During my sophomore year at the university, I took a Creative Writing class. Every Monday we would have to turn in what our teacher labeled as “Brain wiggles.” Essentially, these “brain wiggles” were outrageous prompts that required a 250-300-word response. One of the prompts tasked us to write about how you felt the first time that you fell in love. Not feeling the romantic love theme, as it was around Valentine’s Day and I was single, I took my response in a different direction. I talked about a rather under-appreciated type of love, friendship. In my response, I described how I met two girls at church camp during the summer between 8th grade and high school. The camp was only a week long yet we built a friendship that has lasted 7 years. In the “brain wiggle”, I also spoke about how are able to use little actions and acknowledgments to make you feel loved and appreciated every day. They are there by your side as romantic love fades and hopefully there for your lifetime.

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I wanted to dedicate my experiments to explore the dialogue between friendships that I discussed within that response. I find it especially interesting to hear about how two friends met and how they keep their relationship strong. For my first experiment, I decided to write a meet-cute between two best friends. I wanted to capture that feeling that one has when they meet someone they immediately bond with, a person that you feel that you have known your whole life. That is how I felt with my friends from church camp and what I wanted to covey in my sketch and sample. I also want to use this experiment to practice writing dialogue. It is something that I struggle capturing on the page. I hope this experiment allows me to work on the tricky craft of creating a realistic conversation and a great “meet-cute.”

Writing a short story requires the author to explore characters, settings, conflicts, and themes all within a limited amount of pages. The greatest short stories do not expose these mechanics to the reader. They take risks even knowing that every page, sentence, and word is essential to the narrative. With the intricacy of the genre of short stories, I tend to stick within my comfort level by creating pieces with primarily description. I have always been hesitant to add dialogue. Dialogue is even more intricate than a short story. One has to weave it conductively within the plot and description. However, one wrong word or tone can leave the dialogue feeling fake, lifeless, and tiring to the audience. I will be shaping my short story similar to a few models that I found.

            The first model is labeled one of the Best Russian Short Stories. It is titled One Autumn Night by Maxim Gorky[1]. This story features two homeless young adults that meet each other dumpster diving and strike up a conversation. This leads to a quick comradery while scavenging for food and warmth on the street. This story was chosen as one of my models because of its eloquent use of dialogue. It fits seamlessly within the description of the setting, plot and character development. The dialogue was also used to sharpen the development of the characters. The accents that they used and the words they would say versus what they would think.  I also chose this story because this is the age demographic that I want to use for my piece and the overarching theme of friendship, especially found in odd places. I hope to learn from this piece and achieve the type of pace and realness that the dialogue in this story provides.

            The second model that I found was a short story titled The Moons of Jupiter[2]. This story was written by Alice Munro. Similar to the model above, this story also experimented with dialogue, however, they utilized one character that could not speak. This story surrounds two women, who reside in a nursing home, that have known each other for over eighty years. Their nursing facility gets a new resident that cannot speak due to a stroke. I think that this dialogue does an even better job of capturing the character eccentricities and personalities. The author used poems and songs from memories within these women’s lives and tied them back to their friendship. They also used their dialogue to explain the motivations of the man in the wheelchair. They would speak his emotions and actions for him. Again, this dialogue was more effective because there were more realistic and relatable sentences and words that the characters would actually use. I want to use the believability of the character’s words to stop myself from playing off of troupes and eloquent language that may sound fake to an audience’s ear and eyes.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Best_Russian_Short_Stories/One_Autumn_Night

[2] http://www.bestfree-book.net/Classics/the_moons_of_jupiter/10.html

• The Characters: Ava and Margot

  • Ava junior at the University of Wisconsin. She is moving into her first apartment near campus. She lives in a one-bedroom apartment alone. She is studying computer science. She wants to be a future web designer.

  • Margot is living a few doors down from Ava. They are neighbors but they have not met yet. She is also a junior living with her roommate. This is her second year living in the apartments. She is majoring in communications and does not know her exact career path.

• The Plot:

  • In the beginning of the story, Ava is waving to her parents as they drive away from her new apartment. She turns around from her window and looks over the boxes, scattered clothing, and plastic covered furniture.

  • After slowly making progress unpacking her apartment and watching the Kardashians on her new cable set, she takes some of her trash down to the dumpster.

  • On her way down, Ava can hear the voices of two girls and sees two sets of parents carry furniture up the stairs. She passes by an open door a few apartments down from hers. She looks in and makes eye contact with one of the girls, Margot. She waves but has to move out of the way to let the parents into the apartment with the couch.

  • When she comes back from throwing out the trash, the door is closed.

  • A few weeks later, Ava is making dinner, or attempting to make dinner. She has barely cooked before, living on dining hall food and her mother’s cooking. She is trying to figure out how to sauté by looking at YouTube videos. Ava is trying to make a chicken and kale pasta. She realizes that she forgot the pasta in the car so she turns of the burner.

  • She runs down to her car to get the pasta that had fallen out of her grocery bags in the back of her car. She has her keys in hand jingling with the exuberant amount included on the ring, plus a real fox fur purple pom-pom. She rushes to her car as she is plenty hungry by now.

  • [Start of Sample]

    • As she unlocks her car, she looks but does not see the pasta in the back seat or the trunk of the car. She puts her phone in the cup holder to look under the front seat and finds the box of pasta wedged under the machinery.

    • She grabs the pasta and has the doors open. She presses the lock button on the door and goes to shut the door. Her lanyard on her keys catches the seat belt handle on the passenger side door. She doesn’t realize that the lanyard pulled her keys in until the jingle is combined with the slam of the door. She looks over to see just her little purple pompom hanging out the door with the rest of her keys locked inside as well as her phone in the cup holder.

    • Ava tries her best to break into her way into the car. Not having her phone and living alone, she weighs her options as she stares at the keys inside of the car. She can’t break the door open, nor does she have the tools to push the locked door open. However, she realizes that she really needs her phone to go out tonight and also her car to drive to work in the morning.

    • She, then, remembers the girls that were inside of the apartment a few doors down. Maybe one of them would be willing to let her look up a tow truck and use their phone to call.

    • She luckily has her apartment key and knocks on their door. Margot opens the door and feels sorry for the distraught and stuck Ava. She welcomes her with snacks and a phone to call. Instead of heading back to her apartment to wait for the tow truck employee to unlock her car, Ava stays with Margot and they bond over their embarrassing stories.

  •  [End of Sample]

  • Fast forward a few years and they are both maids of honor at each others wedding and tell the story about how they first met.

Ava quickly walked down the back stairs of her apartment complex that led to the parking lot. The keys in her hand jingled loudly as the multiple key chains clanked together with each step-down. Ava also had a faded and slightly ripped University of Wisconsin lanyard and a bright purple fox fur pom-pom attached to clinking metal ring.

She pushed open the door and listened to the click of the doors as she unlocked her cars. She opened the back doors and bent down to check under the seats for the pasta that escaped her grocery bags during her weekly run to Trader Joe’s. Using her phone’s flashlight, she twisted her body to check the trunk of her car just in case.

Ava remembered that she had put one grocery bag in the front seat on the ride home. Closing the back doors, she whipped open the passenger side door and peered in. She set her phone down in the cup holder so she could use both hands to support her weight as she curved her neck to look under the mechanics of the seat. Seeing the long thin angel hair pasta box that she needed for her sausage and peppers recipe, Ava grabbed the blue container and hit the inside lock button on the passenger side door.

However, as she shut the door she heard her keys jingling, the sound of metal hitting metal and the deafening sound of the door shutting with her keys inside.

She turned around in horror as she saw her lanyard caught around the passenger side seat belt handle. The keys were hanging off the side of the seat and there were a few purple hairs from the pompom caught in the door.

Realizing that those were her only set of keys at school she went to grab her phone from her back pocket. Not finding what she was looking for, the pit of anxiety in her stomach grew as she saw her new floral encased iPhone 8 sitting in the cup holder. 

“Oh shit, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” She said to her car as she pulled and pulled on the handle to no avail. She tried pulling on the side of the door to see if it would budge and let her slip her keys out but her attempts failed. Ava knew that she needed her phone and her car to get to work tomorrow. She totally did not want to have to Uber to work. Ugh, without her phone, she actually couldn’t.

She knew that she had to get into the damn car. She needed a tow truck, or the police, to open her car for her. But how was she going to call?

Luckily, she had her apartment key around her wrist as she bounded up the stairs to knock on the door she saw two girls living in as she moved in. Keeping her fingers crossed behind her back, the door opened to reveal the brunette girl that waved to her a few weeks earlier.

            “Hey, you are the girl from down the hall that I saw, right? I’m Margot.” The brunette girl asked.

            “Yeah, I do, Apartment #4. My name’s Ava.  I hope I’m not bothering you but I really need to use your phone to call a tow truck. I, uh, accidentally locked my keys… and my phone in my car.” Ava said as she blushed at her own stupidity. She quickly added, “I can pay you in pasta” as she held up the blue pasta box.

            Margot laughed and reached into her back pocket to offer Ava her Kate Spade encased IPhone. “Thank you for the offer but I actually already made dinner. You’re welcome to have some while you wait for the tow truck. You can pay me back by making me dinner sometime later.”

            Ava grinned further as she noticed the other girl’s phone. “Oh my gosh, I have the same case! It’s already making me miss my phone.”

            “Just come inside and we get can get it all sorted out. Plus, you can tell me exactly how you locked all your stuff in your car.” Margot said as she once again laughed as she welcomed Ava in and shut the door.

I had a frustrating time writing the sample for my project. I know I wanted to challenge myself with writing more dialogue within my short story but I just kept staring at the blank page wanting to fall into my normal routine of in-depth descriptions of the character’s actions. Every time I would write a sentence of the dialogue, I would have to read it aloud a few times to make sure it did not come across as fake or cheesy. I tried watching a few episodes of television and listening to conversations hoping that would help me grasp the intricacies of dialogue and the awkwardness of meeting someone for the first time.

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After finishing my sample, I was happy with the results. I was to craft dialogue that I felt reflected realistic responses to the events that happened in my short story. I apologize for the cursing during this piece but I have been recently locked out of my car and it is a very frustrating and expensive process. I wanted the dialogue of the characters to reflect those frustrations and stressors.

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If I take this story further for the final project, I want to add more dialogue between the two characters and add more character development for the audience. I want Ava be lonely living alone and slightly sad that she does not have any friends living close to her apartment. I want her friendship with Margot will change her outlook on living in the apartment building and how their friendship is beneficial for both parties