As I write this, there’s a police drone high overhead in the middle of the block, visible through the window. There are cop cars parked at the intersections on each side of our street, and more on the next block over in both directions, and more after that. Word is, there are “people in a car”—another car, other people, non-officers, non-police cars…—and they too are armed. Word is, “multiple suspects have run…” I only know the story as I’ve heard it, in pieces, all potentially reliable and also potentially unreliable….
Story is told from a particular point-of-view, and this one is currently coming my way via the guessers, the glimpsers, the flash-of-a-moment witnesses, not those directly involved.
The city sent out automated texts and robo-calls: “Please stay indoors until further notice…”
In some other form of writing, all of that could be an action script. As a PSA, it’s stripped down and withholding.
Now it’s grown quiet outside, except for the sound of the drone’s whir, the occasional words of the cops, the bark, whimper and whine of a leashed dog searching. It’s unnerving, and I’m writing it out as it goes on…
Before all of this, I was busy thinking about how to convey to writers (specific writers, with work-in-progress, learning the craft) the importance of entering into their own sentences through the worldview of their characters, in third-person and in first-person, in second-person too. Always, in different ways.
I’m going to come back to POV later, perhaps tomorrow. Officers are searching our yard, and the action flick of somebody’s real life is playing out….
The search seems to be moving away from our house. The drone has zipped off toward the river, the officers with the dogs are moving on, only the cop cars on the corner are still here, lights on, sirens off, silently flashing red and blue across the parked cars and the windows in the night.
There it is, a little suppressed drama, with the camera rarely on the action, always on the ideas. There was no action, thankfully. The POV of this story is mine, this round.
Stay well, stay safe, keep writing.
Stay well, stay healthy, stay happy and comfortable but…just a little hungry—for ideas, arts, writing…for stories.
Our block is quiet now.
M
Scary stuff. It's weird when the police drama we see on our screens all the time comes to our corner of the world.