Ray Bradbury ”The Night”: Creative Writing- Second person narrator(English Tuition Bolton Manchester)

Loosening up our creative writing ‘muscles’ is made easy through a dalliance with the second person ‘you’ narrator. For when you write as ‘you’ the pen feels liberated and can find immediate direction and story.   Just try it and see. Give yourself some sort of setting or context in order to frame your ‘you’ and then off ‘you’ go. So try an age, or place or state of mind etc…   And if you need brilliant inspiration here is a marvellous extract by one of the most versatile and humane short story writers of the twentieth century, Ray Bradbury.    The night – Ray Bradbury    YOU are a child in a small town. You are, to be exact, eight years old, and it is growing late at night. Late, for you, accustomed to bedding in at nine or nine-thirty; once in a while perhaps begging Mom or Dad to let you stay up later to hear Sam and Henry on that strange radio that is popular in this year of 1927. But most of the time you are in bed and snug at this time of night. It is a warm summer evening. You live in a small house on a small street in the outer part of town where there are few street lights. There is only one store open, about a block away; Mrs. Singer’s. In the hot evening Mother has been ironing the Monday wash and you have been intermittently begging for ice-cream and staring into the dark. You and your mother are all alone at home in the warm darkness of summer. Finally, just before it is time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relents and tells you: ‘Run get a pint of ice-cream and be sure she packs it tight.’ You ask if you can get a scoop of chocolate ice-cream on top, because you don’t like vanilla, and mother agrees. You clutch the money and run barefooted over the warm evening cement pavement, under the apple trees and oak trees, towards the store. The town is so quiet and far off, you can only hear the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars. Your bare feet slap the pavement, you cross the street and find Mrs. Singer moving ponderously about her store, singing Yiddish melodies. ‘Pint ice-cream?’ she says. ‘Chocolate on top? Yes!’ You watch her fumble the metal top off the ice-cream freezer and manipulate the scoop, packing the cardboard pint chock full with ‘chocolate on top, yes!’ You give the money, receive the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across your brow and cheek, laughing, you thump barefootedly homeward. Behind you, the lights of the lonely little store blink out and there is only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seems to be going to sleep… Opening the screen door you find Mom still ironing. She looks hot and irritated, but she smiles just the same. ‘When will Dad be home from lodge-meeting?’ you ask. ‘About eleven-thirty or twelve,’ Mother replies. She takes the ice-cream to the kitchen, divides it. Giving you your special portion of chocolate, she dishes out some for herself and the rest is put away, ‘For Skipper and your father when they come.’