I chose this week's bi-weekly Friday Flash feature because...well, as I was reading through my old storypraxis flash, I realized that this story reflects what I'm dealing with right now -- or, should I say, what I wish was happening right now. I'm in the midst of writing a story that scares me but which I've been yearning to write since I threw down a first draft back in 2009 during NaNoWriMo.

 

Some days, it's like I'm so worried about getting the story "right" that I'm frozen in place...but then at other, random moments, characters and ideas and words and images appear in my brain as if from nowhere.

 

I need the blur to become sharper, clearer. And it will, in time. Besides, if I didn't have the blur at all, there'd be nothing to see, no sharper image to detect. It's a process.

 

*

 

 

It came to her in bits and pieces – flashes of clarity, followed by hours of mental static. Blurred images, stretched faces, twisted ideas, and broken scenery… nothing coherent, everything random and scattered.

But when she sat and listened, it was as if her senses became sharper, more focused.

A snippet of conversation here, a movement there, an unexpected sound so beautiful it rang in her ears for hours afterward.

And as she sat, and as she listened, she heard two women talking. Not about anything particularly interesting or different – a tedious job, an absentee husband, a wayward child, a lost love – but the words stirred something within her. Emotion?

No. Imagination.

And suddenly, the static started to clear. Her antennae – inside, not out – sharpened the pictures she’d seen before. The blurred images turned into definite objects, the stretched faces became people, the broken scenery reflected places she’d visited, and the twisted ideas were indeed still twisted… but they made sense now, in their own ways.

She saw how they slotted into those flashes of clarity, and how each bit of blurry thought melted one into another.

And so, pen in hand, she pressed the tip to paper and began to write her novel.