What happened inside the OLD WOODEN HOUSE

This story is not for the faint of heart. It transports the reader into an isolated wooden house deep within a deep woods with no town derby.

The strong wind moved through the enormous pines in a steady rhythm.  

From the pines, small needles flew off. Some landed in a raging river below, while others fell upon an old wooden house.

 The old wooden house sat alone and forgotten. In that neglected wooden shell lived an old married couple. The wife sat alone in the small dining room while the husband prepared tea. 

The stormy clouds outside blocked the afternoon sunlight.  The wife was rotting away like the decay of the walls in her mind and her body.  The doctor was no help, blinded to what had possessed her. But one thing dominated her life: pain. Her body bruised easily like purple mold growing under her skin. 

Her thoughts twisted like tangled strings, controlled not by her, but by an invisible puppet master.  

The couple barely found enough coins for food only, not enough for medicine. What little they had left was sacrificed for tea, their pitiful substitute. The husband sought to find work. But none would hire an old man like him.  Now the husband 

brought a steaming, scalding cup of tea to his wife. 

The wife grabbed the blue china cup in her thin hands. Her old fingers trembled as she brought the tea to her lips. She tipped it back and a fiery sensation filled her throat.  The old woman screamed, the sound echoing in the decaying house.  She started to fling her arms everywhere like a dog drowning. The cup dropped and shattered on the old wooden floor.  

The old man leapt back in shock and tripped over a nearby chair, toppling to the ground. He grunted in pain and looked helplessly at his wife. Her eyes looked crazy, almost glazed over in agony. Her pupils stretched wide. 

Suddenly, his wife, now foreign and strange, opened her mouth, she let out a shriek of pain that came from for the tea. It sounded inhuman, almost beastly. She started to shake almost as if having a seizure. Her arms whipped out unexpectedly in front of her and hit the table, though not with enough force to knock it over. 

For the first time ever, the old man was scared of his wife. Her violent trembling stopped and slowly she turned over to him. Her eyes locked with his, and for a split second, it was completely still. 

The sound of the wind blowing through the trees and the rain starting to pick up echoed through the home.

 Suddenly, the elder woman thrust forward, landing on top of her husband. The old man flinched and impulsively put his arm up as a weak shield. She slammed into his body, her nails swinging, scratching, and digging into his aged skin. Unknown to both of them, the large teapot overhead began sliding and squirming like a little child, crawling closer and closer to the edge. The old man finally gained control and shoved the woman away. She fell backward and crashed into the oven. The momentum caused the teetering pot to fall.  The boiling teapot slammed into his face like a car crashing into a pedestrian. The tea gushed out burning him. But it did not matter the metal pot had already given the final blow, the tea began to eat the husband’s dead body. 

The smell of burning flesh enveloped the room where the widow sat alone. No one was nearby. The couple had lived alone, the closest town was miles away. So no one really did care about what happened in the old wooden house they really never knew or heard. 

The booming sound of lightning struck in the distance like a gun, something that a coin of theirs could not afford. But poison… he heard poison had a lower price. So slowly he used it, but he was not brave enough all at once. 

The widow sat alone, staring at her dead husband. His face scalded and burned like a used candle. The bloody tea started to trickle downward onto the floor, spreading toward her. The steam arose out of the approaching tea like a dense fog, or maybe it was death itself trying to claim another soul. 

Another soul in the old wooden house. 

Author's Note

this is intriguing and scary not for young readers. please enjoy, tell me what I could improve on.

Reviews

[JayG]

• this is intriguing and scary not for young readers.

I wish I could agree, but aside from centering the writing, which makes it difficult to read, it’s written as a transcription of the author playing storyteller, which is the most common trap awaiting the hopeful writer, because for the storyteller, who PERFORMS as they read it, it does work. And for you, every line acts as a pointer to images, ideas, and events, waiting in your mind for the words to call them up.

The reader? For them the visual performance doesn’t exist. And you’ve given them a storyteller’s script, which must be performed to work. But with no performance notes, no rehearsal time, and no clue of where we are, who we are, or what’s going on, for your reader, every line acts as a pointer to images, ideas, and events, waiting in *YOUR* mind for the words to call them up. But with you not there when it's read...

To better understand the problem, have the computer read the story to you. That way, instead of you as storyteller, you'll hear what the reader will. Its an excellent editing technique that picks up a lot.

Look at the opening as the reader must:

• The strong wind moved through the enormous pines in a steady rhythm.

1. “The” strong wind? How can there be a specific wind when we don’t know where we are, what’s going on, and why it matters enough to open the story with it?
2. Strong wind? Do you mean 80 MPH? 30? You know. But the reader is lost, because you provide no context, and don’t address any of the issues that will provide context: Where are we in time and space; what's going on; whose skin do w wear?.
3. Full-grown pine trees typically stand 50 to 150 feet tall at maturity, so I assume you mean they're in the 150’ range. But...have you spent much time in the woods? The trees block the wind. So while there may be 50 mph wind above the forest crown, within it, it would be a breeze. I've been camping when a hurricane came through. Open areas in the camp were damaged. But in our campsite us, it was only a windy, rainy, day.
4. Who cares if it’s windy? The story takes place indoors. So why talk about something that no one in the house is paying attention to, and which is not plot-related? Any line that doesn’t move the plot, MEANINGFULLY, set the scene, or, develop character, serves only to slow the narrative, so it needs to be chopped.

Were this included with a query, here is where the rejection would come, because you’re thinking in terms of telling the reader a story. But we can’t do that on the page for lots of reasons, mostly having to do with the fact that with only the emotion that punctuation supplies the narrator’s voice is dispassionate for anyone but you. And, a description of what happens is how history is written, and who reads history books for fun?

When writing fiction we don’t talk TO the reader about what happens. Instead, we involve them to the point where it feels like the events are happening to-that-reader in real-time.

Think of the times during an exciting film or TV show when you couldn’t stop yourself from shouting a warning or encouragement to the characters, because it had become so real to you. THAT’S what your writing should be doing.

What you’ve forgotten is that like all professions, those of fiction are both necessary and, acquired in addition to the general skills of school. The writing skills you practiced for over a decade in school are specific, and give you the ability to create the reports, letters, and other nonfiction that employers need. But those skills cannot be made to work for fiction.

For fiction, you need the emotion-based skills that the pros feel they cannot write without. They’ve been refined over centuries. And, they make money for the pros, so who are we to argue? Take advantage of all that work and development, and grab them for yourself.

To see what they can do for you, jump over to any bookseller site and read the excerpt from Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation. It’s an excellent first book, and filled with things that will have you saying, “But that’s so obvious. How did I never notice that?”

And for what it may be worth, my own articles and YouTube videos are meant as an overview of the traps and gotchas awaiting the hopeful writer.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

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“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”
~ Alfred Hitchcock

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain