Grammar Punk Blog

Write something! Let’s try another scene, or go for an entire story. This time we’ll use prompts from the Grammar Punk™ GP Creative, our creative writing course. Choosing from the Genre, Location, Emotion, Character, and Situation cards here is a scene from a story I will share in a serialization over the next few weeks.

Try your hand at it too. And share!

Genre: Mystery

Location: Big City

Emotion: Confused

Character: Writer

Situation: person who is paranoid

Here is my effort. Title: The Man Who Would Be Poe

“I am a failure.” The writer said. The words were uttered without passion, barely stirring the air in front of the writer’s mouth.

“You’re not serious.” Said his agent, who was preoccupied with the plate of food being set before him.

“An utter and complete failure.”

            “Bah. Nonsense. Poppycock. Ridiculous,” said his agent, cutting into the ridiculously expensive steak.

            “An abysmal and incomprehensible failure.”

            “How can you even say the word when your latest book still sits at the top of the bestsellers list—where it has been sitting I might add for more than sixteen weeks! You’re just hungry. Eat, you’ll feel better.”

            The writer shoved his plate away, the mere thought of ingesting food abhorrent. He was a ghost and ghosts do not consume T-Bones. What a thought. Except of course he wasn’t a ghost, which would at least have some semblance of lingering horror, titillating terror, a smidgen of fright to it.

            Edward Allen Moore (whose rather unfortunate given name was Stanley Nelson Moorehouse) looked rather more like a professional athlete than the stereotypical writer with a lean muscular build, thick blond hair tended to fall into his blue eyes and a handsome face ruddy with glowing health. Gloom sat ill on his open, guileless face.

The writer pinned his agent with piercing blue eyes full of unsatisfied anguish. “Do my stories haunt your dreams?” He demanded. “Do my novels creep into your unconscious and play havoc with your nerves? Does my writing cause you to despair, mourn or wither at the thought of your own mortality? Of course it doesn’t. I’m a very bad writer. The worst.”

The agent, who tried very hard and whenever possible to read as little of his clients work as was humanly possible, sighed gustily. “This is that Poe thing again, isn’t it?”

“That Poe thing?” The writer’s ruddy face blanched. He shoved back from the table so fiercely expensive water goblets tipped and heavy china crashed to the floor as if in sympathy. “That Poe thing!”

The agent clapped a horrified hand over his mouth.  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it! I take it back!” The agent called vainly to the back of the writer’s retreating back. “Edward! Edward, come back! I apologize for—whatever it is I said.” The agent sighed again and sat back down to his pricey, expense-report lunch. No sense in wasting a perfectly good steak. Certainly not on a writer.