draft help!
Nov. 23rd, 2003 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evergleamOkay, so this is my draft thus far. The assignment is basically to write a memoir piece, and we have to write in classic style. If you all could just read this and leave a comment with any questions that come to mind when you read it, about the actual events in the piece or events surrounding it, or anything that happen to come to mind, I would be ever so grateful. I need to figure out where to expand and what should go. Also, I'm planning on writing a little bit about Kim's family and Southern Maryland in general, and I'm trying to decide if I should put anything about my parent's divorce in.
Anyway, here's the draft. Questions, comments?
When I visit my grandmother’s house now, I am reminded of the little girl who used to dance in the living room with her best friend to the sugary sounds of her New Kids on the Block video tape. These days my grandmother’s cramped living room is stuffed with blue and tan-colored reclining chairs, two bookcases filled with photographs and video cassettes, and a twin sized bed where my grandmother now sleeps because she can no longer make it up the stairs to her room. The house itself is a small two story with three bedrooms and one bathroom, nestled deep in Small-town, USA, otherwise known as Clements, Maryland. Outside, the white paint is flaking and the blue shingles are crooked. Inside, the carpet in all the rooms is faded and stained, and the banister leading up the stairs is no longer sturdy. I lived there for two years as a child, with my father and grandmother.
Kim was my best friend, more out of convenience than anything else. She lived in an old trailer on the other side of the dirt driveway, our front doors were maybe fifty feet apart. Her mother was incredibly overprotective and never let her leave her own yard, so the days she was allowed to come over were always spent scurrying in and out of the house, building sandcastles in the sandbox out back, riding our bikes down the hill in the front yard, or gliding through the air on her swing set next door. We made up games to play, sometimes pretending we lived in the wilderness, which was just my backyard, and had to rely on grass and roots and leaves and mud pies to stay alive. Other times we would play “house” on my grandmother’s screened front porch, making believe that we were grownups of fifteen or sixteen whose parents were always dead or on some extravagant voyage so that we were forced to live on our own. The games we played always involved just the two of us trying to survive together against terrible odds.
Some days we would take a break from our games to feed my pet rabbits, Simon and Theodore. We were convinced that in addition to the food pellets, the rabbits loved eating grass and clover and any other greens we could pull up out of the ground, and so we would take my grandmother’s large red mixing bowl outside and fill it to the brim. When we would come back the next day, the pile of grass and clover we had dumped in their cage the afternoon before would still be sitting untouched, but that never deterred us from gathering it for them time and again.
Kim had two older brothers, Timmy and Scottie. Timmy was in high school and never much bothered with us, I never saw him when he wasn’t getting in or out of his car. Scottie was only a few years older than us, though in my mind he seemed almost an adult. He was forever our tormenting Kim and me, making fun of us or chasing us around the yard, or yelling at us when we asked him to play while he was working on the car that would be his the day he hit sixteen. I remember a singular game of cops-n-robbers, where Kim and I were the cops and he was the robber, but usually he made sure we knew he didn’t like us. Kim’s father was something of a shadowy figure, always on the peripheral. He was gruff and always in a baseball cap, and I was a bit intimidated by him. Her mother was much more of a driving force in our lives. Tall and gaunt with graying black hair and a Southern Maryland twang,
And yes, I know the last sentence stops right in the middle. I'm working on it.
Anyway, here's the draft. Questions, comments?
When I visit my grandmother’s house now, I am reminded of the little girl who used to dance in the living room with her best friend to the sugary sounds of her New Kids on the Block video tape. These days my grandmother’s cramped living room is stuffed with blue and tan-colored reclining chairs, two bookcases filled with photographs and video cassettes, and a twin sized bed where my grandmother now sleeps because she can no longer make it up the stairs to her room. The house itself is a small two story with three bedrooms and one bathroom, nestled deep in Small-town, USA, otherwise known as Clements, Maryland. Outside, the white paint is flaking and the blue shingles are crooked. Inside, the carpet in all the rooms is faded and stained, and the banister leading up the stairs is no longer sturdy. I lived there for two years as a child, with my father and grandmother.
Kim was my best friend, more out of convenience than anything else. She lived in an old trailer on the other side of the dirt driveway, our front doors were maybe fifty feet apart. Her mother was incredibly overprotective and never let her leave her own yard, so the days she was allowed to come over were always spent scurrying in and out of the house, building sandcastles in the sandbox out back, riding our bikes down the hill in the front yard, or gliding through the air on her swing set next door. We made up games to play, sometimes pretending we lived in the wilderness, which was just my backyard, and had to rely on grass and roots and leaves and mud pies to stay alive. Other times we would play “house” on my grandmother’s screened front porch, making believe that we were grownups of fifteen or sixteen whose parents were always dead or on some extravagant voyage so that we were forced to live on our own. The games we played always involved just the two of us trying to survive together against terrible odds.
Some days we would take a break from our games to feed my pet rabbits, Simon and Theodore. We were convinced that in addition to the food pellets, the rabbits loved eating grass and clover and any other greens we could pull up out of the ground, and so we would take my grandmother’s large red mixing bowl outside and fill it to the brim. When we would come back the next day, the pile of grass and clover we had dumped in their cage the afternoon before would still be sitting untouched, but that never deterred us from gathering it for them time and again.
Kim had two older brothers, Timmy and Scottie. Timmy was in high school and never much bothered with us, I never saw him when he wasn’t getting in or out of his car. Scottie was only a few years older than us, though in my mind he seemed almost an adult. He was forever our tormenting Kim and me, making fun of us or chasing us around the yard, or yelling at us when we asked him to play while he was working on the car that would be his the day he hit sixteen. I remember a singular game of cops-n-robbers, where Kim and I were the cops and he was the robber, but usually he made sure we knew he didn’t like us. Kim’s father was something of a shadowy figure, always on the peripheral. He was gruff and always in a baseball cap, and I was a bit intimidated by him. Her mother was much more of a driving force in our lives. Tall and gaunt with graying black hair and a Southern Maryland twang,
And yes, I know the last sentence stops right in the middle. I'm working on it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-24 02:11 am (UTC)2. the only things i saw were in the last paragraph....
you used "never" twice in the second sentence rather close together.
fourth sentence you said "our" but i think you meant "out."
in the sentence "He was gruff and always in a baseball cap, and I was a bit intimidated by him." you might consider rewording that giving it a little more flow...maybe -- His face was always hidden under a baseball cap and his gruffness seemed to intimidate me."
lastly, peripheral is an adjective, so you might want to change that to the noun form, periphery.
3. hope that helped. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-24 06:05 am (UTC)And the comments definitely helped, thanks. I moved some things around and changed some of the wording and I think it flows better now. I might post more of it when I get a fuller draft, but I don't know. It's due on Wednesday, so I might not get a chance to.
one more thing --
Date: 2003-11-24 06:19 am (UTC)and this may seem small, but it'll probably catch your reader's eye -- in the first paragraph i'd take out "colored" from "blue and tan-colored..." just because it's redundant.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-24 02:34 am (UTC)I don't know how long the thing's gonna be, but if you have room, maybe some brief physical descriptions of people, especially Kim, would help.
I'd be interested to know how it turns out. Stick with it :)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-24 06:07 am (UTC)And duh. I don't know why a physical description of Kim wasn't one of the first things I thought of adding. I might do the same for my grandmother, too. Thanks for the suggestion. :)