I was browsing old websites from the early 2000's and was fascinated by looking through the guest book pages. People left messages that have survived decades untouched like hieroglyphs on the walls of digital pyramids. So let's add one to The Silent Page! If you visit this site, leave a comment on this page with your name, a note, or anything else you want to save for the future! Cheers to us a few decades from now!
Hello dear readers, welcome to a new format for posts here on the Silent Page! The Cutting Room Floor series will be pieces that are unfinished and probably won't ever be finished but I think are worth sharing. This first one is saved under the name "The Apartment" and tells the story of a young man cleaning out his grandfather's apartment after he passed away.
As part of this series I will also analyze the piece to explain what I was going for, elucidate the writing process, and hopefully make it make sense.
This was my grandfather’s apartment. He lived here in the city for almost his entire retirement. In the past he had worked as a technician, repairing high tech simulators for pilots. His knowledge of applied electronics was beyond that of even the best grad students at the local university. The apartment reflected this. Technical books and drawings on tables, scopes and meters on the walls, a workbench messy with projects only he understood. The faint smell of warm solder still hung in the air.
As you can tell these sentences are pretty rough, but I was trying to setup the grandfather to be similar to my own who was a big inspiration to me. I was sort of shooting for the old "skilled technician who shows that experience outweighs knowledge" stereotype.
I stand at the threshold to his world, a manila envelope of paperwork in hand.
I personally really really like the imagery of this line. Our narrator is both literally at the threshold to the apartment but is also figuratively at the threshold to his grandfather's life as he steps into the task of organizing his things. The idea was for this story to revolve around the process of packing and labelling someone's life after they passed away - a task I was privy to with my late grandfather and one I found both disturbing and strangely beautiful.
It was a cold day in October when I got the call. My grandfather was in the hospital, cancer, aggressive, nothing they could do. I sat down on a bench outside the building with my head in my hands. People passed by, no one said anything. Here was my inspiration in life, dying on the other side of town. I had always wanted to be like him, he had inspired me to pursue these studies and now he wouldn’t see their completion. I don’t know how long I was like that for, but I was snapped out of my rumination by the old math professor leaving to his next class. “Are you ok?” he had asked but I didn’t respond. He sat next to me in the silence. Eventually he left me to my own melancholy.
I started this project on a cold day in early October. Decided it was thematic enough of a season to base the story's exposition in. The character's sadness over his grandfather not getting to see where he ends up after being inspired by him is a personal experience I had and one I wanted to capture in the story. I think the professor's actions are a little strange and I needed to do a rewrite of the ending of the paragraph to make it less disjoint.
A few days later an envelope arrived in my mailbox. Apparently, I had been put down in the will as the one responsible for cleaning out my grandfather’s apartment. Evidently, my extended family had more important matters to attend to.
Here is where I started tying the exposition back to the story. From here it was going to be established that the narrator was the only one in the family who would handle the task of cleaning the apartment and we would follow him as he reflects on what he knew of his grandfather's life. I had little vignettes for a few different mementos he finds that were going to explore the story of his late grandfather and their relationship. I may still explore these concepts in future work but for now this is the station where the train of thought stops.
Overall, its definitely a rough, unfinished draft but I see potential in the ideas and general story outline. What do you, dear readers, think of this style of post? Yay or nay? I kind of like the idea of taking things I'll never finish and exploring them in this manner. I, personally, like seeing how authors/song writers/poets break down their works and expose their inner thought process but that may just be me. Proper pieces soon to come, stay tuned!
(Also, as an aside, if anyone has a knack for being artsy I would love to collaborate on images for these posts. I want to move away from stock images and towards lovely, original work. Reach out at the contact email if interested! - Silent Partner)
I was browsing old websites from the early 2000's and was fascinated by looking through the guest book pages. People left messages that ...
