Summary: Andy is, without a doubt, going to fail his 11th grade Creative Writing class. Maybe it wouldn’t be a problem if his teacher let him write some fantasy or supernatural elements, but how was he supposed to write ‘normal fiction?’
Inspiration: College Creative Writing Class
Date: 09/30/19
Word Count: 4,152
Clumps of dirt and small, jagged stone pieces dug into Sage’s palms as she tried to hush her rapid breathing. If she was quiet – if she was very, very quiet – then perhaps the sight in front of her would disappear like the summer mirage of a hot pavement. There was no way what could be in front of her was real, after all. There was no way for there to be a wolf, large and feral and flashing blindingly white teeth that glowed in the moonlight- There was no way for a creature like that to be real.
“I- If this is a joke, then it’s a really shitty one.” Sage’s voice shook and vibrated as much as her heart, both feeling like they were about to fail her as the hulking beast, bigger than a living creature should ever be, stepped towards her. “It’s not funny. This joke isn’t funny.” The words hardly managed to escape, instead catching in her throat and tangling together like knots.
Another step forward from the beast and Sage slammed her eyes shut. This couldn’t be real. Her new friend, the only one to understand her in this hellhole of a town, couldn’t have just changed like this. Al couldn’t have just dropped to the ground and dug his fingers into the earth as they became claws. There was no way she had really seen fur dig its way out from under skin and teeth sharpen into deadly points. She couldn’t have. This couldn’t be real.
“Wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.” A puff of breath, heavy and damp, washed over her forehead, and Sage felt her heart stutter to a stop. Overwhelming clarity occurred to her in that moment that she was awake, but she was still trapped inside a nightmare.
“This isn’t acceptable for your final manuscript.” His teacher’s words crashed over him like a splash of cold water, which was an achievement, considering Andy had been half asleep in the patch of warm sunlight that had enveloped his desk during the afternoon class. “You need to try again.”
“Try again- Mrs. Buller, this is some of my best work from the entire semester!” Andy took his eleventh grade Creative Writing class very seriously. He took in all feedback and always made sure to use it, so he knew that his most recent submission had been some of his best work throughout the entire class so far. “I even pushed for more sensory detail and everything! See, I even used more than just sight to tell the story!”
“Yes, Andy, I know this is some of your best work.” Mrs. Buller sounded as if she wanted nothing more to do with him, Andy filled with a potent mix of embarrassment and bitterness. His brother had said that this class would be his favorite, but Andy was starting to doubt the truth of that. “It’s also not what I asked for, as I went over with you last class. I asked for a short piece that was not attached to any specific genre. That means no fantasy.”
“It’s not, though!” The lie was out before he could come up with a good defense, Andy swallowing as he felt the flush that was no doubt crawling across his cheeks. “It’s… supernatural.” Andy was certain that a supernatural piece wasn’t a genre so much as a trope. At least, he hoped so.
“That’s a genre, Andy.” Mrs. Buller pushed the paper towards him more firmly, Andy staring down at where a frowning face was drawn over the moment where Sage stumbled into the woods, legs shaking and burning from the exertion of running for so long. The thought of Sage’s colorful swearing at her friend running away from her did little to lift Andy’s spirits. “Your final manuscript is due tomorrow. It needs to be general, normal fiction to be acceptable.”
“Yes, Mrs. Buller.” Fingers digging into the paper and crinkling the edges, Andy sighed as the sunlight disappeared from his desk, a cloud blocking the warmth and leaving him staring at perfectly white pages covered with red ink. He couldn’t help but think that Mrs. Buller might have been more forgiving if he had written about fluffy bunnies instead of vicious werewolves.
—
“I didn’t join the Air Corps because it was my dream.” Andrea’s whispered words were almost lost over the loud shrieking of the wind and the grinding of gears that allowed them to stay aloft so high in the sky, but the ears they were meant for had long since grown used to the sounds that lived with them.
“Sounds like you still had a reason, though.” The words weren’t spoken quietly, but Andrea realized they were spoken softly, as if they were a secret that was meant for her and her alone. “I’d be willing to listen if you wish to share.” Peter’s heart was far too large for this world, Andrea mused.
“It’s not a pretty story, you know.” Andrea curled her fists around the railing she was leaned again, leather gloves pressing against her palms and exposed fingertips grinding against wood that taunted her with the possibility of splinters. “A lot of it isn’t good, Peter.”
“Tell me anyways.” There was no judgement in his voice, and the entire world around them was sealed off by walls of sound. Whatever she said would never be heard by anyone other than the one who stood beside her. Andrea realized she could live with that. If nothing else, she could live with just one person knowing her secrets. It wasn’t as scary a thought as it had been.
“Nothing.” Andy read the words over and over, fully emerged in the scene he had written between Andrea and Peter. The world surrounded him, and it was sharp enough that he could hardly catch his breath through the strong winds, and he fought to keep his balance on the rocking airship. It was some of his better work and part of a book he had been working on since the school year had begun. “There’s nothing that’s helping me.”
There was a pounding on the wall behind him, the vibrations shuddering through him as he heard the faint echo of his brother’s voice, “Talking to yourself is a sign of madness!” Andy elected to ignore him as he tore through the C+ paper that he had been re-reading for clues as to where he had gone wrong in his writing abilities.
It was full of sensory detail and images, the characters were three dimensional, and it was a short, contained scene that had a clear beginning and end with images attached. It was exactly what Mrs. Buller had asked for, and yet there, in bright red pen, were the same words she had been saying to him for the entire school year.
‘No genre! General, normal fiction that takes place in the real world was the goal! Good work but follow the instructions next time.’ Good work. She always told him good work, but then she gave him grades that were either Cs, Ds, or incompletes. Andy was positive that he was going to end up one of those kids who lived in the library trying to figure out how to pass a failing class.
Tossing the papers aside, Andy grabbed his phone and pulled up the open chat with Luce, typing as soon as the keyboard popped up, ‘It happened again. Tell me what I’m doing wrong please I beg of you oh mighty one.’
It took a few minutes, but when the response came, Andy had the urge to smother himself under his blankets when he saw a row of laughing emojis. Luckily, Luce gave him actual words after a long minute, ‘You spend too much time with your head in the clouds and dusty old books! Write something down to earth!’
‘Easier said than done.’ How was he supposed to write something down to earth? Earth was so… boring. There was never anything interesting that happened in the ‘normal’ world. ‘She wants normal fiction. Help me, oh wise one.’
‘Write what happened to you last time at the library or something!! You’re making this way harder than it needs to be. Just write what happened to you today and run with it. Buller will probably be too happy to grade you poorly for it!!’
“I need new friends,” Andy muttered, feeling like the words had to be spoken out loud to convey the magnitude of feelings they carried. Falling sideways onto his bed, Andy rubbed his face against soft, baby blue sheets, smiling at the clean smell of fabric softener and ‘summer breezes.’ He knew that meant his mother had snuck in and made his bed while he was at school, but he couldn’t find it within himself to pretend to be upset when that, coupled with spring sunlight, managed to lift his mood for a few moments.
“Okay. Okay! I just need to write something normal. That’s easy!” Racking his brain for ideas, Andy stretched and shifted until he was sitting against his pillows, sinking into the worn-out material as he opened his laptop and started a new document. Giving it a moment more of thought, he finally decided to follow through one of the writing exercises given to them at the beginning of the year. It was a simple writing task of writing about his room and describing what was in it. Considering he lived in the suburbs in the ‘normal’ world, that couldn’t be too heard.
“Right. Okay, writing exercise… First person, then.” Dull vibrations shot against his arm and had him straightening up. Andy held the pose for a long moment before scowling at his wall where it had been thumped and pointedly moving until none of him was touching it. He’d deal with his brother later, he promised himself. For now, though, he had a story to write.
Head hanging off my bed, I stared at the clock upside down, as if the new position would convince the clock that it should be moving faster. Twenty minutes wasn’t exactly long, in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like each second was slowly killing me with how bored I was becoming. Maybe next time I could walk to where we were having dinner and spare myself the hours it took for Mom to get ready.
Rolling over and grunting at the jolt against my chest at the movement, I pushed myself up and took a centering breath. Twenty minutes. There had to be something in my room that could fill up my time for twenty minutes. I was getting desperate enough that even a one-person card game was looking like a highlight of the day.
Taking stock of my room, I looked around and felt a part of me relax at the golden sunlight that was coming through the open window. The curtains, old and jagged and cut in an odd way due to a past stain when I was a child, fluttered in the breeze that came through. It had a bite of winter to it, but the spring sun was growing more and more each day. It wouldn’t be long until summer was here, and I could finally stop wearing three shirts every time I needed to leave the house.
Gaze moving on, I let myself glance over the rest of the room, body too keyed up with energy to focus on anything for very long. My desk, old and crooked and surviving on three legs and a prayer, was filled with piles of notebooks and neglected homework. The carpet was covered in an equal amount of dirty clothes and dirty socks, but at least nothing looked too bad. I’d have to remember to do laundry after dinner.
Dropping my head and wincing at the jolt of neck strain it caused, I paused when I saw the edge of a book under my bed. It wouldn’t have been too unusual if I kept books under my bed and if the book was one that I actually recognized.
“Well, gang, looks like there’s a mystery on our hands,” I muttered, trying not to laugh at my own joke as I pulled the book out. There were only a few seconds to admire the glossy binding of a photo album before a tarnished silver key with a yellowed tag tied to it caught my attention. “Curiouser and curiouser.”
This time letting myself laugh, I leaned down and picked up the key, frowning when a curling, elegant script read out the word ‘CLOSET.’ Looking to my closet, I stared at the folding door that had no lock or knob to speak of. Maybe the key was meant for another room of the house. Still… I had fifteen minutes to kill and it wouldn’t hurt to look around my closet.
The closet was cramped and tight and filled with far too many button ups that I never actually buttoned up. The key almost slipped out of my hand when I tripped over a box of old shoes from fifth grade and slammed right into the wall with a swear that made me thankful my mom was still getting ready in the bathroom at the other end of the floor.
Pushing off against the door, I froze when I felt an odd bump on the wall. There was no wallpaper to make the feeling and, as far as I knew, the closet was just made of painted walls. Pressing my fingertips against it, though, definitely gave off the impression that it was something. Glancing to the key clutched in my hand, I laughed to myself as I pressed the key against the bump on the wall.
If nothing else, I could at least say that I had tried it for myself. At least, that had been the plan until I heard a ringing click followed by a burst of a cold wind.
“Dammit.” Andy stared at his latest project, rough and unedited and mostly description over any of the vivid images he liked to use. Editing it was no doubt going to be useless, however, when he admitted defeat and realized that his teacher would never accept this piece. Without even trying and without even thinking about it, Andy had started writing fantasy fiction.
Slamming his laptop shut, Andy tossed it to the end of the bed as he threw himself down against his pillows and blankets. The feeling of sinking down into soft foam almost distracted him from his anger – almost. At least it was finally official, Andy thought. He couldn’t write ‘normal fiction’ to save his life. There could be a gun held to his head and an order to write a normal piece of fiction and Andy would be shot because he started writing about aliens and werewolves and witches. It was possible Mrs. Buller just hated the idea of fun. That was what Andy hoped, at least.
“Normal probably isn’t even a real word.” Andy made sure to keep his words quiet enough that his brother wouldn’t hear him, but he felt the anger bubbling up under his skin anyways. It just wasn’t fair that he wasn’t allowed to write about what he wanted. Who was Mrs. Buller to limit their creative writing ability, anyways? Andy had thought that the whole point of Creative Writing was to explore genres like they would every other aspect of writing.
Rolling over, and hearing the crinkle of paper, Andy dug under his blankets and pulled out a crumpled notebook and a mechanical pencil. Shifting onto his stomach, Andy clicked the pen until he had enough lead to write and started scribbling down whatever half-formed ideas popped into his head. He never had been able to stop writing for long, he supposed. Really, the problem these days always seemed to lie in getting him to stop writing.
It wasn’t like he could really help it, though. The words just always… built up. All these worlds and characters and ideas seemed to claw and scratch from the inside of his mind and if he didn’t get them out on paper then he felt like he had failed some cosmic purpose of his. Well, either that or he was upset that he had missed out on exploring such a great story. They were the same thing, if he had to explain it to anyone.
Moving to sit up and bring the notebook into his lap, Andy paused when he caught sight of a stapled bunch of papers, Sage’s name staring back at him from under the red ink that formed a frowning face. Andy looked away before he got the urge to try and scrub the red ink off. No matter how many times his teacher had explained it, he just couldn’t understand.
Normal fiction… Andy wrote and wrote and wrote and what he wrote was always stories about dragons and witches and werewolves and royalty and entire worlds that were left out there to be explored and how could he ever, ever stop writing stories like those?
Clutching at his pencil, Andy stared at the words long enough that they almost seemed to swim in front of his eyes. He didn’t mind, far too used to the sight of words fighting to be seen and understood. Instead he let the words drift as much as his thoughts, stuck on his frustration that he couldn’t let go no matter how much he wanted to. There was just no fun in normality, was the problem.
Was there any good fiction that contained the mundane? There was mundane fantasy, but even that was full of magic imprinted onto a society that they would never get to have for themselves. It was just impossible to have good fiction without a genre – it was as simple as that.
“This is the worst class of my life.” Saying the words felt like letting some of that frustration leak out of him, Andy sighing and releasing his death grip on his pencil. There were small indents pressed into his skin, mirroring the pencil grip perfectly. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, trying to center his thoughts. “It just doesn’t work. Normal fiction doesn’t work because…” It wasn’t true.
The epiphany hit suddenly and fiercely as all good epiphanies did, Andy dropping his pen as he stared at his notebook in utter disbelief over the fact that it all was so simple. It wasn’t that books couldn’t exist without some elements of magic to them, it was that Andy had never read a book that didn’t have magic to it. He had been taught very early that there was no real magic in this world of theirs, except, though, there was. The problem of this – of his block in writing normal fiction – was that he hadn’t been looking for the magic of his world.
“I’m an idiot… An absolute idiot.” It was a realization that hit him suddenly and completely, forcing its way through him and rocking his body with a laugh as bright as the sun that still filled his room. He had been writing of the magic of other worlds, but he had never even thought of his own. He really had deserved those bad grades, realizing what he did now, because, well. Magic was everywhere.
He saw magic when his brother played his violin, notes singing through the air like human vocal chords, his brother’s smile soft and private as if he and the music were having a conversation that no one else would ever hear. He saw magic in the curve of his mother’s smile that was a part of weathered skin and sometimes hidden behind strands of hair that were gracefully fading to gray. It was in Luce when she sought him out and smiled like there was a star within her – as if she were the star, powerful enough to shine out through human skin.
Andy was scrambling for his laptop at once, heart beating out of his chest as a smile stole across his face. His fingers danced across the keys, not pressing down but too full of energy to stay still as he waited for his computer to fully wake up. As quick as he could, he had a new document up and was writing almost faster than he could process the words that were forming in his mind. He couldn’t find it within him to be too upset by that, though, as that led to his best stories. It all flowed so easily, too.
He wrote about the magic his brother managed to summon with each and every song he played. He described how the bow dragged across the strings in a single haunting note before a low timber shook the air, notes weaving together to form a song that could control and influence the very world itself.
Andy wrote about the siren call of his mother. He was careful to describe her voice, soft and smooth as honey, but quick and clever as a cat’s paws. Her voice was the original siren call and was able to bid all to do as she wished and sometimes, just sometimes, it was powerful enough to give her what she wanted with just a quirk of her lips.
He wrote about Luce, his very best friend that he loved to death and yet wanted to shove out a window most days. With her, he was careful. He wrote about the magic that bled from fingertips covered with garden dirt and collected rainwater, her smell the sweetest of berries and the ash of forgotten spells. He made sure to mention that her very breath could shake reality until it did as she wished.
All of it was magic in the mundane – just as it had always been. That was the part that he had been missing, but he finally understood. It took a while, of course, but that was what a graded class was for – to teach him to find what had been in front of him the whole time. It had been so simple, too, but now it finally clicked. It was a mundane life that breathed magic.
It was really quite simple when I managed to explain it to them, in the end. I don’t think they were expecting it, but they understood when we listened to each other carefully. They had never understood the worlds that I saw on a daily basis, hidden between a breath and a heartbeat, but it seemed they were starting to when I explained it in the terms of their world. It went even better when I explained how, for all the knowledge I have, I was never able to understand a world that did not contain fantasy.
In all my time and all my travels, I had never seen a world that existed that did not contain some form of magic – whether it was seen or otherwise. Likewise, I’ve never found a story that didn’t whisper secrets to me as if we were childhood friends, once again hiding under thick, stuffy blankets with nothing but lightheadedness and a single flashlight between us.
There is no such thing as normal fiction. My friends understood it more quickly than my parents did, but they were willing to listen. They listened, I explained, and we met in a way that we can agree on. There is no such thing as normal fiction. There can’t be – not with billions of lives on the planet and billions of clashing personalities. There is no such thing as a normal type of fantasy, I explained to them. It took the time between a sharp inhale and the feeling of a bitten back breath, but finally, finally, they understood.
—
Mrs. Buller had given Andy his paper face down. It was an unspoken rule, but Andy knew that he was about to either get the best news of his life, or the absolute worst. He knew it was only his nerves that made it seem like the classroom had become absolutely silent, but logic didn’t help when he remembered their manuscripts were supposed to account for nearly a quarter of their grade.
Sucking in an unsteady breath, Andy pressed his shaking palms flat against the smooth wooden top of his desk. He was scared, and anxious, and his nerves felt frayed, but he needed to remember that he did his best and told a story he was proud of. Whatever was about to happen when he flipped that paper over, he needed to remember that he had told a story that he was proud of.
Flipping over the packet of paper, Andy stared at neatly printed words pressed into crisp white paper. There, in the cool white space near the top, was the number 100 with a smiling face in blue ink drawn underneath it.