Link to “Puddles” on Bone Parade.
My first fiction workshop in my MFA program at Alabama, I told my friends that I was a realist.
The time for my first workshop rolled around, and I brought in a story entitled “Puddles” about a young boy adopted by a fundamentalist Christian family, who has a hard time fitting in. The story is about Christian charity and childhood and poverty and resilient communities. The boy’s clothing is all donated by the church. The family’s mother works at the local thrift store. The kids all make fun of the boy’s weird habits. Sounds fairly realistic, right? The problem was the boy was green. Half frog, he rose up out of a river and leaked foul carp-smelling water when he cried at Finding Nemo. He had webbed fingers and toes and hardly ever spoke. He ate buttons off of people’s clothes.
A good friend of mine, a realist, openly laughed at me. They said, “I thought you wrote realism.”
I said, “I do.”
What followed was a brief and painful discussion of the definition of realism. My problem was that the story is a real one to me. I live in Southern Appalachia, a community of displaced children and drug-addicted children and children raised by extended family members. Growing up we were all afraid that the government would come and take us away and place us in the custody of other people because our families didn’t have enough food in the cabinets, or because sometimes we didn’t have running water or cleaning supplies. Because sometimes we were left alone for too long. We were told to never open the door for strangers, not because it might be a kidnapper, but because it might be the Department of Child Services.
Even in my relatively privileged upbringing, raised by my grandparents back in the woods on Cherokee Lake, I still grew up with opiate addicts and alcoholics. I was still molested as a child. I still knew not to let strangers in.
To me, the boy’s greenness was an extension of the language I was using to tell the story. A physical manifestation of his otherness, a tall tale, just as real as John Henry or Paul Bunyan or Jack Tales. Just as real as Jonah or David and Goliath or Paul on the road to Damascus. A thing I wanted the reader to accept as fact.
The green boy was the first time I thought of my writing as having central archetypes or Major Arcana. I’ve always been interested in the tarot as a guidebook in Western storytelling and in language’s close relationship with metaphor. I’ve been pondering ways to marry the two for some time.
I would encourage you to spend some time considering your writing’s Major Arcana or central archetypes. There are plenty of books on the tarot and on Western mythology. But I am a tv lover myself, so I recommend the totally free, totally fun: TVTropes.org (link). They even have a button in the header to generate a random trope article.
Here is the prompt I give my students that spawned the green boy:
The Button Prompt:
Get a jar of buttons, a handful of buttons, what have you. My button collection is a combination of purchasing buttons from the local Walmart and hoarding the extra buttons that come with a shirt like a magpie. Once you’ve got your assortment, shake your vessel and choose a button at random.
Then answer these questions about it:
1. What does the button look like?
2. What article of clothing did it come off of?
3. Who lost it?
4. Why did they lose it?
5. What are 10 things that the character who lost the button wants? (One can’t be to find the button.)
6. What are 3 things this character is afraid of?
7. What does the character who lost the buttons shoes look like?
8. What does the house they grew up in look like? Smell like? Sound like?
Now, spend 20 minutes writing a scene where your character either finds the button or loses it. Do this as a freewrite. Do not stop writing; don’t let your pencil, pen, typing fingers, leave the page. I recommend setting a kitchen timer to keep you honest.
As always, if you found this helpful, keep an eye peeled for the return of my summer Make the Rent workshops and/or drop me a dime on Venmo @wndinwiddie.
Really great article and a wonderful prompt. I used buttons in my high school teaching career. When it came time to learn how to outline, I’d throw all the buttons from my button box onto the floor. I then invited students to “play” with them. I usually limited the players to 3-5 kids. Within a minute I could see the patterns. Students began sorting… by size, shape, etc. That was an easy lead-in to how to organize a paper by writing an outline. When I retired, I allowed some students to choose their favorite buttons. Each year, when students saw the buttons on the floor, one would say, “Yes!” Older students had spread the story of button day.
That’s not a bad idea for college students either! I may steal that one. Although with the pandemic, it may need to be more of a virtual sorting. 🙂
Thanks for a great essay and prompt, Wendy!
This made me think of Fred Chappell’s fiction:
To me, the boy’s greenness was an extension of the language I was using to tell the story. A physical manifestation of his otherness, a tall tale, just as real as John Henry or Paul Bunyan or Jack Tales. Just as real as Jonah or David and Goliath or Paul on the road to Damascus. A thing I wanted the reader to accept as fact.