All 1 entries tagged Writing

"One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best." Oh Miss Austen.

This is my week one ICW first prose assignment. We had to create a dialogue between two people, focused around a secret that one of them has, incorporating the idea of dominance and subservience. After doing ten weeks of poetry, I found it rather difficult to engender a piece of prose involving character, narration, space and theme, but hopefully over the next weeks I will learn! Here is the dialogue written in class:

A: It’s brand new, we only had it fitted yesterday.

B: Yeah, looks great, goes we-

A: I just can’t believe how much lighter it makes our hallway! I love it. You should go upstairs - go on - it continues all the way up there, and around, and then joins with –

B: No that’s OK, I mean we should really be getting going now, right?

A: Oh, sure, but don’t you want to see what they’ve done? See the full effect, as it were?

B: No, really, it’s fine. I’m not really into that kind of thing, you know that.

A: But it looks so good! I feel like the house is finally finished now with that done: lighter, more modern. When I was young, my parents had one of those banisters that was solid and thick, and blocked off the whole staircase...

B: Blocking off each floor from the other. Blocking noise.

A: Err, yes, exactly. I like how this means I can still see into the rest of the house, and not have a dated monstrosity barging right down the centre of the hall. So much more modern!

B: Yeah, more modern.

A: Right. And lets the light from down here go up there.

B: And the noise.

And here's the narrative prose:

With the unusual profusion of orange entombing her face and the unfamiliar heaviness of her eyelashes drenched in mascara, she felt like a decorated emergency, waiting to be revived. And Debra, blithering on like she always did in that fake maddening excitement, was ignorant to the nostalgic drowsiness she was suffering from. Standing at the bottom of the beige carpeted stairs, she all at once neglected Debra’s animation over her new white-gloss banister. She was suddenly agog at the millions of things enveloping her mind. She was ready to go out. She had been for a while. But being Debra, as she had always been, swathed with the enthusiastic aura of a saleswoman, was describing in every detail the glorified benefits of her new-look hallway. It was lighter, yes, and added a touch of modernity to the house, yet all she could think about was the noise. That noise from downstairs that seeped through the gaps in the banister. She tried to keep up with the pace of Debra’s continuing advertising, now imploring her to inspect the work upstairs; she managed to sustain her unconstructive manner in refusing this journey, until she found herself in a lethargic numbness, stuttering out words that, to her, seemed to respond to Debra’s rhetoric. She could only hear that incessant noise. She turned to face the front door to signify her urge to leave. She was at that moment sharply aware of Debra closely following her every movement, struggling with the agonizing realisation that she was being scrutinised from behind. 

: 19 Jan 2011 23:42 |  Tags: Creative Dialogue Prose Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem