scarf and dropped three quarters, two dimes and a nickel in exchange for a single chalk-white candle, which she set in one of the glass cups sitting on an unfrequented shelf. The entire cup collection, it seemed, now had a candle of some color sitting inside it now. 

“How many more?”

Slowly, she turned around and held up one finger. All but one.

“You’ll have enough by tomorrow then,” the shopkeeper said, nodding as though in surprised amusement. “Right on schedule, eh?”

She nodded. 

“You’d best get to school then. You’ll be here early again tomorrow?”

She nodded. 

He pointed at the scarf. “Competition today?”

Another nod. 

“Careful on the ice. Good luck.”

She made a small curtseying motion before wrapping the scarf around her neck again and heading outside into the snows. 

The next morning though, the shopkeeper awoke to find no patrons standing outside his window. The silent girl with the amber-colored hair and the bright gray eyes was no where to be found. He glanced outside. The snows seemed to have stopped the day before, and the streets were mostly clear.

“She must have been held up,” he decided after a few minutes. He took out a rose-colored candle and set it on the counter, where it sat, awaiting its purchase. A few more minutes passed with no sign of activity. He took the final cup, a dull gray chalice dusty from years of sitting ignored and unpurchased at the bottom of a collection of unwanted glass trinkets and polished it.. 

The day’s first customers came in. They watched him mold a ball of glass into a little doll, so delicate and misty that she seemed more ghost than glass. They were impressed and praised his precise skill and artistic eye, but not impressed enough to rescue her from a silent life in a display case, watching the world outside go huddled along about its business. More came, and browsed through the store, fingering the figurines and complimenting each piece. But no one would buy anything. 

Eventually, the sun drowned in the horizon, bleeding across the ocean, and the glassmaker had to lock the door and admit he was another day closer to ruin. Not a single sale. Not a single one of his creations adopted into another home. Not even the morning candle sale he had come to expect . He didn’t realize how much he appreciated the girl until her amber curls were missing. 

But there was something wrong in that too. She had been the one to propose lighting the little candles in each cup and setting them around the town over the darkest days of winter to share the beauty of the glass. She had even thought it necessary to buy every single candle from him, as they would be burned in the processes and useless to him later. 

The sunrise was meek at best the next day, and barely a ray shone through the murk of the clouds. The five days of darkness had arrived. 

He unlocked his shop as always, but again found no gray eyes peering excitedly at him, a dollar in hard-earned change in her hand. That’s when the local paper boy and the paper in his hand caught his eye. 

“Girl dies ice-skating.”

He burned the candles, exactly as she had planned them, in exactly the order and places she had planned. For five days, Poughkeepsie enjoyed candlelit streets and the twinkling of little glass cups on every street. 

On the final night he took the final cup after all the other candles had burned out and set it on the windowsill. In his hand he held the rose-colored candle, who had waited in vain for its buyer. 

He ought to burn this last one, especially for that little girl, he thought. But before he did, he noticed a gleam in the little glass chalice. Although the sky was at its darkest for the lightless days with not even a candle to light up the gloom, the chalice seemed to glow. It radiated amber warmth through its gray linings and cast reflections of anything around it upon itself. The chalice was glowing on its own, he realized, with no candle within. It was incandescent, with an inner whisper of a flame that was strong enough to stand alone. 

***

About the story: As promised, these were the prompt words.
noun: chalice
adjective: incandescent
place: Poughkeepsie, New York

My initial and guiding image in this was a picture of a glowing cup through a shop window, with snow falling outside. The girl with the amber curls on the ice skating team was a little random. Initially the shopkeeper was going to be a mean general goods vendor and there was only going to be one candle and one cup because she wanted to create the image I started out with, but I evidently changed some of that. Writing-wise, I tried to make the sentences strong and packed with detail, and I tried my hand at foreshadowing.

The prompt was to make every sentence count and be interesting in itself, but towards the end I think I missed that and just wanted to finish things up. With the dialogue I couldn't quite make each sentence tell a story either and retain the cool, concise tone I wanted to convey either; thus, I opted towards preserving the latter as much as I could. I really dislike the ending too. It feels really...dumb. I noticed that in trying to create a cool, almost uncanny setting I was sinking into my ECA habit of short sentences dotted in the mix with long descriptive ones.

After the initial writing I went back in to add a few foreshadowing details. The emphasis on the color gray (eyes, scarf, the last chalice) and white (mittens, candle) in the first few paragraphs resulted. My reason for this was because in chinese culture, white is the color for death and mourning, just as black is in western culture. I chose white over black to connect it with ice and glass a little. The doll that the shopkeeper makes is also related to this, although when I wrote it I was mainly paying homage to my consciousness class and our discussion on the uncanniness of dolls and automata. Although I didn't intend to initially, I ended up making Qualia mute to connect her with the "ghostly" glass girl.

Realistically speaking, I don't think my style changed dramatically in this exercise. I would like to think that some sentences are nice and can tell a bit of their own story, but otherwise, not really. Foreshadowing I'm afraid I may have been a little ambitious about, but think I did an okay job with hinting at but not completely ruining the surprising effect of Qualia's death.

Standard Characters: Obviously I'm talking about Qualia, who is the only named character in this story. Qualia is one of my "standard characters" which is basically a character who doesn't have a definite background story, only a few vague personality traits (I stole/borrowed/was inspired to implement this idea from a fellow writer ;)). I basically use my standard characters for writing exercises, like this one, or main character name fillers in story ideas (the other characters I use amino acid names for. Isn't Arginine such a pretty name?).

I have three standard characters, followed by their namesake word and all my notes on them.
Qualia (subjective experience; qualitative): female (usually short), sensitive, creative
Cisternae (membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum): male (usually tall), logical, focused
Cristae (membrane folds of the mitochondria): male or female, energetic, hard-working
Of course, depending on what context I throw them in, these may vary or be unexpressed traits (like unexpressed genes!)
I love nerdy names. I also usually pair Qualia and Cisternae up >.<

Anyways, please comment! What do you think? Was my self-analysis a little too ambitious? Do you have "standard characters"? Do you want me to write and post more of these little standard-character/ inkfeather (snippet) exercises? Less? Whatever it is, I like to hear it!

Thanks for reading!
~Minerva