Recently, I read Writing Brave & Free: Encouraging Words for People Who Want to Start Writing by Steve Cox and Ted Kooser to learn how they encourage others who want to write. As always with books on writing, I am on the look out for sparks that ignite the exercise-making part of my brain.  In Chapter One of their book, Kooser and Cox write:

…if you sit down at the same time every day and–starting with a memory or with something you just saw out the window–you write for as long as you can set aside time for, at the end of even one week you will have produced something that you can feel good about. Isn’t that enough? Even a few words a day is more than you had before you started. A novelist we know writes 250 words a day, day in and day out, and never tries for more than that. When he’s finished for the day he treats himself to a game of computer golf. He has published a number of novels and several books of stories, just by letting those daily 250-word pieces add up toward something.

When I was a community college teacher working between three different schools, I was that kind of writer.  I wrote in short spurts by staying in my car ten to twenty minutes before I walked into each school to begin class. “Little pieces of writing,” Steve Cox and Ted Kooser state in their second chapter,” add up to bigger things.” The year I kept to the practice of writing in my car, I created a lot of material, and I completed many poems from those short bursts of writing. I never thought of creating fiction in this way, however.

As I continued reading, I came to these words in Chapter Two, which reinforce the authors’ idea about 250 words a day being good enough to consider yourself writing:

Every novel is merely a collection of scenes, written one by one and eventually arranged into a satisfying pattern. And lots of novelists say they start that way, by writing little scenes and by setting somebody in those scenes to see what they might do next. Lots of novelists write their books by following their characters from scene to scene to see how they react.

Whether one double-spaced page a day can add up to a novel or not, my exercise making brain was engaged.  I wanted to find out what would happen if I wrote several 250-word scenes at random from my current life and then chose a character to drop into them after I wrote the scenes.

I set to work getting the scenes on the page.  They are from my house and places I visit in my town. As I wrote each one, I stopped when I was hopeful I might be near having 250 words (I was typing single-spaced on my computer). When I did a word count, however, I always found I was about another hundred words short of my goal.  Picking up again, I seemed to work slowly, thinking what I could add, but after I tacked on a few more sentences, I was renewed and kept writing. When I felt stumped once more, I did the next count, and I found I had exceeded the 250 words I was going for.

 Here are the three scenes I described.  As I wrote, I took care not to put in characters I cared about or even much about myself beyond the facts of what I saw and heard. I told myself the character I’d want to introduce would come to me after I wrote the scenes. Though what I report and any analogies I make do lend themselves to setting a tone, I tried hard to make my first scene descriptions as neutral as possible:

1.  Dr. Ottoway’s office is not crowded this morning. One of the office assistants is playing with a toddler in a designated play area, with a sunken square of floor and large plastic primary colored toys.  The little girl is giggling and running out into the main waiting room. The office assistant lures her back with a blue truck. The waiting room chairs are made of blonde wood and pink upholstered cushions. Magazines for adults and children rest neatly against a far held in wooden-slatted racks. Medical records hang with brightly colored tabs in file carts behind the receptionist’s counter. When the nurse swings into the room from a door beside the magazines, she calls, “Penny Sharp? The doctor is ready for you.” Three people look up, two women and one man.  The younger and heavier of the two women gets up and walks toward the nurse, using a cane, and her large black purse swings near her hip, its silver buckle catching the sunlight through the window.  Just as she and the nurse are headed through the door, a young woman approaches the door from the exam room side. She waits a moment while Penny and the nurse slowly walk through the doorway. When she steps into the waiting room, the young mother hurries to scoop up the toddler and then stands at the receptionist’s counter to make her next appointment.  The toddler pulls at her mother’s hair and her mother gently takes the little girl’s fingers away. As the little girl rides out of the office on her mother’s hip, an elderly man enters the office using a walker.  His back is curled over it like the hump in the young mother’s ponytail. For a moment, it looks like he is headed to the playground area, but he takes a seat, his walker parked just on the edge of the sunken area, standing like a guard railing to keep the blue and yellow plastic vehicles from entering the pedestrian only area of the waiting room. (336 words)

2.  Lahani’s once-a-week open-mike poetry reading has started.  The organizer tells the group the first fifteen minutes will be readings of poems by dead poets or poets who don’t live in Port Townsend. Same difference he says.  Members of the audience rise and walk, one after the other, to the front of the store and stand at the mike, a yellow-rimmed screen door behind them.  Sometimes people enter that door while the reader is presenting a poem. They walk quietly down a narrow passage between the audience and the far wall to get to the back and order a latte or a cup of tea, a sandwich or a slice of quiche.  Undisturbed, the audience concentrates on the readers and at the same time at people walking the sidewalk beyond the storefront’s glass window.  This poetry group is like a nature preserve, grounds where people can safely sit and listen, safely stand and read. Poetry and the way it speaks to the heart is protected from the daily commerce. This is so even though the miserable sound system makes the readers’ voices cloudy, or at least blankets them — as if all of the people seated at the small bistro tables were sitting with their ears covered by one gigantic wool cap. The featured reader comes to the front, her neon green zip-up cardigan sweater bright against the store front glass, bright against her heart, where her poems come from and sing from, images that bypass our heads, entering our toes, fingers, and groin.  (253 words)

3.  The cat was still sitting hunched in the corner of the dark back bedroom. He seemed to like it best between a bookcase of books about films and TV and a Danish modern leather chair. He was lucky to have a special litter box sitting on a blue tarp covering the teal carpet of the room he had retreated to when he became sick from a kidney problem.  After a four-day hydration at the vet’s office and an appetite enhancer rubbed into his ear twice daily, he was eating and drinking more. He even weakly licked his brother’s fur when his brother came in to eat the leftovers from the dinner placed before him. He remembered he liked the outdoors when he found himself placed on the deck or the warm asphalt driveway for a few afternoon hours. Late at night when the man of the house came into the room and sat in the other chair to watch television, he remembered that he loved sitting on the man’s chest. He managed to jump up onto his lap and stretch out lengthwise from his chin to his belt buckle and purr. The man rubbed him behind each ear and down along his back, even under each leg near his body.  He wouldn’t go and sleep at the bottom of the man’s bed, though, as he had before his skin seemed more and more like a sack he was wearing.  His universe had shrunk to this one room now. He was tired. He was still in love. He would live a bit longer. (262 words)

Now that I had three short pieces of writing describing three scenes from my recent life, I needed to find the character I could drop into them. I thought of relatives, of people I’ve worked with in the past, of myself with the concerns I have right now and even of characters from literature.  I wrote a list and felt a little tug of interest in using a relative whose attitudes toward things I always found frustrating.

Here are the scenes with this character, a middle-aged woman who isolates herself but feels abandoned by her family, dropped into them:

1. She was so relieved that Dr. Ottoway’s office was not crowded. She had no idea really why she had said yes to accompanying her mother to this appointment. But inside she did know why she’d done it.  Doing this would give her a chance to show that she had gone out of her way, staying over a night after a Sunday afternoon visit with her mother. She hadn’t wanted to stay over.  She was much too busy to not wake up in her own bed and get going, long vacations she blocked out months ahead excluded.  Seeing her mother for an afternoon once every quarter now that it took two hours to drive there, she could keep to her schedule and not have to miss her social and community service activities. It was hard enough to squeeze them all in around the regular trips she and her husband made to visit their daughter who lived across the country. And she also liked taking trips abroad for vacations every year, real trips like she’d always admired her father for taking.  She liked doing impressive things like he had.

As she sat waiting, she thought about the calls she’d make to figure out one more stretch of lodging for the trip to Australia only a few months away.  One of the office assistants was playing with a toddler at the back of the room in a small sunken square of floor with large plastic primary colored toys. The little girl’s giggling and running, almost out of the toy area, were very distracting. Thank God the office assistant lured her back into the center of the play area with a blue truck.  She didn’t need a toddler coming over to start her mother reaching into her purse for some treat or other to engage the child’s interest. She glanced over at her mother sitting quietly in the waiting room chair beside her, a square-ish blonde wood and pink upholstered affair, not nearly as modern as the stainless steel and leather chairs in the city doctor’s office. When she saw the magazines stored neatly in racks against the far wall, she got up to find one that might have articles about traveling. She’d been thinking of the Caribbean or Fiji or maybe some islands off Spain for a next trip. As she passed the receptionist’s counter with carts and carts of medical records behind it, she raised her head slightly up and to the right, comparing things. This little town did seem to have its act together, she had to admit, but it sure would have been easier for her, if her mother had stayed in the city where she’d first moved in retirement. It was more fun, if you could call it that, to bring her books from Costco and cans of seltzer and Diet Coke on her way back from doing her own shopping at the warehouse store than it was to make the trip out here.

The nurse swung into the room. “Penny Sharp? The doctor is ready for you.” She watched three people looked up, her mother, another woman and a man.  Penny walked using a cane and moved toward the nurse, her large black purse swinging near her hip, its silver buckle catching the sunlight through the window, spilling coins of light on the walls and upholstery.  Fifty bucks, that’s what she calculated the trip out here cost between ferry fares and gas.

Just then, the toddler’s mother also approached the door to the waiting room from the exam room side, just behind the nurse. She had to wait a moment while Penny and the nurse walked through the doorway and into the exam room area. She knew how that mother felt; life was filled with waiting for someone ahead of you to just get out of the way. When the young mother was able to scoop up her daughter from the play area and go to the receptionist’s counter to make her next appointment, the toddler pulled at her ponytail. Her own mother seemed deep in thought.   Maybe she was just tired. How could anyone feel well if they didn’t exercise; she had for years now, everyday, the same exercises getting easier to zip through without thinking.

As the little girl rode out of the office on her mother’s hip, an elderly man with a walker entered the office. The man took a seat at the back of the room and parked his walker on the edge of the sunken area. From where she sat, the walker looked like it was keeping the blue and yellow plastic vehicles where they belonged. She looked again at her mother. She had no idea why she was needed here. (788 words)

2. It was two days after the doctor’s appointment when her mother called to say that the arthritis in her knees was noticeable on the x-rays.  She took the call from her mother just before the Dockside Café’s once-a-week open-mike poetry reading started.  She said she’d have to call her back later because the reading was about to begin. One after the other, facing the deli counter with pastrami and corned beef that would never rival the Manhattan versions that she’d eaten with her father whenever she came to visit him where he worked, the open mike readers stood to read in front of a yellow-rimmed screen door. When people entered and walked the narrow opening between the reader and the audience to get to the back and order a latte or a cup of tea, she didn’t need to take notice. This wasn’t the Coach Deli where you might see a Broadway actor between rehearsals or shows. She was here because a colleague from work had told her that their supervisor was the evening’s featured reader. She wouldn’t concentrate on the poetry, just on any words new to her. People were always impressed by her large vocabulary, especially at work. She found her concentration for noticing new words affected by watching people walking in the street beyond the storefront’s glass window. Then she got distracted by the miserable sound system, which made the reader’s voices cloudy, blanketed–as if everyone at the small bistro tables sat with one gigantic wool cap covering their ears.  That idea made her skin crawl. She wouldn’t want to share garments with strangers.

When she watched her colleague now at the front, her neon green zip-up cardigan sweater bright against her heart, she rehearsed what she would say about the reading after it was over. She imagined something her father might have said, “Caught you with your feelings showing.” That would work to show the difference between the supervisor and herself. As long as she was rehearsing, she also rehearsed what she would say to her mother in response to the medical information she’d received.

“Well, Mom, I don’t know what to say. I guess you will have to learn to live with it.” She thought of the small calendar in her purse and longed to fill in dinner arrangements she wanted to make with couples she owed invitations. For now, she’d have to plan some of that in her head. (407 words)

When she got home, the cat was still sitting hunched in the corner of the dark back bedroom. He seemed to like it best between the art-book bookcase and the chair that used to be in her father’s executive office. The cat was lucky she put a litter box out for him on a blue tarp covering the hard wood floor of the room he had retreated to.  Normally she wouldn’t spoil cats like this, but he did have a kidney problem. She didn’t know why that kept him from getting to the litter box, but having one closer to him meant no accidents on her Persian throw rugs.  After a four-day hydration at the vet’s office and an appetite enhancer rubbed into his ear twice daily by her husband, the cat was eating and drinking more. He even weakly licked his brother’s fur when that cat came in to eat the leftover cat food her husband had placed in this room. She wondered if the cat remembered he liked the outdoors when he found himself placed on the deck some early evening hours after they were both home from work.  Late at night, her husband would come into this room to watch TV and sit in the other chair. That’s when the cat seemed to remember he loved sitting on her husband’s chest. He managed to jump up onto his lap and stretch out lengthwise from his chin to his belt buckle and purr, getting rubbed behind each ear and down along his back, even under each leg.  She wouldn’t have him sleep at the bottom of their bed, though. She couldn’t trust him to not have an accident and she wasn’t going to have the litter pan anywhere near her room and closets.  His universe had shrunk to this one room now. She would never let that happen to her, never.  (314 words)

As I dropped the character into the scenes, I wrote without stopping and then went back and did a little revising to make sure I had each scene as much from her point of view as I could manage.  When I did a word count, I was very happy to see a significantly larger word count after I reworked the short scenes I’d written with my character and her personality in them.

Even having done only three scenes and then redone them with a character to move from scene to see, I can feel the way writing takes over and words find their way to the page without me thinking too hard or evaluating them at the start.  I am interested to see will happen as I commit to getting down more 250-word scenes, either one a day, or several at a time like I did on days I have more writing time.

Right now, I know there is a conflict between the daughter and the mother. I know I’ll have to torque that one up because in fiction, it is tension that makes the story interesting.  And there will need to be something that alters the current standoff and create a course of action or events. I think this may be a short story, one as most are about the sadness of our shortcomings. Perhaps the turn of events has to do with the character’s getting into a situation where her normal judgmental self and retreat into her own righteousness just doesn’t work at all and either she must see, if only through a peephole, just how much larger a picture there is, just how much she is isolating herself, or she has to dig herself further into the trench she has made to keep from seeing this.

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If you are having a hard time working on a particular piece of writing, try the approach of writing 250 words at a time, either over days or over time in one day.  Any 250 words will do as long as they describe a scene.

After you have a few scene descriptions, try putting one or more characters you are working with or yourself into the scenes you have written.  Be sensitive to how you have to alter the scenes to make the writing work for the dropped in characters. You’ll have fun doing this and before you know it, you will be enjoying the feeling knowing you have words on a page, words you’ll eventually put to use in developing your writing.