Well today I finally submitted my short story (2363 words) for our local council’s My Brother Jack Creative Writing Award. It’s taken a long time to come up with the story and the character. However, I found the setting quite easily. I imagined what my street would have been like in 1942 and back then, it was filled with market gardens and dirt streets that would turn to mud when it rained.
As I look outside my back yard and see the same sandy mud while we have our back yard landscaped, I imagine that back then, where our house stands were crops of lettuce. Further down our street was a secret radio receiving unit that no one knew about that was deciphering Japanese signals for the war in the Pacific. Americans were seen driving motorcycles in our areas at all hours of the night but the locals never knew what was going on. It was a time when our city was in blackout and had a curfew. The irony isn’t lost on me that it must have felt like what we felt like when Melbourne was in the midst of lockdowns and curfews during COVID.
My story is called, “The Despatch Driver.”
I wrote about the prize in the blog post below.
I now await for the results. It’s the first time I have written a creative piece and I found it a lot harder than writing non-fiction.
Congrats on getting it written. I keep threatening to write fiction but put it off.
I would like to write more but noticed that I need to be making time for it. Instead, I blog.
I didn’t factor in the amount of time to actually create the storyline and the plot; the character details and the themes. That took the longest.
I wanted to write like Hemingway. Less words. Less description.
Biggest thing? I had to play the scene in my head. As if I was watching it on a screen then write all the actions. My brain would fill in the gaps but anything I didn’t write, I assumed the reader would “fill in their own gaps” to make their own assumptions. That is, until I gave it to my husband to read and then there were so many questions…..
“How old is that character?”
“Why would his club foot stop him finding a wife to marry?”
“You mentioned a wound on his knee then it’s on his leg, which is it?”
“How did that character assume the protagonist was a market gardener? He didn’t even say he was and no where in the story was it even inferred!”
“Did they have gas pipes in 1942 in Melbourne?”
Etc.
That’s when I realised I need one of those boards they show in crime shows of character photos with bits of string and newspaper clippings pinned to board to create a storyline and know exactly what the character was about.
I had approached this exercise with nonchalance. A story of a young man with a club foot who feels useless when Australia is thrust into war and lonely as his best mate was killed in the fall of Singapore. He has this knack though of building radio receivers – a hobby that no one understands or appreciates until one day an American Despatch driver (working at Australia’s joint US-Aus secret radio receiving unit crashes his motorcycle outside his home). Then his life changes forever. That’s the general gist. That took me ages to come up with.
Yay! Sounds great. Good luck.
🤞!!!! 🤣