Fighting Zombies with Meryl Streep

Tuesday, January 10^th, 8:45pm, 2017, Somewhere in the West of Ireland.

Dear Reader,

I woke up at 6am this morning because I thought I had fallen, and I didn’t get back to sleep, having just had a scary dream about zombies.

I tossed and turned; feeling bad because it had been me who had doomed all humanity with zombies, and feeling guilty, because I had been fascinated by the idea of survival in the dream, until I was suddenly in a bar stood next to Meryl Streep.

Of course that didn’t last very long, because then a zombie bit me and the floor collapsed beneath my feet.

I swear, had I waited another two seconds to wake up, Meryl would’ve stopped me from falling, and we would have saved the entire world together.

     I’ve recovered now from the zombie hysteria, because coffee exists, and although the red upon white that surrounds my irises has now blended into a variation of what I can only call angry owl eyes, I am bubbling over with anticipation. I am thinking about the music I will play with my friends tonight in less than an hour’s time and those tunes that are certainly worth staying awake for.

     That said, and even now, I can’t help but compare that sensation of falling in a dream to the breathlessness of last week in which I tried to write a short story every day, for seven days, and failed. (Oops)

I am now simultaneously proud and overwhelmed by dark plot points in which all of the bad things happen to my characters, in the four short stories I wrote over the course of last week. It’s as if I’m holding myself at arm’s length, sometimes saying: ‘I’m proud of what I’ve written here.’

Following that, I read back over what I’ve written and say: ‘Oh, wow, I am a lot stranger than I thought I was, with stories more sinister than I’d originally planned.’

But, this is good, no?

Does this mean I’ve written something that’s… okay?

     Getting into the rhythm of writing and noticing the odd little things you write about is a lot like waking up from a bizarre dream and realising that on some level, you really would like to be a Disney Princess, or you know, just turn into a dinosaur.

You don’t really know why you would want either of these things, and you might even feel ashamed about it.

     I believe now that most of the time, the sub-conscience should by smiled at rather than shunned. I say this, having spent the week (well, most of it) wringing clear every crevice of my mind to see what I might find for writing materials.

Hopefully, my odd little writing tropes (or writing guilty pleasures, if you will) might make you feel better about the weird dreams you’ve had, especially if you’ve ever sparked the end of the world whilst under the watchful eye of Meryl Streep.

(Just me?)

1) Foreshadowing

When I sprinkle clues between paragraphs of prose, I imagine witches tossing ingredients into a cauldron. It is menacing, and oddly delightful.

Foreshadowing is a teaser trailer of what’s yet to come. It is small, and sometimes it will seem insignificant, so you might skim over it when reading.

Foreshadowing finally creates an expression in my mind for the faceless reader; Eyebrows risen when they realise that they never saw the twist coming. They rifle back through my story, picking every sentence apart; shocked by how they never noticed the clues. Now, when each clue is neatly stacked on top of the one that came before it, everything makes sense, like four notes fused together to create a chord.

And, even though I am probably just wearing my pyjamas, and sitting by the fire with a glass of wine as I write and imagine the strife of my imaginary reader, I feel like I am the villain of a fairy tale. I am chuckling to myself in a dark corner somewhere, and I love it.

Is this how George R. R Martin feels when he kills off characters?

Wow, I sound like a monster.

But,

why write with a faint HB pencil when you can write with the more memorable scalpel?

I can assure you that the reader will prefer the scalpel, as will you.

2) Eyes

Should the whiteness of my eyeballs ever become cross stitched in yellow brush strokes, beside widening pupils and a reddening eye colour, then you would be right to question them as they would look nothing like my original eyes. If my eyelids became hooded and angular along navy eyelashes curling inwards, then please, definitely question them; though they might look striking, they are not my eyes.

The best thing to do would be to ask the owner of these eyes to write you a story. The protagonist of their story should then have pretty eyes, or at least, an affinity for such eyes. If neither of these motifs apply to the short story, then it isn’t me who wrote it and I do not own these eyes. In fact, you should send for help because in this scenario, I have most certainly been replaced by an alien clone.

It has taken fifteen years (I think?) of writing stories for me to realise that I really do love writing about eyes, and they are probably my favourite things to describe.

Sometimes I get half way through paragraph number two of a writing project when I am still just describing the left eye and I haven’t even gotten started on the right one, when I realise that I need to move on to describe smiles and hair colour now.

But, it is a habit of mine that I still find hard to break,

(and embarrassingly so.)

 In my week of short story writing, I’ve come to see that this is the reason why I find prolonged eye contact to be so challenging.

When a new person becomes my friend, it means I have familiarized myself with their eyes and have now accepted how lovely they are (both the person and their eyes), and eye contact is not too tasking, but for the fleeting moment when I first meet a new person, eye contact doesn’t come easy, because I wouldn’t wish to scare anyone with an odd and long winded compliment about their eyes…

but then again, maybe I should just start doing that,

because maybe it would make their eyes smile brighter than before,

and today is about embracing the sub-conscience mind, isn’t it?

     Oh… Aye me (get it?) I suppose you can imagine the awkwardness I experience any time I have an appointment with an optician; Answering questions about my own eyes for a change, whilst being told to follow a moving light and to stare into the serious eyes of another.

It’s a bitter form of multitasking, that is.

But,

these types of serious eyes could fill paragraphs.

Their irises sing in sad songs; revealing the real person behind the music, and it’s those eyes I like best.

I could write about them forever.

3) Flowers

Flowers serve so many purposes in prose and in real life, like comfort or decoration. They have already been equipped with symbolism for a writer’s use, so that makes things convenient for us.

I’ve noticed that I like to fabricate inversions of this symbolism that surrounds roses.

Red roses once preserved everlasting love, but now they can stand for a betrayal, and this betrayal is easily concealed by the beauty of fully fleshed rose petals.

Where yellow roses once embodied joy and protection, they can now reveal a character’s insanity, as each petal begins to wilt.

Where white roses once incited purity and new beginnings, they can now be laced with destruction and the end of the road for a struggling character.

This leads me to talk about the last of my guilty pleasures in writing.

4) Death

Hear me out.

I don’t get some sort of sick joy out of killing characters. In fact, killing characters can take a real emotional toll on the writer.

I, for one, start to feel evil when I reach the death scene of one of my characters. Pyjamas become day wear and cups of tea become immortal, and when I eventually accept that it’s okay to play God in a fictional universe, my brother does a double-take at my appearance, because it is most unusual to see me smiling in normal people clothes on a Sunday afternoon.

That said,

death is so important in any story in which it occurs.

Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen had you not accepted that new job, or had you chosen to take a year out before starting University? How different your life would’ve been with different people in it. Who knows if you would even like espressos anymore, or if your favourite colour would still be red?

Well, fiction forms an exaggeration of this façade.

An odd bout of death in any fantasy novel can only string the plot along.

When the sidekick dies, the Superhero is forced to avenge his death; thus saving the whole world, which wouldn’t have happened, had the sidekick not died first.

I like seeing how death can change my characters.

The protagonist is rolled in grief at first, but then they start to stitch together their very own plot, and in this way, 

the underdog can finally bite.

So, the next time a favourite character of yours dies in ‘Game of Thrones’, just know that the author hasn’t killed them in cold blood.

There is always a reason behind fictional death.

Writers are wild creatures.

They blame themselves for the fall of humanity that came to them in a dream, when in fact, it was all just a dream.

In reality, all writers should know that it’s okay to be intrigued by the sub-conscience mind, as long as they themselves lead healthier lives than their characters.

So,

good luck in facing and embracing your zombies, and please,

write with a scalpel,

for it carves a better novel than a HB pencil ever would.

And really,

all the zombies ever wanted was to be understood.

Ciao,

Meryl Streep (plot twist?)

Madame Mayreed x