Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Observation

For three weeks and two days, Pyre followed the artist everywhere. When she went to a Business Management class at the community college, Pyre followed. When she visited her widow mother in the suburbs, or went to Mass, Pyre was there. If she stopped at the internet cafe, Pyre stood over her shoulder and watched what websites she visited, and read the emails she wrote and received. When she was in the college library, studying or doing research, Pyre sat across the table from her and stared into her eyes as she read.

He followed her when she visited art gallery after art gallery, paintings in hand, and tried to persuade the gallery to display her work. Less prestigious galleries would take her work, but these galleries did not interest her.

He even sat by her bed at night, listening to her snore, hoping to hear words spoken in her sleep that would give some hint to the dreams which tormented her slumber.

During the course of those twenty-three days, Pyre learned a great deal about the struggling and frustrated young artist. He learned that she was a college student, studying for a career she didn't want. He learned that she had one sister, no brothers, and that her father had died of cancer two years previously. He also learned that she was desperately looking for a part-time job somewhere - anywhere - to help pay her bills, put her through college, and cover the cost of her art supplies.

Her mother, he discovered, had always encouraged her to pursue her painting full time, and had even offered to help her out financially so she could set aside all thoughts of school and employment, and embrace, one-hundred percent, her dream of becoming an artist. He also deduced that she had rejected that offer - partly out of a sense of pride and independence, partly in tribute to the traditional view of the "starving artist."

She liked both baroque music and alternative rock, 90's sitcoms amused her more than current television shows, and she would rather see a romantic comedy at the cinema than either a slasher flick or an action-adventure.

She was a picky eater, who studied the ingredients and nutritional information of everything she purchased, and when she picked a canned soup off the supermarket shelf and found a chemical ingredient that she hadn't heard of before, she would put the soup back, write down the ingredient, and look it up online before she would even consider purchasing the soup.

And her name, he learned, was Becca Fredrichs.

But in twenty-three days of constant observation, Pyre learned not one thing about her that would help him understand what stood in the way of her greatness.

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