Abby's Creative Writing Workshop

Christina, a washed-up looking 30 year old is sitting at a seedy bar drinking a Manhattan Cocktail and applying rouge. Matthew, a 50 year old salesman wearing a suit with a loose tie is sitting next to her sipping scotch on the rocks. A bartender swipes down the counter.

Christina: You know I was a dancer in a past life? Swirling and twirling in a platter tutu down 5th avenue and through Time’s Square and right onto the stage at the New York Ballet. Yep, me and Misty Copeland. I was in her wedding, you know.

Matthew: That’s bull shit.

Chrisitina: No, it’s true, I promise. Look! I’ll show you her contact information in my phone.

Christina shows Matthew her phone, the contact says Missy Coalfield.

Matthew motions the bartender over and whispers in his ear.

Matthew, to the bartender: She needs to be cut off, she’s clearly drunk.

The bartender nods, eyes Christina’s glass, and goes back to swiping down the bar.

Christina: I heard that. I’m not drunk. I’m just a dreamer that’s all.

Matthew: Anyone can be a dreamer when they’ve had enough to drink.

Christina: Well then, what are your dreams?

Matthew: Ain’t got a single dream left. I used to have ’em but I waited them all away. Waited for the perfect job, waited for the perfect wife to have the perfect kids, waited for the perfect house, waited, waited, waited. Now I’m a traveling salesman, which is no better than a politician, all I do is sell lies. No wife, no family, no house because all I did was wait.

Matthew downs what’s left in his glass.

Christina: Sounds like your problem isn’t dreaming, it’s patience.

Matthew: You mean to tell me that I have to wait some more! Bull shit!

Matthew slams down his glass and stands up from the bar, he turns around at the door.

Matthew: Goodnight Goddamn Ballerina.

Christina: Goodnight.

Christina: Well if he had waited a bit longer, I could have showed him this.

Christina shows the bartender her phone, displaying Misty Copeland’s real contact information.

Characters: An old man with a cane and a handlebar mustache and a middle-aged woman with pinkish skin

Time: 9:45 am

Setting: A large church with many pews, a large stage, and a small altar.

The old man sits on a pew four rows back, aisle seat, left of center. The pink woman stands next to him.

Pink woman: “Well bless your heart, you must be deaf. I wish I knew braile.”

Old man: “I’m not deaf. I can hear you.”

Pink woman: “Well then why on God’s Green Earth are you not moving?”

Old man: “Because this is my seat.”

Pink woman: “No, it’s my seat! It’s been my seat for years! I’ve never even seen you here before and here you are saying this is your seat!”

While drama is, for the most part, fictional, it is very different from your average fictional story. For one thing, drama must be condensed to dialogue and action. The characters inner thoughts and feelings must be expressed outwardly in drama, while in fiction they can be explained without being expressed. Additionally, fiction has the luxury of being as long as it wants. However, drama must be condensed to an hour or two production.

My hidden love only comes to me in the garden,

while I walk alone amidst the lily’s,

like a song that only plays when one doesn’t feel like dancing.

He always leaves notes under the waning moon

for me to find when the storm grows too chaotic for me to handle.

The sea always crashes against the shore when the sand has forgotten its touch.

Creating dense poetry increases the intensity of the work. Dense poetry can be made my using nouns and active verbs as opposed to adjectives and filler words. In poetry, every word counts, and therein lies the intensity.

COVID-19

the windows – ablaze

but you cannot see anyone inside

streets are empty

upturned like that table Jesus flipped

in the temple

though none of us are selling anything these days

maybe it’s the end

or maybe it’s a sign

it feels like the D in Dollar Tree

blinking, blinking out

and all of us in need of an electrician

Personally, I prefer more formal styles of poetry. I spent 9 years of my life as a percussionist in high school and then college bands, so the rhythm of poetry is very important to me. Additionally, I am a songwriter. If the chorus of a song doesn’t, to some extent, include patterns of rhythm and rhyme, it will not be memorable or successful. I do not mean to say that every single poem must be written in iambic pentameter with a defined rhyme scheme throughout. I am merely advocating for poems to have some echo of a formal structure.

My beat up Ford rattles as I turn down the long dirt road. “This is 98.7 Your Hometown Radio Station” crows the old radio from beneath the dashboard hula-girl. Today is Friday, so I am going to see his grave. It is nothing special, just an old headstone thrown up in haste by the U.S. Military at a time when too many were perishing to allow for any pomp and circumstance. But I will go, and I will lay flowers. It is the right thing to do after all, whether I liked the old man or not, no one deserves a flower-less grave. The radio begins to play the next rotation of classic rock and the oldies. “I got my first real six string… Summer of 69..” The winter of ’69 they sent him home in a box from Vietnam. The summer of ’69 he came home on leave for the last time. “Goddamn it, son, you look like a girl.” He was always commenting on my clothes. Sometimes he whipped me for it. “Susan, why do you let our son look like such a little girl??” He shouted at my mother regularly. Letting her know she wasn’t doing her job right while he was off “Saving our country from the communists”. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt my mother had bought me from the catalogs. It was red, white, and blue floral and she had bought it for my father’s arrival home. Well, the joke is on dad. I brought him red and white and blue flowers today. Wherever he is, I hope he remembers.

The beagle with a black patch over his eye whimpered and whined from where he lay under the red velvet ottoman. She should yell at him for laying on the oriental rug or for chewing on the gold tassels that hung from the ottoman or for all this damn whimpering and whining, but she wouldn’t. Not today. She would just sit in her Victorian arm chair and look out into the dark nothingness outside her sliding glass door. She might flip mindlessly through an HGTV catalog or turn on a cooking show, but she wouldn’t really read and she wouldn’t really watch, so what was the point anyhow. Behind her, she could hear the tea kettle squeal on the ancient stove top. She was surprised to find the stove still worked at all. She listened to it make music with the clock ticking and the dog whining for five minutes before she could bring herself to get up. At twenty-five years old she should not be this way. Living alone among antiquities. Not to mention her grandfather, who owned the house. Her grandmother had died yesterday, bequeathing her everything in the will. The care of her grandfather, included. So here she was, thrown back into her grandmother’s world, her grandmother’s house, her grandmother’s rules. The old woman’s will read like she was doing her granddaughter a favor, giving this all to her. She had never given anything to her granddaughter without expecting something, everything in return. It all began when she was six years old and her grandmother had given her a book. “Take care of it, ” She said, “And you can keep it.” Neither a borrower nor a lender be. I never borrowed anything from you without you borrowing something from me.