Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality

by Pat Murphy

  “Fiction is about people. As a writer, you use words to create people that live in your reader’s mind. When people read your story, they should believe in the characters you created. They should feel that they know these people.”

  “How do you create people that the reader can believe in? You describe these people; you show how they react to events around them; you show them interacting with other people. These are all ways to make your characters real in the minds of your readers.”

  Susan sipped her coffee, wishing she had a firmer grip on her own reality that morning. Her memories of the previous night were somewhat blurry. She vaguely remembered talking with Mary. She remembered talking with Tom about The Twilight Zone. The one thing she remembered quite clearly was drinking Rum Monkeys.

  She blinked, aware she had lost track of what Max was saying. He was giving them a writing exercise.

  “I want you to think back to the last time you witnessed an argument,” Max said. “It doesn’t have to be anything major—just two people disagreeing about something.” He paused, giving people a moment to think.

  Susan remembered seeing Mary talking to Weldon in Penelope’s, gesturing angrily. That had been an argument, she thought. “Now think about why the people were arguing,” Max said. Susan frowned. She didn’t really know why Mary and Weldon were arguing. She didn’t know what Mary and Weldon were doing on board. There was so much she didn’t know.

  She raised her hand timidly. “I don’t know what the people were arguing about,” she said. “I saw them arguing, but I didn’t overhear what they were saying.”

  “That’s perfect!” Max said. “That gives you more room to play with. You can make up the rest.”

  Susan nodded, doubtful but willing to try.

  “As a writer, you need to think about why people do the things they do,” Max went on. “That understanding is important to creating convincing characters.” He leaned back in his chair, studying the group. “A cop once told me that there are really only three criminal motives: money, sex, and power. I would add a couple of other motives. Love—though if you’re feeling cynical, you can put that down as a subset of sex. Desire for fame—though some would say that’s a subset of power. Curiosity—that’s an important one in science fiction.”

  He looked around at the class. “Now think about what motivated the people in your argument. The people may have very different motives, so it helps to consider each person separately. Take a moment, write the name of one person, and then write a little bit about his or her motives.”

  Susan wrote “Weldon Merrimax” at the top of the page, then stared at the name for a moment. She remembered her own encounter with Weldon in the bar. He had seemed happy when he accused her of being a liar. Righteously angry and happy to be making her uncomfortable. “I used to tell fortunes for a living,” he had said.

  She thought about what she knew of fortune-tellers. They preyed on people who were lonely and confused, weak and easily manipulated. She remembered what Max had told her about Weldon. Yes, she thought, he liked to manipulate people; he liked to feel superior. Under Weldon’s name, she wrote, “Weldon is motivated by power. He was trying to put Mary in her place.”

  “Now consider the other person,” Max said. “Write down their name and their motive.”

  “Mary Maxwell,” Susan wrote. Then she thought about what she knew of Mary. She loved adventure. She was curious about the world. But those didn’t seem like reasons she’d be arguing with Weldon. Susan thought about what she had told Mary about Weldon. She had told Mary that the security staff was looking for him because he might have stabbed Patrick Murphy. Patrick Murphy, Susan remembered, was a character in Mary’s novel.

  Susan frowned. Mary was angry because Weldon had attacked Patrick Murphy. Under Mary’s name, she wrote, “Mary wants to protect her characters from Weldon. She is angry that he attacked Patrick Murphy.”

  “Now that you have some idea of the character’s motivations,” Max said, “I’d like you to write a dialog between these characters. Just their words—you can fill in the rest later. In this dialog, the characters won’t say anything about what motivates them, but the reader should be able to figure out the power dynamic from the dialog. Give it a try.”

  Susan looked at the page, then wrote. “‘You had no right to kill Patrick,’ Mary said. ‘No right at all.’”

  SEVENTEEN

  You can’t expect an adventure to be tidy,” Gitana said. “If you could get home in time for supper; it wouldn’t be much of an adventure, would it?”

  —from The Twisted Band

  by Max Merriwell

  After workshop, Pat and Susan went to the recreation deck. They sat in deck chairs beside the great oval swimming pool with its impossibly blue tile.

  Susan felt detached, still absorbed by her account of the argument between Mary and Weldon. The deck of the cruise ship seemed unreal. The chrome railings sparkled in the sunshine. Children splashed in the water. People at the bar were laughing and talking. It was all terribly cheerful and wholesome.

  They ordered lunch. “You look a little under the weather,” Pat commented. “Those Rum Monkeys are lethal. Oh, hey—you know what? Max claimed that he made up the name ‘Flaming Rum Monkey.’ He said it’s Mary Maxwell’s favorite drink.”

  “Of course,” Susan said, nodding wearily. “Its all too weird.” After a moment’s hesitation, Susan said, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this. You’ll think I’m nuts.”

  “That’s all right,” Pat said. “I already think you’re nuts. And my dissertation advisor thinks I’m nuts. So go ahead.”

  Susan described her conversation with Mary. She told Pat she had heard wolves howling and had followed the sound to the observation deck. Tom had found her there.

  Susan leaned back in her lounge chair, trying to remember all the details of her conversation with Tom. “I asked him about Weldon Merrimax and Mary Maxwell.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said a couple of Max’s fans were playing a joke. I suggested that maybe those people were leaking through from another dimension.” Susan blushed, remembering that. “He was very polite about it.”

  “He didn’t immediately say you were nuts? He must be in love.” Susan felt her face grow hotter still.

  “Ah,” Pat said, studying her face. “So you didn’t just chat, out there on the observation deck under the stars.”

  “We did just talk,” Susan said. “I pointed out a UFO and we watched that. But other than that, we just talked. He’s a very nice guy.”

  “I see,” Pat said. “And I suspect he thinks you’re very nice, too, or he wouldn’t have been hanging out with you while you talked nonsense about Weldon Merrimax and Mary Maxwell.”

  “He didn’t say it was nonsense,” Susan protested. “He just said he didn’t think any crimes had been committed. Do you think it’s nonsense?”

  “No, but I study quantum mechanics, so you can’t go by what I think.”

  “So what should we do?” Susan asked.

  The poolside waitress approached, carrying a tray filled with drinks and food.

  “I’m like Tom there—I don’t see that we need to do anything So I think we should eat lunch,” Pat said. She grinned as the waitress set her plate on the low table between their lounge chairs. “Don’t want to let these tentacles get cold.” Pat had ordered the fried calamari.

  Susan made a face. “I don’t see how you can eat those things.”

  “They’re very tasty,” Pat said. “I’ve always been intrigued by squid. When Max asked us to write about monsters, I wrote about a giant squid. I was terrified of them when I was a kid. When I was in third grade, I read an illustrated children’s book on sea creatures and there was this drawing of a sperm whale battling a giant squid. The whale had one tentacle in its jaws; the squid had wrapped the others around the whale’s head. I can still remember the giant squid’s eye, about the size of a dinner plate, gazing balefully from the page. I always
figured the squid won that battle. The whale was bigger, but the squid looked so mean. For years I was afraid to go swimming in the ocean. I figured a giant squid would grab me and pull me under.” Pat speared a fried tentacle with her fork, lifted it and smiled. “I order calamari by way of revenge.”

  As they were finishing lunch, Pat told Susan about her plans for the afternoon. “I’m going to go play Bingo,” she said with enthusiasm. She pulled out a copy of the Ship’s Log and pointed to the notice about the afternoon Bingo game in the Singing Sirens Theater. “Want to come?”

  “No thanks.”

  Pat possessed an infinite capacity for enjoying odd pastimes. In the past, Susan had accused her of choosing to participate in impossibly boring activities for the exclusive purpose of making fun of them later. Pat had not denied the charge. She had merely defended herself by saying that she was fascinated—in an anthropological sort of way—by human behavior.

  “What are you going to do, then?” Pat asked.

  “Maybe just sit here and read Max’s book,” Susan said. She had brought along a copy of There and Back Again and she was looking forward to reading it.

  Pat shook her head sadly. She gestured at the Ship’s Log. “How can you resist all these opportunities to be entertained?”

  Susan shrugged, smiling. She had scanned the Ship’s Log the day before. The activities it offered seemed to fall into four categories: self-improvement (aerobics classes), sales opportunities (wine tasting in the Ithaca Dining Room), attempts to match up singles (learning the “cha-cha” from Lisa), and manufactured social activities (bingo, Ping-Pong tournament, Scrabble in the games room). A few activities fell into more than one category—the skin care seminar promised self-improvement and also, she was sure, would include a sales pitch.

  “Will power, I guess,” she said. Pat left Susan to her book.

  The hero of There and Back Again was Bailey Beldon. Bailey was a norbit—that being the name adopted by those who lived in the Asteroid Belt. A happy, home-loving bachelor, Bailey lived in a comfortable, cozy, hollowed-out asteroid. One day, he found a message pod that had lost its way. A mysterious adventurer named Gitana and a group of sibs from the Farr clone, the galaxy’s largest, richest, and most famous clone family, came to claim the message pod. The message pod held an invaluable commodity—a partial map of the wormholes that were used in interstellar travel.

  That’s where Bailey’s adventure began. The norbit was swept up on a quest that carried him far from his comfortable home, in search of the rest of the map.

  It was a wonderful yarn. Bailey had survived several adventures and had just reached the temporary safety of Farr Station, home of the group of clones, when Susan realized that she was cold. The sun had vanished beneath a solid gray blanket of clouds; a cool wind was blowing. The children had abandoned the pool and the bar was almost deserted.

  Susan closed her book and headed for the library. During workshop, she had noticed a number of comfortable-looking easy chairs, and she thought she would curl up in one of them.

  A hand-lettered sign on the library door read: “Three o’clock: Children’s Story Hour.” Susan read the sign and smiled. When she had worked in the library, story hour had been one of her favorite times. She had loved to read aloud and had loved listening to other librarians read to the kids. There was something so soothing about listening to a familiar story read aloud. Susan stepped inside, anticipating a treat.

  The library was in considerable disarray. Jody was there, along with half a dozen other youngsters, ranging in age from four to seven. The kids were playing some kind of game that seemed to involve taking all the cushions off the upholstered chairs and building a fort. Two little girls were having a tug of war over one cushion and bickering loudly. A little boy in a red T-shirt and overalls was bouncing on a chair from which the cushions had been removed. They were all, Susan thought, at that cranky, nasty, sleepy stage that so many kids reach when they haven’t had a nap.

  Cindy, the member of the cruise staff who had introduced Max, was standing to one side, looking desperate.

  During Max’s talks, Cindy usually sat in the back and looked bored. Susan thought she was rather rude. Cindy never did any of the writing exercises that Max proposed; she just stared out the window.

  Now, she looked like she was on the ragged edge of panic. She held a book in one hand and she waved the other hand ineffectually at the kids. “Let’s all sit down, shall we?” she said. “I’ll read you a nice little story.”

  “We don’t want to hear a nice story,” Jody said, speaking loudly to be heard over the bickering girls. “I’m building a house for little monsters.”

  Cindy looked like she might either burst into tears or start screaming about little monsters. Susan decided she should intervene before Cindy lost it. She strolled up to Cindy.

  “What are you going to read?” she asked, taking the book from the young woman’s hand. It was There and Back Again, by Max Merriwell.

  “Max said it would be good to read to kids,” Cindy said.

  “This isn’t a kids book,” Susan said, frowning. She thought about what she’d read so far. Parts might be a little over the kids’ heads, but nothing was really objectionable. She looked up from the book and noticed that Jody was listening. “In fact,” Susan continued, “I don’t know if you should read this book to these kids.”

  Cindy looked startled. “What do you mean? I thought …” Susan interrupted before Cindy could say that she thought it was a nice book. “It’s by that guy who knows so much about monsters,” Susan said. “Jody’s met him. It might be too scary for these little kids” Jody had looked up from the fort she was building. “Are there monsters in it?” she asked Susan.

  Susan nodded slowly. “Yeah, there are. And lots of other stuff that would be too much for such little kids.” The girls had stopped fighting over the cushion to listen. “A book like this could give these kids nightmares,” Susan said to Cindy.

  “It’s not too much for me,” Jody said stoutly.

  Susan gave her a considering look. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you could handle it. But these little kids …” She waved a hand at the others.

  “I’m not little,” shouted the boy in overalls. He had stopped bouncing on the chair. “I’m four.”

  “I’m four and a half,” proclaimed one of the little girls. Suddenly everyone was shouting his or her age and insisting on the right to hear this scary story.

  Susan allowed them to persuade her. “Well, I suppose I could read some of it,” she said.

  “Yeah!” said the little boy. “Read the part about monsters.”

  “I’ll sit here and read.” Susan replaced a cushion on a chair and sat down. “Do you guys want to sit on the floor or on the chairs?” The question established that they would all sit, but gave them a choice about where they sat. “Everybody find a seat and then I can start reading.”

  Cindy—looking startled and grateful—helped the kids get settled. Jody curled up in a chair; the two little girls made a nest of cushions on the floor; the boy in overalls sat cross-legged on a cushion, like a meditating monk.

  Susan read the first few chapters, describing Bailey’s adventures.

  It was a fine book to read aloud. She particularly liked the section where Bailey and his friends were almost captured by the Trancers, a space-going cult that trapped interstellar travelers with music, playing irresistible tunes that made people dance ’til they dropped.

  Bailey helped the Farrs escape and make their way to Farr Station. At that point, Susan looked up from the book and glanced at her watch. “I think that’s all we have time for today,” she said.

  The smaller of the formerly bickering girls looked up from her nest of cushions. She had, Susan thought, been napping for the past hour. “I want to hear more about Bailey,” she murmured sleepily.

  “I’m still waiting for the monsters,” Jody said.

  “That’s it for today,” Cindy said, looking toward th
e door where another member of the cruise staff had appeared. “Here’s Trudy to take you back to the Kid Zone for snacks.” And all the kids trooped off with Trudy, into the foggy afternoon.

  “Thanks so much for helping,” Cindy said. “They were going to trash the place and eat me alive when you came along.”

  Susan smiled at her. “It was fun,” she said. “When I ran story hour at the public library, I learned that there’s an art to rounding up kids and getting them to settle down. The first rule is: Never tell them you are going to read a nice story. They don’t want to hear a nice story. Tell them you’re going to read something totally unsuitable for children. That’s what they want to hear.”

  “I thought you were serious when you were telling me it wasn’t a kids’ book,” Cindy said.

  Susan shrugged. “It isn’t. They won’t get parts of it. But that’s okay. I’ll read ahead and make sure there aren’t any sex scenes coming up.”

  Cindy nodded, looking relieved. “I don’t usually run story hour. Usually, the librarian does that. But she quit when we were in New York, and we’re shorthanded. I’m doing it so Trudy can get an after noon break.” She picked up There and Back Again from the table where Susan had set it down. “I guess I’ll start tomorrow from where you left off.”

  “You’ll need to remind them a bit about what has happened so far,” Susan said. “Summarize the story, touching on the high points.”

  Cindy nodded, but Susan thought she looked a little nervous.

  “If you like, I could stop by again and make sure you get off on the right foot,” Susan said.

  “That would be wonderful,” Cindy said. “I could sure use your help.” She frowned. “But you’re a passenger and I really shouldn’t let you.

  “I want to,” Susan said. It was true. She did want to. She wanted to keep reading about Bailey. Though she could read the rest of the book to herself, it would be much more fun to read it to the kids.