This must have been his lunch break, which was a problem because he didn’t think he ate any food. Except he wasn’t hungry. But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was he didn’t even remember being at work before this meeting.
Oliver hesitated at the corner and looked around. The traffic on the street was steady, but the foot traffic was light. Behind him, Minnie and Wilson had already gotten up from the table and disappeared in one direction or another, even though there hadn’t really been time for them to reach a spot that was not in view from where Ollie stood.
The good news was that he didn’t see the large man who thought he was Cant anywhere, because if he coupled that with the problem he was suddenly having with his memory, he’d be forced to conclude that there was definitely something wrong.
But no, of course that wasn’t the case. Oliver’d just gotten so used to being at work he didn’t even register it any longer. He must have sleepwalked through the whole morning. It only seemed like his day began on that uncomfortable wrought-iron chair chained to the middle of the vertical park.
Just to make sure—and he couldn’t explain why this was a valid confirmation—he looked up at the corner of the building across the street. Birds still lived atop the cornices, and still circled around, and they still weren’t dragons.
Everything is fine.
Chapter Five
Unnamed
Oliver sat at his laptop and stared at the blinking cursor beneath his title page. The title was the only thing he’d been able to write up to this point, and that title was Unnamed.
It was an inauspicious beginning.
For weeks, this was how writing went for him: a blinking cursor on a white ‘page’ in a Word document with no actual words in either direction aside from the occasional title word that was a placeholder about fifty percent of the time. “Unnamed” was just such a placeholder, which meant his one accomplishment thus far in completing his latest assignment was not even an actual accomplishment. He’d typed a seven-letter word he expected to replace with another word in the near future. If he was looking for credit, he could argue that the new word would also have to begin with the letter U, so he had that going for him. But Wilson had supplied that letter, so he couldn’t take credit for that either.
He didn’t know what changed in the recent past to turn that blank page with the blinking cursor into a page full of words. (Still with a blinking cursor. The cursor was never satisfied.) All he knew was that one day he started writing, and everything just fell together, and the frustrating aspect of it all was that when he couldn’t just sit down and start writing, he didn’t know why that was. If you don’t know how a machine is activated, you can’t be expected to know how to get it going when it isn’t running.
Oliver got up and took a look out the window. The apartment had a decent view of the city, really, and he only occasionally took in that view. It was the sort of perspective a tourist might appreciate, were this a hotel room. (It was too small to be a hotel room. It was perhaps large enough to be a sanitation closet in a proper hotel, but that was pushing it.) The city was dominated by seven or eight main thoroughfares, and four of those seven met at a central point, like an actual hub on a wheel. He thought that was probably where he got the idea of the outer space arrangement in his Hockspit story, but he tried not to overanalyze these things. It worked, and it made sense, and that was what mattered.
The roads headed off in diagonals, with boroughs popping up around various mini-centers that were called things like “such-and-such Square” or “this-and-that Circle”, which was always curious because there was inevitably neither a square nor a circle involved.
The effect was a city map that looked like someone had smashed a spider against a wall with a shoe, and torn off a couple of the legs. It only really worked if one imagined spiders had big bulbous knees—to account for the squares and the circles along the legs—so it was a terrible analogy. It was the one most people went with anyway.
Ollie lived on one of the legs, on Common Ave., pretty close to the center of the city. When he looked to the left, he was looking inbound. In that direction the buildings all got taller, ultimately obscuring the view of downtown proper. Straight ahead was another row of apartments, but that side’s buildings were shorter, and he could see over them as far as the ball field. Of that he could see only the outer wall and the lights. Thankfully, the lights faced away from the window.
He could see very far when he looked to the right. In that direction, the urban sprawl was really obvious. The intersection of Common and Harrod was fully visible—Harrod Ave. was where Four Horse was—and so was the road a long way past that. Common cut through two college campuses before vanishing into the hills that distinguished the suburbs.
Looking down on the street level Oliver was happy to note nothing unusual, like a large hairy figment of his imagination staring back up at him.
Wilson and Minnie lived in a section of the city on the other side of the downtown, so Oliver couldn’t see Tenth from his window. If he had the city plans right, they were to his left, through downtown, and then left again at about a 120-degree angle. Tenth didn’t head directly into downtown, though; getting to it was a series of right-left-right-lefts using connecting streets until getting to Trimount Ave., which went straight in.
Absolutely none of this was going to help Oliver write. The blinking cursor on the blank page remained both blinking and blank. But he’d learned that sometimes the best way to get his mind going was to distract it for a while.
He sat back down and put his fingers on the keyboard, and waited to see if they started putting out words.
They didn’t.
“The problem is, you’ve never read a romance,” he said.
There was no reason to say this aloud, but it broke up the monotony of the text in his internal narrative so he rolled with it.
“There are rules. You don’t even know what the rules are.”
At least with the other stories he had something to stand on, because he’d read things like them before. At the same time, he knew he broke a couple of rules here and there. The military sci-fi didn’t have enough weapon porn in it, for instance. He didn’t know exactly how to resolve that, since the characters were using guns he made up, leveraging technology that didn’t exist and science that was probably completely wrong. Providing details on a made-up weapon just didn’t make a huge amount of sense to him, yet his characters might care a lot, so Ollie should have given it to them. Even if it was all nonsense.
So there were expectations. There were tropes. He had been ignoring a lot of them. And he was okay with that. But maybe, for romance, he had better pay attention.
Story structure was another thing he had a habit of ignoring. In this, at least, he had Wilson’s support. In one of the first TAWU meetings Oliver attended, Wilson talked at length about how stories have acts, and stages, and turning points, and so on, and all these things come at certain points in a story. Then, after listing all of this out he told them to throw it all away.
The story, he said, should have its own rhythm and pace, and if you learn how to tell a good story it will end up following a pattern all its own. That pattern might very well end up being the same as the one in the structure map he provided, but it didn’t have to.
That the same person was now telling him to outline, was either funny or alarming. Funny, because Wilson seemed to be doing an end-around on his own advice, and alarming for the fact that Wilson might not know he’s doing this. The possibility that his mentor was essentially making things up as he went—with the later things contradicting the earlier things—occurred to him, and not for the first time.
Oliver clicked over to a search engine and looked for romance story outlines, and then romance story tropes. The first search results made him think there was no room for creativity, and the second made his head explode. There were more tropes than he thought possible, and about the only one that looked mandatory was Happily Ever A
fter, with a “Happy For Now” caveat that apparently existed to allow for sequels.
He had a nagging sense that he should maybe not try to write a genre he’d never read and wasn’t really a fan of. He had nothing against romance as a genre form, but he also had no history of reading that form, and that was just a bad way to begin. Sure, he could grasp it conceptually: he had seen romantic comedies, and that was close. (Probably.) But unless he was going to write a screenplay—and this was something worth considering—it didn’t make sense to try and do this.
Of course, he was also stalling. Writing an outline felt like homework, and he didn’t enjoy writing nearly as much when it resembled homework. But Minerva asked him to write her one, so he had to try.
“Just write a crappy outline,” he said to himself.
Act One
The protagonist: a nurse. Yes, a nurse is good, let’s go with a nurse. A nurse who works at an old age home. Her name is… okay let’s face it, I’m going to be basing her on Minerva whether I mean to or not (note: DO NOT LET HER READ THIS) so, no I can’t call her Minerva, but okay, Athena, then. They’re the same name, just Roman vs. Greek, so, cool.
* * *
Old age home? Why an old age home? Okay, stick with it for now. Athena has a boyfriend already, and she lives with him, but he’s a jerk. (too close?) He’s a jerk and he takes advantage of her and he’s… in a band or something, and she’s supporting them and she’s also going to school. Yes, cool, okay.
* * *
She’s incomplete somehow? Maybe she doesn’t think she deserves better than jerk boyfriend. (childhood trauma?)
Love interest: he’s, well okay, what the hell, his name is Otis. Sounds like an old person name, but when you’ve got a theme, might as well stick to it, right? (right?) Otis. Yeah, I’m gonna be basing this on me, whatever, I’m writing a romance where the lead is Minerva and the love interest is me and all right, fine, I’m not really doing this stupid assignment anyway. (DO NOT LET HER READ THIS)
* * *
Otis is a paramedic, so they work together, except that doesn’t make sense because I didn’t put her in a hospital. Maybe I should move her to a hospital.
* * *
Okay, I’m gonna move her to a hospital.
* * *
Wait! Wait, wait no okay, so she’s at like an old old person old age home. Like the kind of place that has paramedics there all the time, like two or three times a week. Maybe they have a special dock for the ambulance and he works for one of those private companies and they’re there all the time just hanging out and waiting for someone old to have an event so they need to go to the hospital. That way I don’t have to put Athena in the emergency room, because how else would she interact with a paramedic?
* * *
Yes, I like this idea. And this way the patients are always the same so I can build a character or two in the elderly ppls.
* * *
Yes.
* * *
Plot for act one: Do they already know each other?
I don’t know. Am I supposed to put a meet-cute in? Is that only a movie thing?
* * *
Not just a movie thing, thank you Internet. But okay I think I want them to know each other already. They’re supposed to be in conflict initially, though, so maybe they don’t like each other? Maybe he flirts with her but she’s got a boyfriend so, no, that’s not okay, no they flirt with each other, yes, but they’re like, this is all cool because she’s got a boyfriend and everyone else is like, this is totally not cool you guys but they’re sure it is.
* * *
So maybe open with her leaving for work, so hello here’s crappy boyfriend being crappy, here’s her getting in her car and going to work, describe work, and then there’s a crisis! Medical something-something, someone’s crashing oh no, call paramedics.
* * *
Athena goes with dying person to ambulance bay, and we meet Otis and they something-flirt-something, oops, Mrs. So-and-so’s dying, gotta fly.
* * *
Too dark? Love story surrounded by death, characters only together because of repeated death and dying, reminders of mortality, enjoy life while you can (is this a trope?) yes I can work with this but is this okay for the genre?
* * *
Whatever, keep going. Never gonna write this anyway. Also, I’m doing outlines wrong, I’m nearly positive.
* * *
Conflict: I have no conflict, this is all setup. Where does the conflict come from?
* * *
A patient? I need another character. Conflict character: Nathan. Old guy, been in the home for a long time, has lots of health emergencies, so he gets to know both Athena and Otis. Maybe he’s the guy who tells them they should really get together, seize the day blah blah. Lots of old-person wisdom.
* * *
This is not conflict, but maybe Nathan is just so awesome that every time he nearly dies it’s a big deal, and then he nearly nearly dies, and asks Athena to go with him in the ambulance because he’s sure he’s going to really for real die this time, and then it’s just Otis and Athena and Nathan.
* * *
Act Two
Nathan’s faking! (note: figure out how to fool a paramedic into thinking you’re dying; find out if paramedics can work alone, or if I need to account for a partner. If I ever decide to write this, I mean.)
* * *
Nathan’s faking and he has a gun, somehow, and he’s kidnapping them to take him somewhere. And it’s not that he isn’t actually a kind old guy with lots of wisdom and who wants these two crazy kids to end up together, it’s that he’s all of those things and he’s also an old bank robber.
* * *
He saw some kind of something on the news and this something made him think, oh, no, I have to go find my stash, and he has money buried somewhere that he has to go find, and nobody knows he’s secretly this old bank robber because he’s using a fake name and the guy he actually is, is supposed to be dead. (How did he do this? How much do I care?)
* * *
So now they’re hostages, even though Nathan is elderly and may have some sort of medical condition or something, and when he knows he needs sleep he, I guess, ties them up at first, until something. I need an inciting incident that gets them to agree to go along on his treasure hunt.
* * *
It’s a road movie? Can I do a road movie that’s also a romance? That can be a thing, I’m pretty sure.
* * *
Since people can’t just disappear they end up being missing persons, and Nathan’s face gets on the news and someone recognizes him, and now it’s a manhunt for this famous criminal, and all Nathan wants is to find the treasure trove before he dies…
* * *
…so he can give it to Otis and Athena? Sure, why not? He doesn’t have any next-of-kin, not unless I want to make him Athena’s long-lost father, but that’s so tired, and besides, it’s a huge coincidence, so no, unless some trope tells me I have to do that I’m not gonna do that.
* * *
Okay but our lovers, they’re bickering a lot because maybe one of them is really into this and the other one isn’t, something something, so they’re fighting, but it’s the kind of fighting that makes you think they really care about each other. (I can’t create characters like this, this is so dumb.)
* * *
There has to be a puzzle. Either Nathan’s memory isn’t a hundred percent or he doesn’t really know where the money is, he just has clues left behind by whoever actually hid it. Or, he knows but he doesn’t want to go there directly, he want’s Athena and Otis to figure it out.
* * *
A treasure map! Nathan drew it when his mind worked better (dementia? That’s a thing) and they have to use it to find the treasure now, so they can do it even if Nathan isn’t there or can’t figure it out himself because of his old age thing.
* * *
Act Three
Otis and Nathan go off on their own, Athena leaves them, figur
es out the final clue where the treasure is, somehow reconnects/saves them or something, they find the treasure, Nathan dies of whatever it is that’s been killing him, they can’t save him, there’s something in the treasure that is important somehow. Not money, something else, important for a different reason. Like, a long lost something that, upon being revealed, results in the couple facing no charges? Somehow?
* * *
I need to figure out what that is. There’s a story around that something, it’s the part to build around.
Oliver’s phone was ringing.
It was a little while before he even recognized this was happening, because he was concentrating on the outline, and because his phone basically never rang.
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