July 2014 Issue of The Scribblers Newsletter
Welcome to the July issue of The Scribblers. In this issue we have new writing prompts and part four of the story "Sisters" by Jamie Baker and a look at Neil Simon, a prolific American playwright and screenwriter with 30 plays and nearly as many screenplays to his credit.
Welcome to the July issue of The Scribblers. In this issue we have new writing prompts and part four of the story "Sisters" by Jamie Baker and a look at Neil Simon, a prolific American playwright and screenwriter with 30 plays and nearly as many screenplays to his credit.
July Writing Prompts
Each month we try to provide prompts for you to use. Pick one or more and write 500 to 1,000 words using the prompt/s as the basis of your story.
1. I was awakened by the neighbors' barking dog at 3 A.M. to find my husband prowling around the trees in that same neighbors' back yard.
2. "You will pay for that, Missy," my boss, known throughout the company as Crazy Judy, shouted as she stomped up the stairs to the company President's office.
3. Old Mr. Williams stumbled down the sidewalk mumbling to himself and carrying a canvas tote bag.
Very Short Fiction Contest
Glimmer Train magazine is hosting a Very Short Fiction contest here .
1st place $1,500 & publication in Issue 95. Deadline: 7/31.
Second- and 3rd-place winners receive $500/$300, respectively, or, if accepted for publication, $700.
Open to all writers, this category welcomes stories up to 3000 words.Reading fee is $15 per story. Please, no more than three submissions per category.
Guidelines are here.
Winners and finalists will be announced in the October 1 bulletin, and finalists will be contacted directly the week before.
Sisters Part 4
Mikes whining outside my door pulled me to the surface for a
few seconds. The light outside the
window was dim and grey. I heard my dad
telling Mike to be quiet and then I sunk back down again. When I woke up again,
my alarm clock said it was almost 11.
Barefoot, I slipped down the hallway to the kitchen, passing my brothers
who were both asleep on the living room floor.
Dad was sacked out on the couch.
Mom was at the kitchen table, her cigarettes, ashtray and coffee
cup assembled on the placemat. She was
still in her pajamas, one slipper dangling from her crossed leg, the morning
paper hiding her face. She always got
the Tribune, the city paper, no matter where we lived, even like now, 20 miles
outside of the city. And she read it every
day, though I don’t know why. She never
went to any public meetings, not even the PTA.
She didn’t vote. She wasn’t
interested in sports. She never
commented on the police blotter, or the war or the protests, not even Ann
Landers, and I never heard her laugh at the comics.
If asked, I guess she might say she needed the paper so she
could check out the sales, but that wasn’t true. She only shopped at May Fair, never A&P
or Safeway, and she always bought the
same stuff, on sale or not, Starkist tuna, Chef Boy R De raviolis, Campbell
soups, Scott paper products. And her
Winstons and the half-and-half for her coffee, always Folgers.
I drank some orange juice, waiting for mom to say something. The silence made me feel bad, so after I
rinsed my glass and put it in the dish drainer, I went back to bed and read my
history book until I fell asleep again.
In the afternoon I went outside and stood around by the
pool, watching grey clouds rolls across the water. Lots of dead bugs and leaves floated along
the pool’s edges, so I took down the pool net that hangs on the side of the
pool shed and started scooping out the junk.
I had 2 small piles of debris on the deck when pony-tail guy
showed up. He had on the same grungy
jeans as last night, but the t-shirt under his jean jacket was different and
his hair hung straight to his shoulder instead of being held back by a rubber
band.
“Hey,” he said, “didn’t I meet you last night?” and he
thumbed over his shoulder towards Ginger and Marci’s apartment.
“Yeah, I was at their party.”
“Carol, right?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me your name.”
“Roy Brown,” pulling a pack of Camels out his jacket pocket
and pointing it at me. I shook my head.
“My friends call me Reno,” lighting a cigarette with a
silver Zippo.
“Why?”
“Because that’s where I’m from,” blowing smoke up where it
faded into the grey sky.
“I’ve got my van out in the parking lot. We could go out there and get it on.”
He laughed with a snort, smoke spurting from his nostrils.
“I’m only 14.”
“So, that’s not too young, as long as it’s consensual. You know what that means, right? That you give you’re willing, that you want to
do it.”
I couldn’t look at him, just kept scooping dead bugs out of
the pool.
“I can make your first time really good, believe me.”
“No thanks,” I said, fishing the cigarette butt out of the
water.
“Why not, you’re gonna do it sooner or later. May as well be now, with someone who knows
what he’s doing.”
“I don’t want to get pregnant.”
“Hey, that’s not a problem. That’s why I take a pill every day, I don’t
want any little Renos running around.”
I knew girls could take birth control pills, but could
guys? I never heard of that before. The sound of a door shutting echoed across
the pool and I looked up to see Ginger walking towards us.
“Hey, Carol. Roy,
what BS are you spewing now?”
“Just doing little educating. Knowledge is power, right?”
“Carol,” it was my dad calling from the open door of the
apartment. “Come up here please.”
Ginger took the pool net from me, “See you later.”
Dad was taking the boys out to play miniature golf and eat
dinner to give Mom a break. I could go
if I wanted, but I said no, I’d rather stay home.
“Who were talking with down at the pool?”
I shrugged, “I don’t know, just some people who live here I
guess.”
“Well, they looked hippies, like real low lifes. Not
the kind of people you want to associate with.
You can make better friends than that.”
A Look at Neil Simon
Born July 4, 1927, playwright and screenwriter Neil Simon grew up during the great depression in The Bronx, New York. He has written over thirty plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, most adapted from his plays. He has received more Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.
Simon's childhood was difficult and mostly unhappy due to his parents' "tempestuous marriage", and ongoing financial hardship caused by the Depression.
With his parents' financial hardships affecting their marriage, and giving him a mostly unhappy and unstable childhood, he often took refuge in movie theaters where he enjoyed watching the early comedians like Charlie Chaplin, which inspired him to become a comedy writer.
His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional hardship. As a result, Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with relatives, or else their parents took in boarders for some income. Simon recalls this period: "The horror of those years was that I didn't come from one broken home but five. It got so bad at one point that we took in a couple of butchers who paid their rent in lamb chops."
During an interview with writer Lawrence Grobel, Simon stated: "To this day I never really knew what the reason for all the fights and battles were about between the two of them.... She'd hate him and be very angry, but he would come back and she would take him back. She really loved him." Simon points out that one of the reasons he became a writer was his need to be independent of such family concerns when growing up.
"It's partly why I became a writer, because I learned to fend for myself very early. . . . I began to think early on, at the age of seven or eight, that I'd better start taking care of myself somehow, emotionally.... It made me strong as an independent person."
I think part of what made me a comedy writer is the blocking out of some of the really ugly, painful things in my childhood and covering it up with a humorous attitude.... do something to laugh until I was able to forget what was hurting.
Simon attributes childhood movies for inspiring him to some day write comedy: "I wanted to make a whole audience fall onto the floor, writhing and laughing so hard that some of them pass out." In referring to Chaplin's influence, Simon noted that it was his "appreciation of Chaplin's ability to make people laugh that was the only thing that I saw in the future for myself as a connection with people. I was never going to be an athlete or a doctor."
At the age of fifteen, Simon and his brother created a series of comedy sketches for employees at an annual department store event. During these high-school
years, he also enjoyed reading humor by Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman and S. J. Perelman. Simon recalls: "I read humorists... I read all the adventure stories... I was at the library three days a week as a kid. I read everything, I think, except the classics—which I'm going to get to one day."
After a few years in the Army Air Force Reserve, he began writing comedy scripts for radio and some popular early television shows. Among them were The Phil Silvers Show and Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows in 1950, where he worked alongside other young writers including Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Selma Diamond.
He began writing his own plays beginning with Come Blow Your Horn in 1961, which took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on
Broadway. It was followed by two more successful plays, Barefoot in the Park in 1963 and The Odd Couple in 1965, for which he won a Tony Award, making him a national celebrity and "the hottest new playwright on Broadway."
His style ranged from romantic comedy to farce to more serious dramatic comedy. Overall, he has garnered seventeen Tony nominations and won three. During one season, he had four successful plays showing on Broadway at the same time, and in 1983 became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor. During the time between the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, he wrote both original screenplays and stage plays, with some films actually based on his plays.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1991 for Lost in Yonkers, critics began to take notice of the depths, complexity and issues of universal interest in his stories, which expressed serious concerns of most average people. His comedies were based around subjects such as marital conflict, infidelity, sibling rivalry, adolescence, and fear of aging.
Most of his plays were also partly autobiographical, portraying his troubled childhood and different stages of his life, creating characters who were typically New Yorkers and often Jewish, like himself. Simon's facility with dialogue gives his stories a rare blend of realism, humor and seriousness which audiences find easy to identify with.
Theater critic John Lahr describes Simon's primary theme as being about "the silent majority", many of whom are "frustrated, edgy, and insecure". Simon's
characters are also portrayed as "likable" and easy for audiences to identify with, often having difficult relationships in marriage, friendship or business, as they "struggle to find a sense of belonging".
Each month we try to provide prompts for you to use. Pick one or more and write 500 to 1,000 words using the prompt/s as the basis of your story.
1. I was awakened by the neighbors' barking dog at 3 A.M. to find my husband prowling around the trees in that same neighbors' back yard.
2. "You will pay for that, Missy," my boss, known throughout the company as Crazy Judy, shouted as she stomped up the stairs to the company President's office.
3. Old Mr. Williams stumbled down the sidewalk mumbling to himself and carrying a canvas tote bag.
1. I was awakened by the neighbors' barking dog at 3 A.M. to find my husband prowling around the trees in that same neighbors' back yard.
2. "You will pay for that, Missy," my boss, known throughout the company as Crazy Judy, shouted as she stomped up the stairs to the company President's office.
3. Old Mr. Williams stumbled down the sidewalk mumbling to himself and carrying a canvas tote bag.
Very Short Fiction Contest
1st place $1,500 & publication in Issue 95. Deadline: 7/31.
Second- and 3rd-place winners receive $500/$300, respectively, or, if accepted for publication, $700.
Open to all writers, this category welcomes stories up to 3000 words.Reading fee is $15 per story. Please, no more than three submissions per category.
Guidelines are here.
Winners and finalists will be announced in the October 1 bulletin, and finalists will be contacted directly the week before.
Sisters Part 4
by Jamie Baker
Mikes whining outside my door pulled me to the surface for a
few seconds. The light outside the
window was dim and grey. I heard my dad
telling Mike to be quiet and then I sunk back down again. When I woke up again,
my alarm clock said it was almost 11.
Barefoot, I slipped down the hallway to the kitchen, passing my brothers
who were both asleep on the living room floor.
Dad was sacked out on the couch.
Mom was at the kitchen table, her cigarettes, ashtray and coffee
cup assembled on the placemat. She was
still in her pajamas, one slipper dangling from her crossed leg, the morning
paper hiding her face. She always got
the Tribune, the city paper, no matter where we lived, even like now, 20 miles
outside of the city. And she read it every
day, though I don’t know why. She never
went to any public meetings, not even the PTA.
She didn’t vote. She wasn’t
interested in sports. She never
commented on the police blotter, or the war or the protests, not even Ann
Landers, and I never heard her laugh at the comics.
If asked, I guess she might say she needed the paper so she
could check out the sales, but that wasn’t true. She only shopped at May Fair, never A&P
or Safeway, and she always bought the
same stuff, on sale or not, Starkist tuna, Chef Boy R De raviolis, Campbell
soups, Scott paper products. And her
Winstons and the half-and-half for her coffee, always Folgers.
I drank some orange juice, waiting for mom to say something. The silence made me feel bad, so after I
rinsed my glass and put it in the dish drainer, I went back to bed and read my
history book until I fell asleep again.
In the afternoon I went outside and stood around by the
pool, watching grey clouds rolls across the water. Lots of dead bugs and leaves floated along
the pool’s edges, so I took down the pool net that hangs on the side of the
pool shed and started scooping out the junk.
I had 2 small piles of debris on the deck when pony-tail guy
showed up. He had on the same grungy
jeans as last night, but the t-shirt under his jean jacket was different and
his hair hung straight to his shoulder instead of being held back by a rubber
band.
“Hey,” he said, “didn’t I meet you last night?” and he
thumbed over his shoulder towards Ginger and Marci’s apartment.
“Yeah, I was at their party.”
“Carol, right?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me your name.”
“Roy Brown,” pulling a pack of Camels out his jacket pocket
and pointing it at me. I shook my head.
“My friends call me Reno,” lighting a cigarette with a
silver Zippo.
“Why?”
“Because that’s where I’m from,” blowing smoke up where it
faded into the grey sky.
“I’ve got my van out in the parking lot. We could go out there and get it on.”
“Get what on?”
He laughed with a snort, smoke spurting from his nostrils.
“You need schooling.
Get it on, ball, have sex.”
“I’m only 14.”
“So, that’s not too young, as long as it’s consensual. You know what that means, right? That you give you’re willing, that you want to
do it.”
I couldn’t look at him, just kept scooping dead bugs out of
the pool.
“What’s the matter?
Are you afraid? You’ve never done it have you?” flicking his cigarette
into the pool, where it hit the water with a small hiss.
“I can make your first time really good, believe me.”
“No thanks,” I said, fishing the cigarette butt out of the
water.
“Why not, you’re gonna do it sooner or later. May as well be now, with someone who knows
what he’s doing.”
“I don’t want to get pregnant.”
“Hey, that’s not a problem. That’s why I take a pill every day, I don’t
want any little Renos running around.”
I knew girls could take birth control pills, but could
guys? I never heard of that before. The sound of a door shutting echoed across
the pool and I looked up to see Ginger walking towards us.
“Hey, Carol. Roy,
what BS are you spewing now?”
“Just doing little educating. Knowledge is power, right?”
“Carol,” it was my dad calling from the open door of the
apartment. “Come up here please.”
Ginger took the pool net from me, “See you later.”
Dad was taking the boys out to play miniature golf and eat
dinner to give Mom a break. I could go
if I wanted, but I said no, I’d rather stay home.
“Who were talking with down at the pool?”
I shrugged, “I don’t know, just some people who live here I
guess.”
“Well, they looked hippies, like real low lifes. Not
the kind of people you want to associate with.
You can make better friends than that.”
A Look at Neil Simon
Born July 4, 1927, playwright and screenwriter Neil Simon grew up during the great depression in The Bronx, New York. He has written over thirty plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, most adapted from his plays. He has received more Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.
Simon's childhood was difficult and mostly unhappy due to his parents' "tempestuous marriage", and ongoing financial hardship caused by the Depression.
With his parents' financial hardships affecting their marriage, and giving him a mostly unhappy and unstable childhood, he often took refuge in movie theaters where he enjoyed watching the early comedians like Charlie Chaplin, which inspired him to become a comedy writer.
His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional hardship. As a result, Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with relatives, or else their parents took in boarders for some income. Simon recalls this period: "The horror of those years was that I didn't come from one broken home but five. It got so bad at one point that we took in a couple of butchers who paid their rent in lamb chops."
During an interview with writer Lawrence Grobel, Simon stated: "To this day I never really knew what the reason for all the fights and battles were about between the two of them.... She'd hate him and be very angry, but he would come back and she would take him back. She really loved him." Simon points out that one of the reasons he became a writer was his need to be independent of such family concerns when growing up.
"It's partly why I became a writer, because I learned to fend for myself very early. . . . I began to think early on, at the age of seven or eight, that I'd better start taking care of myself somehow, emotionally.... It made me strong as an independent person."
I think part of what made me a comedy writer is the blocking out of some of the really ugly, painful things in my childhood and covering it up with a humorous attitude.... do something to laugh until I was able to forget what was hurting.
Simon attributes childhood movies for inspiring him to some day write comedy: "I wanted to make a whole audience fall onto the floor, writhing and laughing so hard that some of them pass out." In referring to Chaplin's influence, Simon noted that it was his "appreciation of Chaplin's ability to make people laugh that was the only thing that I saw in the future for myself as a connection with people. I was never going to be an athlete or a doctor."
At the age of fifteen, Simon and his brother created a series of comedy sketches for employees at an annual department store event. During these high-school
years, he also enjoyed reading humor by Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman and S. J. Perelman. Simon recalls: "I read humorists... I read all the adventure stories... I was at the library three days a week as a kid. I read everything, I think, except the classics—which I'm going to get to one day."
After a few years in the Army Air Force Reserve, he began writing comedy scripts for radio and some popular early television shows. Among them were The Phil Silvers Show and Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows in 1950, where he worked alongside other young writers including Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Selma Diamond.
He began writing his own plays beginning with Come Blow Your Horn in 1961, which took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on
Broadway. It was followed by two more successful plays, Barefoot in the Park in 1963 and The Odd Couple in 1965, for which he won a Tony Award, making him a national celebrity and "the hottest new playwright on Broadway."
His style ranged from romantic comedy to farce to more serious dramatic comedy. Overall, he has garnered seventeen Tony nominations and won three. During one season, he had four successful plays showing on Broadway at the same time, and in 1983 became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor. During the time between the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, he wrote both original screenplays and stage plays, with some films actually based on his plays.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1991 for Lost in Yonkers, critics began to take notice of the depths, complexity and issues of universal interest in his stories, which expressed serious concerns of most average people. His comedies were based around subjects such as marital conflict, infidelity, sibling rivalry, adolescence, and fear of aging.
Most of his plays were also partly autobiographical, portraying his troubled childhood and different stages of his life, creating characters who were typically New Yorkers and often Jewish, like himself. Simon's facility with dialogue gives his stories a rare blend of realism, humor and seriousness which audiences find easy to identify with.
Theater critic John Lahr describes Simon's primary theme as being about "the silent majority", many of whom are "frustrated, edgy, and insecure". Simon's
characters are also portrayed as "likable" and easy for audiences to identify with, often having difficult relationships in marriage, friendship or business, as they "struggle to find a sense of belonging".
And Finally...
We are always looking for articles and short stories to publish, as well as suggestions for the newsletter. Please send any ideas, stories, etc. to Colleen. We'd love to see any contributions you'd like to make to The Scribblers.
If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please email Colleen with the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject line and we will remove you from our mailing list.
We are always looking for articles and short stories to publish, as well as suggestions for the newsletter. Please send any ideas, stories, etc. to Colleen. We'd love to see any contributions you'd like to make to The Scribblers.
If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please email Colleen with the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject line and we will remove you from our mailing list.
