From the Fan Fiction Unbound Archive,
posted by conTessaofthecastle:
The rain lasted all night. Daphne and Astoria slept fitfully, waking each other with every movement. The next morning was damp, but the rain had stopped. They started walking early, eager to leave the cramped cave. Water dripped from trees as they started off through the forest. Daphne was worried about making up for the time they got lost during the storm. Lord Quintana’s harridans must be using powerful seeking spells, which would find them eventually. She walked more quickly. Astoria wordlessly kept pace.
Soph.
For our individual projects, they tell us we can work wherever we want, including the rooms on the third floor. No one is staying up there, but they opened the rooms in case we want to work alone or with someone else, away from the others. We’re supposed to tell the instructors where we are so they can check in on us and talk about what we’re doing.
Yin surprises me by inviting me to go up there and work with her. I’m still pissed about the Orly thing, but I need to find a way to impress Professor Forsythe. Yin must know her more than she would admit at pizza the other night, since they’re on a first-name basis. We go up the stairs with a few other girls, including Tess.
Yin asks, “Soph, why sonnets?”
I feel as if I’ve been answering this for years. “I like the tradition and the challenge of organizing my thoughts and feelings. I like the setup, the argument, and the resolution. I like the sensation that I am doing something great poets have been doing for centuries. I like to write in a style I wouldn’t use when I speak to you.”
At the top of the stairs, I see the rooms are smaller than ours. Yin and I choose one and sit on the floor, leaning against the bed.
I continue, “Also, I like the format, but I want to use it to communicate ideas that never would have been in sonnets when they were developed, like social issues, not love and flowers and pretty things.”
Now I ask Yin, “Why free verse?”
“I like the freedom of it, working out how words sound without forcing them into a rhyme or a pattern someone’s done before,” she says matter-of-factly. “But I’m interested in something more tightly composed. I thought we could work together. I’d like to see how you do it.”
I’m flattered and a little intimidated. I don’t have much of a method. I think about what’s going on and then fill in the structure. When I explain it to her, she says it’s not that different from what she does. So, I take out my laptop and show her, using a spreadsheet with the fourteen ten-syllable lines, in an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG pattern, all set up.
“What do you want to write about?” I ask.
She tells me about stuff that’s going on at her school: a fight over whether a teacher should stay. The kids like him, but the parents don’t. We shoot ideas back and forth, putting the kids’ feelings in the first stanza, then the adults’ in the next, then the conflict in the third and, finally, a couplet resolving it. Yin wants to do it without rhyming. That doesn’t sound right to me. A sonnet has traditional rules: fourteen lines of ten syllables each, with a specific rhyme scheme.
Yin asks, “Who’s your instructor? I’ve got Joan.”
“I thought you had Prof—Helen!”
“No, Joan. Why did you think I had Helen?”
“I saw you talking with her when I went in to talk to Grace.”
“Oh. I was trying to switch my night to make dinner so I can cook with Chris.”
She tells me I’m lucky I got Grace. I ask why, swallowing my objection to Chris.
“Because she writes poetry herself. She’s some kind of prodigy. I think she’s one of those people who can make it up on the spot and it always rhymes, with perfect meter. Why—don’t you like her?”
I explain that I had hoped to work with Professor Forsythe since she knows all about the structures that interest me, leaving out that it would be good for college admissions.
Yin says she thinks “Helen” is too stiff. “Helen contacted me after I got this New York State Teachers’ grant for new media last year. She called my high school about it and wanted me to apply for this conference. But she’s been totally distant so far this week.” So much for getting anything helpful from Yin.
I’m about to confront her about Orly when Joan pokes her head in. “Hi, how’s it going?”
We explain where we are. I tell her that sonnets have a complex rhyming scheme that makes them sonnets, and Joan says, “Soph, what’s wrong with playing a little bit with the piece? Yin wants shape, but not necessarily rules. Let her try that and then listen to it. Maybe you want to try something more like free verse yourself. You’re here to do something new, right?”
“I do want to do something new. I want to try a more complicated structure,” I protest.
“What’s more complicated than no set structure?”
Tess.
Professor Forsythe tells me desktop computers are available in the third-floor writing rooms, and I go up there to work on my latest chapter before lunch. Soph is talking to Yin down the hall, and I wonder if they’re discussing Orly. I’m trying to figure out how to put some of myself in the story, but for some reason all I can think of is Angie. I know I can’t put a cow into a story about witches, but I wonder how she’s doing. I text Mom to ask. She tells me that the calf is still bottle-feeding, and is growing. Then she tells me that Daddy said if she is still doing all right when the conference is over I can name her. That’s how I know he’s forgiven me.
I text Joey and tell him what Professor Forsythe said about my writing.
He sends a reply almost immediately, so he’s bored.
[From Joey to Tess] You’re going to have to figure out how to talk about yourself sometime, Tess. Might as well start now.
I put my phone down and sigh. Things might be better at home, but I still don’t understand these girls at all. Keisha is the only one I’ve met who understands what I write. Professor Forsythe is pushing me to write things I never thought I could put on paper. Chris and Orly are confusing me in ways I don’t know how to figure out. And Soph… Well, Soph is so many different things I can’t begin to count them. She’s smart and funny and clever. She knows about all kinds of things I don’t: how to use a subway, how to get girls to flock to her like a celebrity. But she doesn’t seem to know how to convince Professor Forsythe to like her, or how to solve the problems between Chris and Orly. She did offer to help me write poetry for my spells. Maybe if we work together I can figure out the rest of it.
Joey’s text is stuck in my head: “Might as well start now.” But so are Daddy’s words, “Make us proud, Tess.” I don’t know who to listen to, and the more I try to figure it out, the more confused I end up.
I stare blankly at my computer screen. Daphne and Astoria are stuck in the woods, wet and scared, with no clear way to shelter. Maybe if I make one of them do something totally unexpected, that will point me in a new direction.
* * *
From Soph Alcazar’s Writing Journal,
February 13, 2018
Structure, rhyme scheme, meter, all in my lane.
But here they tell me no, confusion reigns.