Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Writing disconnections
Plot/story, struggle, and connections
Character, setting, and types of stories

Given the dynamics of connection, it shouldn’t surprise you that a narrative ending in disconnection, especially death, tends toward tragedy. The most casual conversation includes anecdotes of destination (including death) and detour. Yes, it’s a sad fact to contemplate, but slowly our bodies and minds unravel and fall apart until they can no longer function.

Let’s move on to an example that illustrates disconnection at work. It’s the conclusion of a creative nonfiction piece in which a beloved horse succumbs on a farm:

In the last few weeks which remained to him of that, his last, season of life, I saw the stallion but little. The trials of my own life kept me away.

When at last the day came upon which that beautiful strength settled itself to earth, it did so gently as though relaxing into a comfortable state of repose. The expression in his eyes I will never forget. The old labyrinth of stern, cruel memories—the wild blur of darkness—was gone and in its place was something contemplative, yet all its own: like if you threw a stone up in the air and it didn’t come down, but rather just stayed there. Perhaps he died marveling at the strange beauty of such a sight.

When he was dead a tractor with a backhoe dug his grave and a great rusty chain was wrapped about him so as to drag his great form to it. He lies there now in the fashion of a hundred other animals of that farm, having returned to the earth. I think of them sometimes, the various spots where they have been buried, spanning all the way back to my childhood, and how some of those places are covered now in saplings and thickets or mown over, or, in a few cases, marked each spring by the emergence of daffodils or tulips. Most farms are like that: landscapes of the dead, from which new things are always growing. But I don’t like to dwell on that too much.

Yet when I do think of death—of how I would like to die—it is usually in the prone form of a large animal, yet such an animal as God must have saw when he first envisioned the creatures of the earth before all time. Never in my life have I known a being truer to the nature of itself.

Disconnection functions here through the inevitability of death in the life cycle. The horse and his human admirer are parted by death, although the event also functions as a deepening of love on the human narrator’s part. You might think of this example, then, as literal disconnection that contains psychological and emotional overtures of connection.

WRITING PROMPT

A morning trip to school shapes up as power struggle between protagonist child and antagonist mom, resolved with a connecting hug or a parting blast. Decide which you prefer, and portray it in your journal.

The least you need to know

·  Most all narratives involve journeys.

·  The struggle for power or simple conflict is usually what moves narrative action forward.

·  Connections between characters provide mutual understanding and sometimes also levity.

·  Disconnection is a tragic element that involves partings and often death.