Opening to a story...
By Rebecca / Spinebreakers Crew
Whilst in Birmingham for a Spinebreakers Live event I attended a creative writing workshop in whch we wrote the opening to a story. This is mine:
You wouldn’t think a caravan could ruin your life, but it can. They’d brought it home when she was five, her mother gushing with excitement. You were able to make out only snippets of her garbled chatter. ‘Always dreamed … such fun … worth the money’ were a few of the fragmented phrases that became the soundtrack to April’s thoughts as she looked in despair at the ugly, white contraption standing in her driveway. Since then her parents had taken it upon themselves to pull her and her brother out of school about once a month for a few days of ‘family adventure’ which consisted of driving around in that monstrosity to remote villages hunting for ‘interesting objects’ in odd shops and country markets. These ‘interesting objects’ or pieces of junk as April preferred to call them, were now piled on every available surface and inconvenient piece of floor in April’s dingy little house. ‘That’s April, she lives in that weird house on Pine Avenue. You know; the freak family with the caravan’. She’d heard someone say that today to a person who’d been in her art class for three years and never noticed her. She looked round at the dilapidated shop fronts from her perch on the creaking swing. It was a desolate part of town. The patch of green with a run down playground that people called a park had been abandoned long ago by the other students in favour of ‘cooler’ places to hang out. For her the hum of the distant motorway was almost soothing. She came here to think, to collect her herself together after each day before entering her nightmarish house full of sickening, smiling faces asking the dreaded question: ‘so how was school?’ With a sigh she pulled herself up and walked dejectedly along the empty road. It was time to go home.