The Kitten & the Neglected Candle
Narrative · Work by Hanna.
Callum’s annotated reading is still to come — for now the piece is shown as Hanna wrote it.
Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash
Two linked vignettes — the kitten sees the candle.
The kitten
It was the WORST THING ON EARTH! Its owner had fallen asleep during its favourite time. The kitten knocked down the lamp and fought with the couch — I'm sure that if she could knock grandma's teeth out just to wake him up, she would, although he didn't have any. (The smell of toast and melted butter wasn't there today.) The look of big, tough stray cats outside the window intimidated her.
She needed her fruit-power treaties if she was going to grow big and strong to defend herself and her beloved owner. It was her time to unleash her max volume.
The candle on the windowsill!!!
The neglected candle
The candle wasn't at all happy when the owners decided electricity was the way to go. Long ago, two sisters lived in a small house down in North Dakota. The sisters had been working relentlessly to afford to upgrade to electricity — a source of energy for everyone in the neighbourhood — the house sitting in darkness, lighting the candle. One day, the two sisters walked into the house holding an electrical lamp, ready to put it away. They made the bed. Beside her perfectly made bed, one sister put away the candle, sitting it in the dusty drawer, and switched on a lamp which sat in the same spot the candle had before.
Years passed and the candle was neglected, until this one event which changed everything: it was a Thursday night when a storm took place where the sisters lived, destroying the power lines and cutting out the power. The sisters were up, puzzled at why everything was dark, and their first instinct was to bring out the forgotten candle.
Perfectionist Jance tried to blow out the candle, only to find — the typical perfectionist Jance had, of course, tried to keep blowing it — it remained the same, no matter how much she tried. It wouldn't go out. After numerous tries, Jance decided to make peace with the candle and moved it to the dining room, where the sisters had dinner every night.
What is taught here
The moves taught against narrative and creative writing, drawn from the practice's own technique record. They describe the category rather than this piece in particular.
- Show, Don't Tell
- Conveying feeling and character through action, image and detail rather than naming the emotion outright.
- Complex, Consistent, Unique Character Framework
- Building a character who is complicated, behaves consistently with that complication, and could not be swapped for anyone else.
- Checklist Technique for Descriptive Writing
- Working a description against a deliberate checklist of elements so nothing is left to chance.
- Logical but Surprising Resolution
- Ending on a turn the reader did not predict but can see, in hindsight, was earned by everything before it.
- Two-Story / Subtext Technique
- Running a second story underneath the surface one, so the piece means more than it says.
- Trust-the-Reader Ending / Cut the Final Over-Explanation
- Restraint in narrative endings — resisting the urge to spell out meaning the story has already implied.
- Mentor-Text Function Annotation (Creative Writing)
- Reading a polished exemplar creative piece and labelling each craft choice by its function in the text, rather than naming the device — asking what it was used to do, not what it is called.
- Object-Introduction: Withhold and Delay the Subject
- Holding back the subject of a description so the reader assembles it from detail before it is named.
More narrative and creative writing published here, and the Clinic works the same moves at the level of a single sentence.