James B. submitted his response to the dictionary creative writing prompt, along with a short explanation of how he went about doing the exercise:
I actually did the exercise twice. My first go-round I got “grammarian,” “merchant,” and “ripieno.” It was hard at first, trying to work with those words, but I kept at it until I got something down. By that time, I was warmed up, so I decided to try again. I found that it helped me to use more than three words. So though technically my words this time were Finland, deprivation, and Rio de Janeiro, I kept flipping around, just looking at different pages of the dictionary, thinking about language and free associating until I hit on “ghost word” and then “ghost writer.” Once I had a subject, I could start writing. The first time through I used the words exactly, but while revising it, I shortened “Rio de Janeiro” to “Rio” and changed “deprivation” to “deprived.”
The ghost writer left chapter ten of his client’s biography and walked down to Bunhill cemetery, feeling safe in taking a break, having covered already that morning the house in Burgundy, the affair in Rio, and his client’s second and favorite wife, a model from Finland. He followed the stone path between the rows of stones, and thought of the poets and dissenters who were buried there, and wondered how they had made a living.
Some office workers sat on benches eating their lunches, ready to exchange thoughts of office politics for those of Blake and Defoe. One woman had brought a book -- it looked like poetry. She looked happy, but everyone else looked deprived of something essential. Maybe an affair in Rio, the ghost writer thought. He sat down apart from them and tried to convince himself that he was happier than they were, with his days free to sweat over sentences, even if they ultimately belonged to someone else. But every word he gave away belonged less to him. Already entire swathes of the language were tainted by his work. He’d started hoarding the best words. The client couldn’t have “provenance,” for instance, or “succor.” Not “succulence,” either, for that matter. If he could, he’d give the old bugger nothing but articles and conjunctions. He feared leaving himself nothing but anachronisms, ghost words nobody wanted anymore, except for Medievalists, who used them at conferences for fun, or at home, to remind their spouses of who was smarter.
Blake's stone was covered with copper pennies and pences, delivered late at night by pale adolescents. They brought candles and flowers and bits of verse to recite to the old mystic and to the girl or boy they were hoping to shag.
The ghost writer rubbed his face, remembering having been such a boy. It pays well, he reminded himself. Well enough to escape to Rio, if he chose to. He could live cheaply there, and discover an entire language he hadn’t yet plundered. Sometimes he still struggled late at night, when those boys and girls were giggling in the cemetery, to bend the language into something true. But those moments weighed so lightly in his life: like origami or butterflies compared to the fiction he dressed up as truth each day.
The office worker checked her watch and closed her book, looking around once more, clearly reluctant to leave. Reminded of his own work, he rose, too, hoping she would turn her eyes his way. She didn’t look at him, but as he stretched, he felt sunlight hit his head before turning toward home and another afternoon. He had another divorce to cover, and he hadn't even gotten to the scandal that was going to sell the book.
Return to the dictionary creative writing prompt.
