By Chris Cottom
I know you told us not to use dialogue to info-dump, so, if this was my assignment story, I wouldn’t say, ‘It’s me, Becky, the quiet one with the full pack of highlighters and deep-seated imposter syndrome.’ And your ever-so-helpful lecture on ‘death by backstory’ taught me not to interrupt the narrative with, for example, my heroine’s journey to Oxford Brookes from the arse-end of Ealing, where her parents run a chippy and her brother pubed her Barbies with indelible biro. I want my piece to be ‘pungent with place’, like contrasting a cluttered kitchen in a Headington hall of residence with a quad-full of claret-quaffing toffs down the hill at Magdalen. If my story described my main character’s cello-brown bob and zit-free complexion, it would also mention the flecks of gold in the man’s hipster beard, his fingers tapping out the rhythm in a piece of prose, his poet’s heart. Although you said we needn’t write what we know, my story for your assignment does actually feature a lonely newbie, struggling to keep her shit together and wondering about switching to History of Art, except she couldn’t bear to disappoint her tutor, who’s so patient as he helps her punctuate her unbroken paragraphs of internal monologue. At the climax, she’s wandering along beside the Cherwell, raw after her workshop on life writing, but exultant that her tutor had praised the musicality of her language, and one of her peers had wept, actually wept, at the bit about the kitten. Finally, she accepts that she, too, has a poet’s heart and hurries home for a celebratory teacake. Except doubt bites her on the bum again, even before she’s spread her Utterly Butterly, so I’ll show-not-tell her fretting over her adverb-free open ending. She’s about to email it to her tutor when she remembers his warning about using a piece of metafiction to hit on someone, so she adds a bit about hoping they can talk this through over a chai latte at Café Coco on the Cowley Road any afternoon next week, where she’ll be waiting with her story and her rainbow of highlighters.
Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His work has been published by 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, NFFD NZ, NFFD UK, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Phare, The Lascaux Review, and other fine places. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien. chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom
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