Stranger Eyes

You

            You chuckle along with the rest of the class when Professor Kel tells Rowan to lie down on the floor. Tea cup in hand, you twist in your spinny chair to watch whatever’s going to happen next. It’s not every day you get to watch a writer act out his own story.

            While Rowan moves into position, Professor Kel seeks out a book—any book. Luckily, in the English Department wing of the building, books are always readily at hand. Professor Kel opens her hardbacked choice to the dedication page and sets it down next to Rowan's head. Read the dedication, she tells him, and he contorts his neck before conceding, he can’t.

            “Then how is Tom or what’s his name supposed to have read the dedication of that book when he lay dying after being thrown off the roof?” Kel asks.

            Poor Rowan, you think. Always the example. But we all do it, and Kel has a point.

            “You’re going to have to rethink your ending, there,” the professor tells Rowan. Then she regards the rest of the class. “I hope this helps you guys to see how important it is to describe things in a way that makes sense to the reader.”

            Be concrete, you translate. The slogan of this fiction workshop, if ever there was one.

            The class offers a few last comments on Rowan's draft: possible solutions to his problematic ending, last thoughts on what he’s done well in the piece.

            Then all the spinny chairs angle towards you.

            “Ellie, you’re up,” says Professor Kel.

            The good thing about the professor and all the students sitting around a single long table? The class as a whole feels a lot more conversational, informal. Especially when there’s cookies. The not so good thing? You can see when everyone’s staring at you.

            You whisk up all your long hair and drape it over one shoulder, tugging your fingers through any remaining tangles as you read your latest short story draft. It’s not your best, you know, and you cringe every time you come across another as-clause that slipped in there somehow. But even if it’s not beautifully or professionally written—it is a first draft—there’s a beautiful story at the heart of it. One of the first you’ve written that actually comes from some seed of personal experience. You never went to a boarding school like the girls you wrote about, but the cross-cultural experience—that’s your life. Every story’s personal, but this one’s a cry from your misunderstood TCK soul.

            So, it’s both a surprise and not a surprise when you get to the end and they have questions. They say nice things, too—“’frustration swelled until it was a bubble blocking her throat,’ wow! Great image!”—but you don’t really hear those.

            I failed, you think. I failed my chance to show them what it’s like. I failed my chance to make them see the camouflaged me.

 

 

Harry

            Harrison James listens best with his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, but today he reclines in his chair, arms folded, while Ellie, another writer in the class, reads her story aloud. In front of him, a too-big-for-one-serving cookie and an empty bluebell patterned teacup. Looking around the wood-topped conference table at his peers, Harry notices several others leaning back, distancing themselves from the table. Still others scroll on their laptops, but whether they’re following along with Ellie’s story or checking emails or online shopping, Harry can’t tell.

            Uh oh. Realizing thoughts of his peers have kept him from listening, Harry returns his dead-eyed focus to the girl reading her story.

            Three girls try to save a baby bird from abandonment. Oh, wait, or is it the girls who’ve been abandoned? Or both…?

Harry listens closer.

            The girls gather materials to try to make a nest for the bird: a shoe box, a scarf, some crinkled brown leaves and pinky-length twigs from outside. Somehow they combine these into a nest, but Ellie doesn’t describe it.

            Harry wishes he could picture it better, but he supposes maybe it’s one of those cases that doesn’t require as much description, that would interrupt the story if Ellie did describe it more. That’s a balance he, Harry, still struggles to find when writing his own stories.

             The girls try to take the bird with them to dinner, but they get caught by some adult, who tells them to put the bird back in its real nest. The girls protest that the mama bird isn’t going to come back for the baby—ah, Harry thinks, so the girls are projecting their own fears onto the bird—but the adult tells them their intentions are very sweet but the mom will come back, you’ll see.

             Ellie finishes reading her story—leaving off with the girls returning to the game of soccer that led to the discovery of the baby bird—and silence resumes its reign.

             As the workshop requires, Harry ponders the successes and shortcomings of Ellie’s piece, preparing to give his feedback.

            That was a good move, bringing the story full circle with the soccer thing. Harry considers how he might use that strategy in his next story. He does wish, though, that he’d gotten to see the mama bird come back. “You’ll see,” the adult told those girls, but the readers never got to see. Harry voices this to the group.

 

 

You

            The class moves on to workshopping the next student’s draft, but you don’t go with them. You’re stuck in your head. Your ears go on mute.

            What’s the use in writing a story down if the black-and-white words don’t let anyone follow you into your brain? The stories are always so clear in there, maybe they’re just not supposed to come out.

You shake your head—just slightly, so that no one will notice.

            “You can make us believe anything,” Professor Kel is saying when you rejoin the world, “but you have to take us there.”

            That’s the problem, then. You have to get out of your head. You have to see the story for what it is. It comes to you as just a seed. You try to raise it right, mold it as best you can. But when it’s full grown, it escapes beyond your influence, left to the hands of all those it encounters. Before long, you might not even recognize it anymore. That’s okay. Stories aren’t meant to live in your head forever, else you couldn’t call yourself a writer.

            Class is almost over. Professor Kel brings up revision. Re-seeing. You have to look at your draft through the eyes of a stranger, she says, because that’s how any reader will experience it.