WORDSQUARE
Dave's writing group was set a wordsquare exercise, these are the words he got.
Purple bitter sulphur anger
So he wrote the piece below which he called 'UNBLOCKING THE SINK' because he was trying do undo a bad bout of writer's block, here goes ....
Bitter and anger go together ….
In ‘Chance Encounter’,
the first (and so far only) lengthy piece of fiction I’ve had published in a
national magazine (Writing Magazine),
the ‘hero’ (for want of a better word) is both bitter and angry
following his perceived desertion / betrayal by his former partner (Amy) and
the collapse of the company he’s worked for all his working life, leaving him alone
and unemployed. He’s bitter about what’s happened and he feels anger towards Amy
and just about everyone else. He finds a kind of redemption in the end though.
The ending gives hope even if it’s unresolved.
The opening passage of ‘Chance
Encounter’ also has another kind of bitter
in it, the hero’s sitting in the Buerre Louise pub sinking his ‘second pint of bitter from some obscure
Cornish Brewery’ before setting out to find ‘a fish supper at the Judd St Chippy’.
And I’ve just finished reading the latest ‘Rebus’ – ‘Better be the Devil’ – Rankin back to
form. And bitter features a lot in
Rebus stories, though for most of this latest one he’s on the wagon, fearing
the results of hospital tests, the threatened diagnosis from which hangs like
the Sword of Damocles over the novel.
But what of sulphur?
The smell of sulphur is the smell of
farts, the smell of Trump but that’s been overworked just now.
Then I remember the springs at Saturnia in Tuscany with
their warm, bubbling sulphurous waters and the overflow running down the hill
into pools where trippers bathed for free. But I’m not sure whether the smell
came from underground minerals or from the used disposable nappies floating in
the stream.
So my mind turns to the Devil, the smell of sulphur is the smell of the pits of Hell.
And what of purple
– well there’s UKIP – the purple
rosettes, the purple lettering on a
yellow background.
Maybe I should be
thinking about writing a detective story. And now I think of it, the
opening passage of ‘Chance Encounter’
has its homage to Chandler’s great detective, when the hero mutters as he
leaves the pub ‘down these mean streets a
man must walk’,
My detective could be a bitter,
angry man who’s drawn to Tuscany for some reason. But I worry, aren’t all
detectives in fiction, bitter, angry men with relationship and drink problems? And
didn’t Val McDermid have a story in which her detective goes to Tuscany. Is this
getting derivative?
In my story my bitter
angry detective with relationship issues and a drink problem will find
himself (or even herself) travelling to this small castle in Tuscany (Val
d’Orcia?) pursuing a trail of deceit and treachery surrounding a nationally
recognised sort of UKIP figure (with
possibly satanic overtones – clouds of sulphurous odours surrounding him –
shades of Dennis Wheatley or even the Da Vinci code) With a pivotal scene in
the gardens at Saturnia around the sulphur
springs.
Yes that’s what to write, with a bit of purple prose, but will I write it?
Watch this space!
