Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

How Not to Be Boring

This wasn’t meant as a rant originally, but a girl that I mentor (I kinda hate that word) said she found it really helpful, and these stories do me no good sitting in my head so here. (And I get a lot of other people asking me how to write an interesting story, so this was my answer to her (which is long, so it’ll be a two parter, I guess, maybe).

Let’s talk about: How Not to Be Boring

When people ask you about your day, they don’t actually want an answer. They don’t care. It’s just polite to say “How was your day”, and it’s nice to simply answer “Fine.”

But when you write a story, people care. They want to know how your day was. They want to know what you did. They want to know how you felt and what you thought. They care.

If I were going to write about the other weekend, I wouldn’t just say “it was the worst I’ve felt in a really long time. I just really wanted to see my best friend, so I went for a drive. Then I decided I didn’t want him to hate me for being so weak, so I turned around and came home and cried when he called me to tell me he’s proud of how strong I’ve been.”

No one would want to read that. That is a boring story. There’s no imagery. There’s no figurative language. There’s no emotion. None of their senses would be evoked.

They wouldn’t feel anything for me. They wouldn’t understand.

They want the real story with every detail stitched together in a quilt of imagery and art. They want to read what actually happened:

 

Everything reminded me of how much I missed him. The way his chair smelled like a strange mixture of sweat and smoke. The way I could feel the slopes and arches of the mattress where he was supposed to be laying. The way the clock ticked. And ticked. And ticked.

I had to get out. Tick. Tick. Tick. I had to see him.

At first, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t remember grabbing the keys and my bag and slamming the stupid front door on the lonesomeness of the house. I just remember the way the metal felt cold in my hands and the way it made me smile, because finally I was feeling something besides lost.

One moment it was eleven at night and I was sitting in the shower, wishing he was waiting for me on the couch, and the next it was midnight and I was sitting behind the wheel knowing he was waiting for me in his apartment, eight hours away.

That was the first time in weeks that I felt good. I felt free.

I remember driving faster and faster, sailing down the highway, trying to catch a good wind in the passing lane. Streetlights faded into stars. Headlights found their homes in subdivisions and I found mine on the interstate.

In my head, I started writing a speech to deliver at his doorstep. I’d be casual and cool, like I wasn’t falling apart. Like I was in complete control. I’d lie and I’d say “I missed you and I couldn’t sleep. So here I am.”

He didn’t need to know the truth. There was no reason to tell him that I was pathetic and that I couldn’t live on my own. I was okay with being alone, but I couldn’t handle being lonely.

And then it hit me there on the interstate at two in the morning: I was weak. I couldn’t be one of those independent people that suffered in silence. I couldn’t just look at my knee injury as a simple hiccup. I couldn’t look at my impending hospitalization as a challenge to get better.

No. Only he could do that. He had to do that for me. I couldn’t take care of myself.

And I certainly couldn’t handle another blow to my esteem, so I stopped thinking about how worthless I was being and started fantasizing about his reaction when he would open the door and see me, no bag, no plan, no nothing, standing outside his apartment in the city.