Published April 12, 2013
I sat beside the window on the rocking chair, thinking for the concept of my Novel. As I was twirling the pen, the rustling of the leaves diverted my attention from the world of imagination.
As I peered through the window, I saw an eccentric figure of a women gliding over the loamy soil. I soon got out of the dingy hotel and mounted the wooden stairs. I followed the shadow. The shadow laid me into the woods and I followed her with thumping heartbeats. But she suddenly vanished. I looked around but could not trace her. What was her motive, I failed to comprehend.
…………
“Hey, I won’t tolerate these novels strewn over here. You have become a headache for me. Your books are always lying across the room. Better start searching for job rather than wasting time in reading and writing novel.” Kelly, my wife, haughtily expressed her feelings, which I thought were needless.
“I have read these novels, so I do not need them now. But did you have to talk so arrogantly? Haven’t I always tried to search the job, but because of the depression I was not able to gain the confidence that I needed during the interviews. I wasn’t selected. That’s okay. It’s part and parcel of our lives. And how many times do I have to tell you that I am a heart patient and a stress may cause death. I will have to go to Matheran to grab some tranquility and pen down the Novel.”
This was the last conversation with my wife before I had headed towards Matheran.
I had come to Matheran for a four week’s stay as I was feeling blue. One of the reasons was that I was fired from the company because all my colleagues were jealous of me because I was always ahead of the pack. I had worked like a dog. Because of all these problems I was leaning towards pessimism. I started feeling that I was a cat in gloves that would catch no mice after all. So I had no option but to write a novel which could, perhaps, feel my coffers.
I was erring on the roads of the Matheran when I saw a dreary hotel. I descended the stairs of that hotel. I slid into the lobby and noticed an old man with white beard, grizzled hair, he was stout and short, his face pale and gloomy. I moved towards him and enquired about the rent of one night stay and the check out timings of the hotel. The rent was quite affordable for me. He called out his son and told him to give me my room keys which were handed over to me.
I stepped into the room; a squirrel ran from the entrance door. The room was not in a good condition. A cheap imitation of Mona Lisa painting was hanging on the peeled paint of the wall. The white tiles had turned yellow due to the non maintenance and had developed cracks in them. There was only one bulb in the box room which emitted yellow light making the atmosphere more morbid. There was just a single bed at the left corner of the room. I stepped outside the room and asked the old man for a blanket. He did not reply. Just kept mum. I ignored him.
I banged the door with a thud. I started arranging my books and my clothes on the rickety table.
I was bushed.
I lay on the bed. My eyelids started feeling heavy and after five minutes or so, I fell asleep. I woke up at dusk. I splashed cold water on my face, felt somewhat refreshed. Then I mopped my face with the handkerchief. After that I undressed, wore a blue T-shirt and a black pant.
I sat on my armchair which was next to the rickety table. I started again pirouetting pen. The dim lights turned a bit bright. I spent nearly an hour thinking about the topic of my novel.
It was pitch dark outside. Again the rustling of the leaves started as an espied through the window and the same bizarre figure in the white flowing gown scampering into the dense forest.
I suddenly got to my feet and ascended the stairs in a jiffy. She ran across the tracks of the mini train and dematerialized into the woods. I again chased her into the woods. I looked around and found no one. I was awestruck. Where had she vanished and what the hell was happening, I couldn’t fathom.
My heart was beating abatedly as I had chased her a long distance. I felt giddy and fell down instantly on the grass.
When I woke up, the mist had covered the whole forest. The due drops had fallen on the trees. When I glanced at my watch it showed 5.30 a.m.
I got up and began to wander through the forest. The atmosphere was quite nippy. I started sprinting through the back woods.
The smog was getting denser and thicker. As I was trudging I came across a huge pipal tree. As I felt fatigued, I closed my eyes for some moments.
Suddenly I heard the rustling of the leaves which were being blown by the savage wind. I saw the same peculiar figure of a lady as I jaunted towards her and reached the tree. As I closed on her, I recognized that she was the very lady who had laid me into the forest.
I went more close to her. I was feeling as pale as a ghost. I was in two minds as to whether turn a tale or go close to her.
I looked around and found a vine lying on the ground. I caught it by both ends and drew close to her. And then suddenly started strangulating her. She was trying to free herself from my clutches but could not. She screamed. Suddenly I recognized the voice.
Hadn’t I heard it before?
Yes, indeed. This voice sounded familiar.
“Who are you?” I asked her hoarsely.
She signaled to me to let loose the grip. I nodded and loosened the vine. Suddenly she yanked the vine from my hands and sprinted towards the woods.
I chased her and caught hold of her hair. She fell down on my feet.
I yanked her hair and asked menacingly, “Who are you?”
She got up and answered in morbid tone. “I….I... I’m Kelly, your wife. Didn’t you recognize me?
I was flabbergasted.
I couldn’t fathom as to why my dear wife was playing a cheap prank with me?
I was crestfallen. It was a peculiar thing that even knowing that I was a heart patient, she was playing a trick with me.
She related, “I had planned to kill you as we were always at each other’s throat. I knew that you were a heart patient and a shocking incident would lead you at the doorsteps of death.”
I was baffled that my wife, my beloved one had hatched a plot to kill me. I questioned her whether she had planned this entirely on her own or was there someone hiding behind her?
“No. I hadn’t planned this plot on my own. It was Rory’s idea, my ex boyfriend.” She said sobbingly. Then after some minutes continued: “Once I had expressed my anguish about our strained relationship to him. And had even mentioned that I had wanted to remain high on the hog”.
I greeted my teeth and clenched my fists.
She pleaded me to forgive me. But I wasn’t in a mood to forgive her as she was playing with my life and betraying me with the help of her boyfriend. It was a nauseating feeling.
I felt that I was a jerk who loved his wife from the bottom of the heart.
I waved my hand dismissively and told her to go away. And then I turned and started walking briskly towards the entry point of the woods.
I walked towards my hotel feeling desolate. I entered into my room, switched on the light and sat down on my armchair.
Then suddenly a thought entered into my mind. My wife had betrayed me but she had unwittingly given the germ for my Novel which I was trying to pen down for the last six months.
I grinned like a chesire cat.
THE END
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139,463 Literary Works • 672,569 Reviews
Hey there Rithik!
manisha here to review. I see this is your first post on YWS.
Firstly, I see potential in your writing. But you must really work hard. I notice that you seem to struggle with grammar and sentence formation. That can always be perfected with more practice. Read as many books as you can. Good books. And learn from the style the authors have used.
The shadow led me into the woods.
the last line sounds odd. It goes like this-
What her motive was, I failed to comprehend.
You don't have to capitalize the "n" in the novel unless it is a name.
You mean fill my coffers.
the usage of the word erring is wrong. and you do not slid into the lobby. You walk towards it. and it is "I walked towards him", not moved.
very dramatic.
abatedly isn't a word.
Smog is a term used for air pollution. You must mean fog.
You mean gem, not germ right?? And you have done it again with the the word novel. Do not capitalize the n.
I wasn't expecting this end which actually took me by surprise.
this was a good try!
Remember we are here to help.
Do not forget to read lots of books.
- manisha
This read too fast for it to scare me, or have me feeling anything, for that matter. The fear in horror lies partly in the wait. If you read any of Stephen King's short stories, or H. P. Lovecraft's, you'll note that they take their time. Horror is best left to marinate in the author's words, and the reader enjoys it best when he can savor the taste of fear.
The strength of a horror story can be found in its emotions. You don't have much here. You're telling too much for actual emotions to take over. What's peculiar to your style of telling is that it masquerades as showing. For example, you never said outright they had a bad relationship (not until towards the end, at least), but you did tell it in the sense that the wife says,
"You are a headache for me."
Most of your exposition is done through dialogue, and while it's clever, it doesn't make up for showing and not telling. You want to show things to the readers, not tell them. Give your readers credit too. If they're fighting, and he eventually leaves the house, we'll figure out they're not on good terms and that their relationship is on the rocks. That alone shows enough about their relationship.
While we're on the topic of dialogue, I want to note that your dialogue is stiff and stilted, forced and tired. Try listening to people talk. They tend to use a lot of contractions in their speech, and sometimes they don't make sense because half the talking is done through body language. For the writing to be effective, you want to emulate as much of this as you can. Not too much, because soon you'll realize that most of the time, when people talk, there's less words and a lot of "Yeah, I remember that" or "Uh-huh" and the like. You don't need a lot of those cluttering up your dialogue. Include body language as well. Don't tell us she said it "haughtily", show us how she tossed her hair and crossed her arms over her chest, or maybe how she kicked away one or two novels.
Next, your narrator has a weak voice at best. Strengthen it. Show us how he's different from all the other first person narrators out there. Right now, I honestly don't want to spend any time at all in this guy's head. He seems boring, a little conceited, and quite uninteresting. He's got nothing special about him that makes me want to stay in his head for an entire novel.
Listen. This is written in first-person-POV. Now read it, and read it with a critical mind. Read it as if you didn't know who wrote it, and ask yourself afterwards if you think the narrator is an interesting person. He seems bland and uninteresting. Give me a good reason to stay with him throughout the story. I might have actually considered him somewhat interesting if you'd mentioned off the bat that he had a heart condition, but you didn't, and so I didn't. Even with the heart condition, though, I think you'd be hard-pressed to make me stay with him for an entire day.
Look at it this way. Why should I spend my entire time with your narrator instead of some other narrator? Probably because he's got an interesting story, right? Well, other narrators have interesting stories too. Why him? It should be because your narrator makes the story sound interesting. You want one of those people who, by sheer force of personality, are interesting, to be your narrator. You want someone who forces the reader to stay with them because the reader can't help it -your narrator is too different, too interesting, too unforgettable to leave behind in favor of another narrator. This should show through the voice.
Now that we have the voice cleared, I recommend you start working on your flow. The whole thing sounds incredibly stilted and forced. Read it out loud, and if anything pauses at an awkward place or makes you stumble, revise that part of the sentence. I'd wager English is your secondary language? (I mean no offense; English is also my secondary language.) If so, you could always ask for someone to help you out with the flow of the piece. A native English speaker is more likely to catch onto flow problems than you are. You want the piece to have some sort of rhythm when you read it out loud, so it's difficult to put down and reads nicely. After a while, you'll catch on to the way flow works and you'll be able to fix these sorts of problems yourself.
Characterization is also weak. They're one-dimensional, even your main character. This shouldn't be the case because it's a first person POV. It'd help if you gave your character some quirks. I find giving characters quirks always makes them more whole, more real in some way. It's the little details that matter the most, and it's what'll make them seem human in the end. Put in a bit about how he needs to use this one pen, and this one pen alone. Maybe have his wife own a necklace that she feels is a good luck charm. These will help give them small characteristics that will go a long way.
Personally, I find your ending really bland. I don't believe in boring story structures, though I do believe in badly executed stories. I feel as if you fumbled a bit towards the end. The heart condition came out of nowhere - it feels as if you pulled it out of thin air, and conveniently. It might be better if you hinted at it when they were arguing - have him choke or gasp for air - but you didn't. As a result, your ending seems contrived and unnatural. In horror, you want the ending to be unsettling. Your ending fails to achieve this as well. It's mostly because of the telling, which leads to a lack of emotions and atmosphere.
On a final note, avoid starting a majority of your sentences with "I". It makes the piece hard to read and boring. Remember, don't tell: add in more description, and engage all five senses, not just the sights and sounds. How does the forest feel? Sticky? Cold? How does it smell?
Azirah
Hello, this is Abel with your review.
I liked the plot of the story. A classic 'think it's supernatural but it turns out to be a human' mystery is always effective, but underemployment of interesting elements often make it very uninteresting.
This was too simple to begin with. I understand it's a short story, but with a little more complexity in the scenery transition, accompanied with the creative employment of more figures of speech, the story would've been pretty fledged.
I have located several grammatical errors of which I shall outline some of them for you to correct:
I know this seems insignificant but it's necessary to identify where the rustle of the leaves came from even if you indicated that the protagonist was sitting by the window. So it might be, "the rustling of leaves from outside).
It's "...the shadow LED me into the woods..."
It's "...Better start searching for A job..."
How does jealousy amongst your colleagues get you fired from work? You need to be precise and tell us exactly what he was accused of doing that earned him a sack letter."
"...was hanging on the peeled paint of the wall..."
Paint is not a solid matter, or at least it can't be dry enough to support a painting. The painting hung on the wall itself, and not the paint.
"I went more close to her"
More and close are a juxtaposition that grammatical laws abhor. Please, use 'closer' instead.
How was the man unable to recognize his wife from such a close proximity? Was she wearing a mask or something? It seems implausible as a fact that a man could only recognize his wife's voice even when nothing deters him from frisking her face.
It's "...I GRITTED my teeth..." and not "...I greeted my teeth..."
It's "...she pleaded for forgiveness" OR "she begged me to forgive her" OR "and NOT "she begged me to fogive me"
As I aforesaid, this piece would be more interesting if you'd insert greater literary effects.
Cheers.