Life writing

I'm almost at the end of my creative writing course. Just two more assignments to go. I have tried to keep my main focus of writing as video-gamey as possible but this one goes off on a more dramatic tangent that I really enjoyed producing. The piece scored 79/100 (70/80 for the main piece, 9/20 for the commentary) and the theme for this assignment was 'life writing'. Something about a human being, written from the perspective of a human being, detailing a specific incident or series of incidents. Although my story was very well received by my assessor, my commentary wasn't and significantly let my score down, so it is omitted here. I have, however, included some of the feedback I received.

Alone in class 5C

Alone in class 5c. Break-time. The noise felt like it had gone on forever. I was very proud of my reactions. From the second I heard the glass window smash I was already rolling off my chair and folding my body into a defensive position. Not sure whether it was safe yet to stand or even raise my head I crouched by my desk with my head between my knees, like a counter clerk during a bank raid. I felt the blood drain from my face. It felt numb and bloated and my ears burned. My joints felt hollow as if they would not hold my weight had I the courage to stand. My hands were clasped to stop them shaking. They were cold. I rocked on my feet ever so slightly and felt broken glass grind against broken glass beneath the rubber of my well-worn school shoes.

My heart and my stomach were taking turns occupying the space in my throat that wasn’t becoming increasingly filled with bile. I willed myself not to throw up. There was a light weight on my shoulder and as I moved I felt a slim shard of glass slide from its precarious perch onto the floor where I watched it snap cleanly in two. There was a commotion outside in the… what should I call it? The word ‘playground’ sounds incredibly childish. At fifteen I was a little too old to be playing Hopscotch and Ring Around the Roses… So, there was a commotion in the Pupil’s Outdoor Recreation Area (perfect ). My knees were muffling the sounds to my ears and they were still ringing from the noise of the explosion of glass that had occurred inches from me, but I heard noises of the yard, accusing tones, raised voices and one boy crying. My eyes had been fixed on the floor between my feet and as I felt the bridge of my nose tickle and watched a drop of water fall from its tip and splash on the dusty floor I realised that the crying boy was me. Seconds passed but it felt like a minute or two at the very least so I raised my head and noticed I was still alone in the room. Nobody had come to my assistance. Maybe nobody will, I remember thinking. If somebody did come to see if I was ok I wouldn’t like them to find me with my head between my legs like some kind of coward. I shifted my position slightly and tried to stand without putting my hands on the floor for assistance, I felt certain I had managed to avoid any cuts or grazes although I was surrounded by glass. The effort of hoisting myself to a standing position required full cooperation of my bravery drained knees so was as awkward a manouver as I had ever attempted. But, after a Bambi-like wobble, I was stood. Tiny glass cubes and crystalline dust fell about me like snow as I tugged at the cuffs of my blazer and generally neatened myself up a little. I resisted the temptation to dry my eyes with my palms so as I turned my head to the hole in the wall where the window resided until 30 seconds prior, my blurry vision could only make out the familiar frame of the top half of Stu Anderson, leaning menacingly through the hole.

“Oi, faggot,” he said, indicating something by my feet that I had not noticed until then, “give me my ball back.” Stu was the biggest dog in the Pupils Outdoor Recreation Area and he took great pleasure in reminding many pupils of that daily. He would acquaint his victims of this information in many ways. I personally had been on the receiving end of abuse ranging from something as simple as a flicked ear to the more sinister persecution of semi-regular beatings, dropping a lit cigarette down my shirt or, his showpiece which has thankfully only happened once, a tight headlock while one of his lieutenants de-pants me followed by a swift ejection into the playgr-Pupils Outdoor Recreation Area. Sometimes I wondered how he got away with it. But I had heard that his modus operandi in the event of his own personal capture by a teacher was to cry. Genuinely and sincerely he was so, so sorry and would blub his way through a well-rehearsed list. He was just doing it for attention. He was doing it because he was jealous of his victim. He was doing it because he was scared of not being noticed, or, and this is the one that generally got him a slapped wrist as opposed to an expulsion, he only did it because of the abuse he suffered at home. Stu must have been incredibly convincing because after his rap he would become my best friend for a couple of days. The first couple of times I was completely taken in by the incredible performance. I would get a supervised apology and when the teacher left, satisfied, I expected a punch to the gut and a new nick-name based around being skinny, tall, or gay, but it didn’t come. The innocence and sincerity would continue as he talked openly to me about his fears of being unpopular, leading to his frequent decisions to intimidate physically and verbally and he is sorry and he will never do it again and would I like to come round for tea and he would teach me how to kick a football. This would go on for, maybe, two days. His henchmen would be given the cold shoulder as Stu Anderson palled around with his new best friend. And, yeah, I enjoyed being his mate. Initial nervousness gave way to a feeling of general comraderie as we kicked balls and climbed trees and generally did the things I would have imagined friends did. After just a few hours my defensive walls were down completely. He was changed. Improved and reformed in every way imaginable. The inevitable decline in his good humour should not have been a surprise but it was, probably due to the shower of glass. To give him his due, attempting to disfigure someone using  a combination of leather and broken glass is a novel way to say ‘we’re not friends anymore’.

So there we were. Our relationship had hit a wall and the bouncy weapon of betrayal lay at my feet. It was one of those professional footballs, Caseys, we used to call them, made with tough hexagonal patches of leather. They felt like a medicine ball to kick and if one struck you in the face, as I had experienced on many occasions, the sting was worse than a volley of snowball direct hits. I regarded the offending ball carefully and slowly bent down and picked it up. Heavy, it was. Thick-skinned too. Combined with its destructive capabilities, its roundness and its I.Q. level a thought occurred to me that this ball was not so dissimilar to its owner. “Give it to me, then!” bellowed Stu, making me jump slightly. His face was begging to have the ball thrown at it but to kick or to throw the ball to him would not be playing to my strengths and would likely result in another smashed window or, and this has happened before, a self-inflicted bloody nose, so I was left with two options. To retain the ball and give it to a teacher because that would teach Stu Anderson a lesson and certainly not result in my eye being blackened and my school bag burned the very next day. Or, the option I chose, to walk nervously toward the window, glass cracking underfoot with the ball held at arms-length. Stu also reached his arms out to take the ball from me.  His fingers were an inch away from his prize when, from apparently out of nowhere, like a train smashing into an abandoned car at a level crossing, Mr Clegg the P.E. teacher filled the window frame, momentarily blocking out the sun and when he had gone, Stu Anderson had gone too. I dropped the ball, gravity at least ensuring that it travelled in a straight line and crunched to a standstill between my feet.

The ball remained there for the day. I passed the class room on my way out of the building at the end of lessons and saw it through the open door. All the desks and chairs had been pushed to one side away from the window and the casey was sat on the teachers desk beneath the black board. The glass had been swept away and the window boarded up with plywood but the ball was forgotten about. So I took it home before it did any more damage.

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"TUTOR'S COMMENTS AND ADVICE TO STUDENT:


This was a strong piece of writing. Its basic strategy of fastening us close to real-time personal experience made sure that your reader was at once involved and having to work hard - I suspect I wasn't alone in thinking at the start that some sort of high school atrocity had taken place.What this did was to convey very effectively that it is not the 'objective' reality of an event that matters to the person involved but how it affected them at the time. Stylistically, the unremitting blocks of text worked for a similar reason, holding us off from more generalizing perspectives. You are very strong on the way in which at key moments human life can bear in on us with no relief of context or background.


However, the human dimension of the situation still needed to be filled out to avoid a simple vivid-event effect. This was well done by capturing the protagonist's wry outlook (as in his characterization of the 'non-playground') and Stu's attitude to him. While remaining 'the bully' as he had to be in such a short piece, his combination of brutality and lachrymose sentiment came across as psychologically convincing. Your ending is very effective: not just realistic in a downbeat way but also providing a neat, convincing reversal - the narrator at least getting himself something from his victimhood. There can be no doubt that you have produced an original, intense and well-honed piece."

Aww, shucks.

Interestingly, my tutor liked the last paragraph although I hated it, it was added just to make up the word count requirement. I would have much preferred to end with, 

"I dropped the ball, gravity at least ensuring that it travelled in a straight line and crunched to a standstill between my feet."

Which perhaps goes to show that critiquing creative writing is subjective and something that speaks to one person my not speak to another in the same way if at all. With that in mind I tend to view my scores philosophically. 79/100 could have been 89/100 or 59/100 on a different day or scored by a different tutor. The main thing is that I'm having fun.