Beginning to an untitled story

[kleenexwoman]

We are doing fiction now in my English class. You might think that this would fill me with joy at the chance to learn from a master of the art.
The problem here is that my English teacher is first and foremost a poet. He explained this to us at the beginning of the unit, and basically admitted that it would not be as easy for him to teach fiction.
That is OK and cool with me; he is still an excellent teacher. And to tell you the truth, it's very illuminating to learn fiction from a poet. It really gives you an entirely different perspective on fiction itself.
One of the more interesting points that Mr. Yakich likes to talk about is the difference between poetic truth and reality. When writing about an incident or a place or an emotion or anything, there is no need to stick strictly to what happened or what is actually there; the heart of the poem is not in the real-life details.
So we read some excerpts from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" today. It's an excellent book about one man's experiences in the Vietnam War.
O'Brien says in the book, several times, that many of the stories are not true, that they are truer than real life. He doesn't really explain it in the book, but my guess is that he shares Yakich's philosophy of artistic truth.
The interesting thing is that I'm fairly certain all of the stories are true and that he's telling the readers that some are false in order to make a point. Maybe it's to get the readers to reconsider their perception of truth? I'm looking forward to the discussion about this on Monday.
Actually, there was one story that I was pretty certain was fictional. Oddly enough, it was the one I liked the best. I don't remember the title.
In a nutshell: A soldier (a medic, if I remember correctly) gets his girlfriend to fly out to Vietnam and stay with him. She's a typical teenage girl, blonde and pink and sweet and wears fuzzy sweaters. After the soldier and his girlfriend have their romantic reunion, she starts working in the medical tent with him. She gets her hands dirty (in blood and the spilled intestines of gutshot soldiers), and eventually becomes acclimated and accustomed to the war.
She starts going out on raids with the Green Berets, and eventually sneaking out at night and creeping around the jungle with the Viet Cong. The last time we see her, she's dressed back in her pink fuzzy sweater and is wearing a necklace of human ears. Then she disappears into the jungle altogether.
Gah, I don't do it justice at all. Tim O'Brien is a wonderful writer and I highly suggest checking out "The Things They Carried".

To get back on topic. My main objection to English class is the nature of the assignments. We've got a book called "What If?" which is supposedly "chock-full of writing prompts" and "perfect for a class or just as a jump-start!"
The problem is that the prompts are all either connect-the-dots type assignments ("Think up names for these characters!") or very, very vague ("Write a story starting with a color"). I don't like creativity in a vacuum. If I'm going to write something that I didn't think up myself, I at least want some concise limitations that I can dance around.
The prompts last night were this:
#12: "Write from the viewpoint of a member of the opposite sex."
#13: "Write from the viewpoint of someone who is not the same age as you."
#18: "Describe an environment that someone is in."
Useful if I've got a character or a story and just can't think of a way to start writing about them, but all of my characters and plots at the moment are pretty tightly planned out. (Except for one, but I didn't think that bringing in three pages of angsty gay timetravel fanfiction would be quite the best idea in this case.)
And so nyghtshayde came along and gave me a story idea. I'm going to be stretch it out as long as I can so that I've got something to write for this class during B.S. prompts.


Professor Robert Thatcher wrapped his hands around his mug of Guinness as he took in the interior of Cathasaigh’s. He’d heard the name tossed around in the pre-class banter of his students, the owner mentioned as a prototype of a straight-laced barkeep who refused to look the other way at fake IDs. It was almost a campus joke, a byword to lightheartedly condemn any illicit activity, no matter how slight. “Cathy Says you wouldn’t get away with that,” referring to the deliberate mispronunciation of the difficult Celtic name.
The pub itself wasn’t the dingy hole he had expected. The floorboards were dark polished wood, free from peanut shells or an errant wad of gum a student might have tossed over his shoulder; they gleamed softly in the light from the cast-iron light fixtures that hung from the ceiling, mimicking the shapes of branches in their twists. The walls were of real stone; Robert, seated in a brown leather booth in the back corner, could touch the chilly gray rock and almost imagine that they had been ripped from the walls of a castle. Framed watercolor paintings of the Green Man (a character Robert recognized well from his treasured mythology books) and misty meadows hung on the walls. They were clearly amateur efforts, the paper wrinkled with long-dried saturation inside the glass frames, but it was obvious that the landscapes were careful re-creations of a beloved place.
The pub was almost empty. Robert was glad; he had chosen the pub precisely because the students stayed away. He hadn’t wanted to deal with having to make small talk about assignments or football tonight. Normally he welcomed any opportunity to socialize with his students outside of the classroom, listening to their dreams and dramas, sharing his concerns and thoughts, making a connection. Bridging the seemingly infinite gap between teacher and student—even erasing it, letting them see each other not as unreachable academic and interchangeable pupil, but human beings with lives outside of the sterile classroom.
But tonight, Robert Thatcher was not willing to let any of his students see into his soul.