Day Four: Formal VS. Informal Style

This one actually looks fun and easy. We'll see!

Summary of pre-exercise meditation:
"We adjust our manner of speaking depending on whom we're addressing." Fred White The Daily Writer
If we're talking to kids, or someone whose first language is not English, we tend to simplify our vocabulary, shorten our sentences. When talking to a supervisor, or mother-in-law we're not going to sprinkle the f-bomb (really? Is it really a verbal explosion with devastating consequences?) as liberally as we might (depending on how trashy, or trashed we are) when conversing with with good friends. Fred White also says, "How people speak to one another depending upon their respective places in the social hierarchy contributes to the realism of a story." and (I love this) "Think of language as a painter's palette, where different groups of pigments represent different types of language use or different levels of formality." Nice!

Try this:
Write a short story in which the two principal characters are from different levels in the social hierarchy. For example, write a story about a dedicated  piano teacher trying to work with a rebellious but brilliant student who learned much of his manner of speaking from the streets.

Later

 The Red Ones
by Laurie Guerin

                 Oliver is amazed when Jen picks him up from kindergarten without a car.

              “You aren’t going to believe this, Ollie!” Jen says. “It’s so sunny today, I walked here.”

His mouth drops open. “All the way from our house?” Their house is a mile down the road.

               “Yep! That means we’re going to walk back.” 

               “Yay!” He throws himself into her, hugs her legs before hooking his arms through the straps of his Perry-the-Platypus backpack. “Let’s go!”

The entire mile is one straight shot down a busy road with apple orchards on both sides. They walk on the dirt paths to stay clear of cars. Oliver spots an apple on the ground right-off and picks it up.

“Can I keep this, mom? I wanna take it home to Gramma.”

“Sure,” she says. “But there are going to be a bunch of them. Why don’t you wait so you don’t have to carry it the whole time.”

“That’s OK. I want this one.”

“Let me see it for a second.” He hands it over for inspection. “Oops, look right here.” She points to where the bottom of the apple is rotten. Little bugs crawl in and out of a cavity.

“Ummm, never mind.” he says. Makes a point to kick it after she drops it to the ground.

He walks along, springing off large rocks and balancing on irrigation pipes. “Do you know that there’s a kind of bird who can eat steel?”

“Are you kidding me? Eat steel? Is it a for-real bird, or a cartoon bird?”

“For-real bird!” he says. “Ian and I saw it yesternight on a show about real things.”

“What’s the bird called?”

“I don’t remember…”

“We can look it up online when we get back. We can even find pictures.”

“No, you won’t find this bird. It’s really special. It lives in another country.” He runs a few paces ahead of Jen.

“That’s OK! You can find everything on line, even birds from different countries. The scientists that study the birds want everyone…”

“Actually…not another country, but another planet.”

“Oh, then it’s a pretend bird!” Jen knew it wasn’t likely that a real bird could eat steel, but then she’d only recently found out that platypuses had stingers.  And that the shoulder blades of dogs were unattached to the rest of the skeleton.  For all she knew the bird’s saliva might have contained a corrosive agent.

“No! Real, mama.” He’s still in front of her, gesticulating with his hands, “Like monsters are real on other planets. And aliens.”

“You know there’s no such thing as monsters, right?” Believing monsters are real in the daylight was a completely different thing from believing in monsters when he woke up alone in his bed at night. He was such a fearful kid sometimes. Obsessing about strangers.  Any time he got a cut or a scrape, he squeezed the daylights out of it and had a fit if even a pinpoint of blood surfaced.

 “Oh yes there is! You don’t know that?!” He looks at her, eyes and mouth wide open.  “They live in the outer space galaxy. Ian and me have definitely seen that. So do aliens live there.”

Her first inclination is to make sure he understands the difference between fantasy and reality. She doesn’t want him to be scared later, and if she goes along with it, won’t he think she’s agreeing?  It was so hard to know what to tell kids and when. Plus, considering who his father was, the poor kid was going to have enough trouble sorting out the truth. His father. On the run and probably conning some woman in Vegas right then. If he’d gotten that far, that is.   Couldn’t tell a five year old something like that.

“Ollie, you know there’s no such thing as aliens either, right? Not aliens, or monsters.”

Oliver, turns around extends his arms to the side and begins walking backward. “You’ve just never seen one, mom. Ian and…”

“Oliver! Watch out!” Too late. He collides with a man who has appeared at the end of a row of trees. The man is wearing a hat, his face partially covered with a fine mesh insect shield. He’s holding a fruit picker with a telescopic handle, topped with a claw-like basket. Oliver spins around, takes one look at the man and scrambles toward Jen, literally kicking up dirt trying to gain traction.

“Mama!” He cries out, his face tight with panic.  

“It’s OK! It’s OK, Ollie. It’s just a guy picking apples, Honey.” She scoops him up. He cinches both his arms and legs around her like a spider monkey.

“Sorry,” she says to the man. “We were just talking about aliens and you, like, materialized.” She laughs and the man pulls the mesh away from his mouth.

“No Indocumentado.”  

“Indocument... Oh No!  I didn't mean ‘What a coincidence, we were just talking about aliens,’ We just happened to be…” Jen's babbling, she knows that, but she doesn't want the poor man to think that she's one of those Americans. The type to demand his papers. 

“…Que?” The man takes a step toward them and Oliver’s grip tightens.

Jen raises her voice and takes pains to enunciate each word clearly.  “Aliens. From. Outer. Space. That’s what we. …”

“…You mean the leetle green men?” The man assumes a half-crouch, but doesn’t come any closer. “With the espace ship and the things coming out of the head like theese?” He raises his hands up high and waves his index fingers over each side of his head.

“Exactly!” Jen says, relieved and the man laughs harder than she believes the situation calls for. “So you knew all along what I was trying to say, didn’t you?

“They’re orange too,” Oliver’s grip on her loosens suddenly. “And the really mean ones are red.” He shifts his body to get a better look at the man.  

“Ah! The red ones. Yes, I have heard of these. That is why I have theese.” He extends the fruit picker in front of him and squeezes the handle so that the claw opens and closes.

“Not really, Ollie,” Jen says. “It helps him pick…”

“…That’s cool!” Oliver clambers down and stands facing the man. “We should go catch them.”

“Yes,” says the man. “Yes we will. But how do we get there? Do you have a space ship?”

It seems to Jen that his accent is becoming less and less pronounced.

“No, but we can make a rocket in like, ninety days.”

Jen laughs.

“Seriously, mom!  All we need is a lot of screws and some steel and grandpa has that in his shop. Probably anything else we need too, like flashlights and a cage and stuff.”

“You have been thinking about theese, my boy,” the man says, planting the tool at his side. He pulls the mesh back up over his face. “Come see me when theese rocket is finished.”

He smiles at Jen. The sun glints off of a gold incisor.

“Thanks,” she says, reaching for Oliver’s hand. “See you then.”

“Yeah,” says Oliver. “See ya.”

They walk for a while before Oliver stops.  “I have something in my shoe.” He pulls it off and Jen squats down so he can hold onto her for balance. He brushes his foot off and feels between his each of his toes while she gives his shoe a good shake.

“He was nice.” Oliver says.

“He was. Funny too.”
“He scared me at first though. Oh boy, did he!”

He puts his shoe back on and tests it.

“Good?”

“Yeah.”

“So Ollie?”

“Yeah?”

“What will you do with the red ones once they’re caught?”

He runs forward a few steps and picks up another apple and brings it to her. “Give them a chance to be good.”

 “And what if they’re still mean?”

“Send ‘em back to the galaxy.”

“Perfect,” She tosses the apple back. “Grandma’s gonna love it.”  

Post posting feedback: Shared this with my writing group and while there were things people  liked (especially the parents/grandparents in the group), Ellen said that in order to prevent this from being a "Kid's say the darndest things," story, it has to be a story, which it's not yet. There are elements to a story (ex. the encounter with the gardener), but, among other things, no one changes.  Another writer thought it started to get interesting when the mom spoke about the boys fear, his absentee father, etc. Interesting to consider what makes a piece a story.