Reedsy put up some interesting prompts this week. They always put up five, all on the same theme, and this week’s theme is ‘Meet in the Middle’. They’ve set up the beginning and end of the story and challenged the writers to fill in the middle.
I liked the one that gave the first line referring to the happiest day of their lives and the last line as ‘By then it was too late’. I had real trouble thinking of any event other than a wedding that could feasibly fit that first line, and I was thinking of a wedding going seriously wrong. So I Googled ‘wedding gone wrong’ and got a proper Christmas present for writers.
The Germans have a word for it; Schadenfreude (yep, tell me if I spelt that wrong). I’m told it roughly translates as ‘glee at another’s misfortune’. Reading those accounts of weddings gone wrong, I had to laugh, although I had plenty of sympathy for the couple involved who had planned and saved and organised for this day. The father of the bride treading on his daughter’s dress and sending her flying into the pews – the ring dropped on the floor and rolling under a pew – a fight over the bride’s bouquet between two female guests. Most of the brides laughed, a few were distressed.
I was awake till after 3am writing the wedding from Hell and the bride who deserved every inch of it. I couldn’t stop. Between paragraphs about dragging her dress hem through cowshit and finding rat poo in the cake, I was trawling the internet for more wedding splat ideas.
I just love these kind of stories, where the territory is unfamiliar and I have to start reading around it. The kind of stuff you find that is pure fact is often just too weird to survive in a fiction work, and I have to remind myself of the writing advice I was given early on; that it might have happened in reality, but no reader will ever believe it.
Julia Chalkley 