Here are two accounts of the same story. Hang in for a valuable song tip.
He was riding along a rural two-lane highway. It was dark. Suddenly, a deer jumped out onto the road. Next thing he knew, he and the bike were sliding around on the highway in the opposite lane.
Fortunately, there were no on-coming cars.
Coming to a stop and catching his bearings, he grabbed the bike, walked it across the lane and put it on the stand.
By then people had stopped to see what happened.
A bit scraped up and limping around, he got a ride to his sweeties house to go get checked out at the hospital.
He did get patched up and made it, but he was lucky.
Now, here’s another telling of it.
I was on US Highway 41 around 10:00 PM, a rural two-lane highway, and it was already pitch black.
I knew there were deer in that area, so I looked in my rearview… “No cars… good. I’ll slow down a bit.”
Another look in the mirror and I saw headlights gaining on me, so I sped back up to 60 MPH to get some distance… just in case.
Suddenly, the corner of my eye saw something, but before I could even flinch my foot and fingers for the brakes, the deer jumped in front of me.
I hooked his back leg with the front wheel of the bike, sending us all sprawling ass-over-tea kettle.
My chin smashed the glass of the speedometer on the way to the pavement. I landed knees and forearms down to protect my body, but the damned bike was behind me… pushing me down the highway… in the on-coming lane.
Fortunately for me, no cars were coming, or I’d be writing to you with wings hanging off my shoulders right now.
No doubt about that.
But that damned bike, like blades on Olympic ice… that steel on pavement kept sliding me along chewing up my clothes and raking skin off me. I tried to kick free, but my foot was stuck in the gear shift.
Finally, I broke myself free from the motorcycle, and all I saw were jerky movie frames of my bike’s headlight and tail light spinning around behind me each time my head made it over my ass summersaulting down the highway.
Rolling like a log horizontally now, I finally flopped to a stop.
Adrenalin kicked in… I knew I was in the opposite lane. I had to get me and the bike off the on-coming lane before someone came along and finished the job.
I put the bike in its stand and walked to where people had stopped. One guy said I had a pretty good gash in my chin.
I didn’t know it until later, but there’s a pretty good artery running through your chin.
Everyone who stopped was looking at the three-legged deer lying on the highway. One dude even asked me if I was going to take the deer home.
I looked like a jagged mess, and they’re all staring at a deer missing its back leg. I couldn’t believe it.
I just needed a ride to my girlfriend’s house so I could go get checked out.
My foot was killing me, my chin was pumping blood like a Texas oil derrick, and my forearms and knees were on fire with major road rash. I looked like the Incredible Hulk with shredded clothes.
After scaring the crap out of my girlfriend standing at her door a ragged, bloody mess, I got to the hospital, got patched up, sewn up, and bandaged up.
I nearly clubbed the ER doc when he started scrubbing bits of pavement out of the raw meat of my one knee with a scrub brush and Peroxide. God that hurt.
I looked like a partial mummy by the time it was over.
To top it all off, the cop who tracked me down at the hospital 30-miles away from where I smucked that deer, had the gall to walk up to the gurney I was lying in getting patched up, to chew me a new one for leaving the scene of an accident.
Yeah right dude, right. Shut up and go play Mat Dillon, will ya?
Okay.
Can you see a difference in the believability in these two stories?
One is from a 3rd person stand point. A story, but not too believable. Not many details, because he/she wouldn’t intimately know them when telling another person’s story.
The latter?
It’s my own story. It happened to me, and I can speak with detail no one else could.
When writing your stories? Dudes. Don’t try and make up crap from thin air. It won’t work. No one’s gonna believe you.
Everyone knows if you are writing from the hart or not, because they can see it in your language, your detail, and your passion.
You can reach into a story you haven’t lived if you are close enough to it, but you better get yourself in character like a good actor, and really feel it, or your song is milk toast.
So, make your story a good bloody mess. Leave the milk toasters to the amateurs.
Just sayin’…
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