Okay so I know I already used this muse to write a poem. But I couldn't help myself. I was compelled to write this character development piece that bombarded my thoughts while I showered this morning. I hope you like it! Please, please, please let me know what you think?! Your words are priceless to me!
"MASTER OF THE TOOL"(....a practice piece on character development)
She picked up the pencil and grabbed her writing tablet. She loved the charcoal trail of curves and lines that shadowed behind the tip, as she moved her wrist, detailing where it should go next. She loved the loops and lines and dots that formed together to create letters. She loved how the letters created words and the how words created sentences and how those sentences, linked into thoughts, and in response, those thoughts, with their twists and turns, morphed into stories and characters and settings. She loved that she was the one in control of it all. It was her own little world to which she was the master.
She loved that she could be the one to determine the villain, the hero, the damsel in distress. She loved that her cupid’s arrow of lead, allowed her to predict who the fair maiden would live happily ever after with. She loved the justice she could exact, with just a flick of her wrist, as her fingers grasped hold of her yellow gavel. She loved too, the way she could sit back and examine the pulse of it all...their lives...their time...their setting, under her stethoscope, keeping beat to a rhythm that belonged only to her.
It may not have been the truth, but it was her reality or fantasy and she loved that it was okay to do this. She also loved how, if she so chose, she could just flip her cylindrical life-giver over and vanquish the lives and the story and the setting...all with just a tiny piece of rubber glued to the end...and secured with a thin metal cuff....leaving the paper hot and streaky...evidence that something else had gone on there, but no way to know for sure just what it was, 'a secret kept and known only to the master of the tool,' she thought, as she blew away the bits and pieces of crumbled rubber.
She could rewrite and redirect them and their stories all over again. She could create a new river in which they all drew their water from, she could relocate the mountain from which it flowed, if she so chose. She could open the heavens and allow the rain to drench a parched and drought riddled make believe village, if she wanted to. What wonderful power and satisfaction was contrived from the small act of putting pencil to paper and letting her imagination, her yearnings, and her unrequited loves etch their way into her life to be lived wherever and however she wanted.
This power of course was only contrived from her creative and fantastical writing, when she had to write non-fiction that was a totally different experience. The story and pencil were in control of her, using her as their vessel, so that they could come alive on paper, to be shared and relived again and again. The facts were in control of the reader as well. Controlling their emotion, holding them captive to their demands of attention...to be given life over and over, as they were absorbed into the readers minds and hearts and lives. The facts were at times, ruthless and brutal, and sometimes wonderfully reminiscent, but nevertheless, always in control of the writer and the reader.
This type of writing was one to which she had no choice but to surrender to at times, as her job of being a journalist kept its strangled hold on her wrist, that is, if she wanted a paycheck so she could eat and pay her rent. Yet in all fairness, she acknowledged too, that there was some cathartic release, justice and eye on the pulse, that came with writing fact as well as fiction.
© Copyright 2010 Christine Maxwell
All rights reserved
Chris, Oh how, oh how can you do it?! It is too amazing, this talent of yours! The loops, the lines, the dots forming together to create letters! -- it could have been and would have been by most, “she wrote”. And the rest of this piece is done just as well. This is quite a prelude to any number of stories long or short. You are this woman. Within your God given talent, you have the power to create any reality: the power to take any character into whatever environment to go wherever and do whichever and end whenever you desire.
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