Fiction Workshop

Thursday 09/09/10
Using the endings that you wrote for homework last class, you will spend the class period writing the start. Number one rule of in-class writings:
Keep your pen moving. If you get stuck, write the last thing you wrote over and over again until you can keep going.


Endings for those who might have missed class.

The remembering becomes one thing, flickering through the past like a small cameraman wandering the faded, paper-print rooms of a bliss dollhouse.
Someone was saying back again in Pakistan over the shouting from the next room. Someone excused himself from the party and walked out into a downpour. When he put his arms around his body, it looked like he was wrapping himself up in rain. I tried to remember who named their dog Only and who called their cat Satan but the names of the people had vanished. I walked out onto the deck at one a.m. and stretched out on my back beneath the early winter's ink well of sky, listening for crickets and longing for so many things whose names were just beyond my reach.
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We hadn't even started out yet for Amarillo but the horizon was Texas leaning into morning. There were reasons for most things, but what happened over summer could not be explained. Ray said that most of life was a multiple choice test and that some questions had several right answers but some were tricks: anything you chose wound up the same, wound up wrong. The trick was not to put too much into guessing about the ones you'd already answered. We'll never know if that's true but summer was in the rear-view mirror and up ahead, and inevitable town whose name sounded like a flower.
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If he hadn't believed T before, he believed enough. The horses spooked during storms knew as much about fear, lightning, the way the world sounded angry when thunder commanded the sky. He wanted only now simplicity, a faith in only the weather's temper tantrums and _________________ and to find himself finally cattle-wise.