A Curious Girl: Character Building

Hiyas! Emily came into my room today and said, 'Whenever I come in here, you're working. You must be so conscientious.'

Riiight. Actually I'm terrified. I have work to do for my next tutorial and I'm so afraid I'll hand it in late and end up dropping out or something.

I went to the Creative Writing Group yesterday. Scary Suit Guy came along as well, when we were playing writing games he ended up writing something based around Pink Floyd lyrics. He reckons he can convert me to liking Pink Floyd. Somehow I think I would know if I liked Pink Floyd by now, I've heard Clive's music enough...

What we were meant to do was write a short piece based around a character description from a famous text. Mine was Oscar Wilde, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', reading a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little, flowerlike face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion.

I was quite pleased with my piece, I meant to type it out for you but instead I'll have to do it from memory because I really can't be bothered to go back to my room and get it.

"Damn PMS," her father cursed, as Natalie stomped up the stairs for the nineteenth time that day. Actually it wasn't PMS, but Natalie was still using that excuse so she could finally have free use of her mother's dark chocolate supply. In any case, PMS served as a useful explanation for the father to use for his daughter's ridiculous behaviour.

Natalie had turned seventeen a few weeks before, and throughout her life had been a constant source of anguish to those about her. Her parents could not understand why she was such a picky eater, and so violent about it too. Once when she was two years old, she had thrown her spinach bake across the kitchen after her parents had patiently insisted for the third time that it was good for her. She had worn the adorable dresses they dressed in her with ill-grace, covering them with mud during rough-and-tumble games.

Another thing they had never been able to impress on her was the art of tactful lying. At family dinner parties she didn't hesitate to respond to the comment "Don't you think Aunt Isabelle has lost a lot of weight?" with a short and painfully honest, "No, not really."

"Why should she have?" Natalie would say, when reprimanded, "She looks better plump." Her parents wondered if she was a bit simple.

And she was so pretty - and so why did she insist on shying away from all make-up apart from black eye-shadow and weird purple contact lenses?

She never played those classical CDs they bought her either. She preferred to frighten the neighbours with dreadful rock music like the Beatles.

Her parents despaired.

Natalie, on the other hand, retired with the dark chocolate and wondered how she'd got such ridiculous parents.

I like writing games, because the idea is that everyone (who isn't too shy to :) ) reads something out, and even if it's a bit naff or unstructured, no-one really minds. I'm a bit shy to bring along my other stuff to read, most of the people who read write fantasy or sci-fi, or poetry which is kinda cool, but I don't have anything under those genres which I would dare read out :) (Except maybe The Crystal Set, I have a feeling they'd like that story). Someone read the first chapter of his novel yesterday, it was first person present tense, very cleverly written. Most of my own stuff is rather mainstream... maybe deceptively so :) And I write about teenagers mostly, because I still am a teenager, and we teenagers are much more interesting than you might think. It saddens me that things written about teenagers are usually considered substandard unless the writer was J.D. Salinger or J.K. Rowling (or William Shakespeare, as the above Oscar Wilde quotation about Juliet demonstrates). But then I had this rant a while back...

Three hour practical today. Actually, it wasn't that long (we got to leave early) but it felt it :) Onion cells... It was mainly learning how to use the microscopes, useful but not very interesting.

Random word for today: Plasmolysis

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