A Tourist in Mayberry

1/8) Daisy Now - Timeout and Time for Some Explaining

Writers.com - Tips for beginning writers. Tip #4 - Do not explain. Let the story's actions/events do the explaining.

Ok, let's slow down a bit because I am ahead of the story, and I have to explain a few things. I am sorry if the timeline is confusing, but I started and stopped this book several times. I kept my story in a diary journal when I was younger, but the journal was joined by a box filled with snippets of story written on a geometry quiz or a sales receipt or the back of discarded junk mail. My story traveled with me to college where I worked on it between distractions: a boy with gray green eyes, a final exam, a job at a diner, an introduction to the legal drinking age (a problem for me even before I was legal).

I would put the story away, but it would whisper to me and demand my attention, especially in the pre-dawn hours before I was fully awake. Tell me, it said.

This was the advice my friend, Geoffrey Guthrie at the Mount Airy News gave me last year about writing this story, "Finish it now, or you never will."

I am committed to finishing this story before I graduate from college. I have been listening and asking questions and taking notes and collecting truth and now, it is time it is told. Bear with me. I am a novice writer so I have to put some kind of order to this hodgepodge of intrigue that is my story. I am using a variety of techniques, including real life newspaper/magazine articles, my diary journal notes, various points of view, and flashbacks and other storytelling devices I have learned in my writing classes. In some incidences I have given you, the reader, a smidgen of daily life at the retirement center and, sometimes, I have told past experiences of the characters so you can understand their motivations. I am a new author, and while I am sure experienced writers would not recommend my methods, I am eager to try new techniques I have learned.

As most writers of real life events, I am not omnipresent so I have to patch the story together using what I have. Because this tale is well documented, I am able to use later retells and some confessions to make my story as accurate as possible. What I don't know, I surmise and take some liberties. It is not so hard to figure out what people are thinking because their actions tell you what's on their minds. I started out telling this story like the reporter I wanted to be, but I broke the rule of "not making yourself part of the story" early on because I am a part of the story.

This story is based on a true story just like a Hollywood blockbuster, and just like a movie viewer, you decide what you want to believe. When you do your fact checking, keep in mind that I changed some names of people who had a minor role in this story - to protect the innocent, but also because I live in this town. As strange as some parts of my story are, remember what my Nana Gail always says, "You can't make this shit up."

And so, here it goes because, in the words of our local Sheriff, " People who go on and on and add words to their explanation of what happened, well that's like picking a scab. Soon enough it will start to bleed."