Cheri was on good terms with her truck. It wasn't so much that they had been through a lot together as that they had not been through anything together, and she was giving it the benefit of the doubt. It was a faded bronze, with a leather interior that was already starting to get a little dusty from Cheri's drives around the ranch every day. Much to her father's chagrin, she had named it Putsy, dangling a rainbow lei from the rear view mirror to mark the vehicle as her own.
"Putsy's a name you give a lame dog," he had said under his breath when she first drove up to the ranch with it. She hadn't told her parents she was buying the thing, but then, she hadn't told them when she had gone to the DMV to get her license, either. It wasn't that they were against any of it, it's just that they had a lot more on their minds than their only daughter being allowed to drive on a highway. Of course they had taught her to drive around the ranch, that had happened years ago, but after that, they didn't put too much thought into the legality of her driving.
She didn't blame them. The ranch was huge, and since that school trip when some idiot had lost a couple of deadly snakes on their land, they had enough on their plate trying to keep all the livestock alive. Because of course they weren't two males or two females. No, they had to be a mating pair.
For all these years, though, Cheri had refused to let the snakes destroy her world. That's one reason she had bought Putsy: She would be able to run errands around the ranch without worrying about her horse being bitten (it had happened twice, and the hike back was a doozy) or having to borrow her dad's truck, leaving him in danger of having to make that hike.
I stop this piece of fiction here to explain why it isn't any good. I wrote it last night while at work and realized while driving home that it is all exposition, even the piece of dialogue I included. Exposition is the term used for any time when nothing is happening. The writer is explaining things. I just spent four paragraphs explaining about the truck and the ranch, and while I was able to include a bunch of detail--and even a conflict!--nothing happened the entire time. That is no good for the beginning of a story, because a reader wants to watch events. They want a story. She drove the truck to a certain ravine, for instance, and it looked like this and she saw such and such. Even if it is passive action like I just described, it is action.
Exposition does have its place, but rarely are large chunks of it justified, and especially not at the beginning of a story. It is not engaging, simply put. Now, this doesn't mean that exposition is the Big Bad Wolf. It does have its place; just know that that place is about as large as a classroom lecture in the life of a teenager. The longer a story, the more room for it. If placed at the beginning of a story, it needs to be kept to a minimum. Four paragraphs, Elizabeth-from-yesternight, is not a minimum. Get it together.
Please allow me to try again, and maybe you will see a difference and know what I'm talking about.
"Putsy's a name you give a lame dog," Cheri's dad said, eying the bronze-colored truck she had just parked in the dirt in front of him.
"Well, since I've never had a dog, I figured I needed to use the name somewhere," she said. She pulled her hair into a ponytail to arrest it from the wind, using a bobby pin to get rid of the last few strands--the "wings," as her mom called them.
"Dog would've been more useful."
Cheri pretended to think about that for a moment, then shrugged and shot him a grin before closing the driver's side door behind her and coming to stand beside him. He was holding a map of the ranch, marked up with a green sharpie in broad strokes and circles. True to her dad's way of thinking, the creeks were labeled "Creek," the wooded areas were labeled "Trees," and the fence lines were marked by two parallel lines. Cheri was sure that if they had had a dog, the poor thing would not have been named Putsy, lame or not.
"I was thinkin' we would start here," he said, gesturing toward an area Cheri knew to be a rocky field. "Then head north, probably, along the tree line, and see where that gets us." He paused, then said, "But leave Putsy here. No reason to ruin the ozone."
Cheri rolled her eyes for his benefit and got into the truck, driving it back onto the road to park. Soon she was back with her dad, getting into his dusty Chevy and grabbing his map to give it yesterday's updates, which she had forgotten to write down before heading into town that morning to buy Putsy. She marked a dry creek bed with the date, then on the back of the map copied the date and wrote, "NO SNAKES FOUND." She checked their "killed" tally at the bottom, something she did every day even though neither of them had any idea how many of the venomous things there were around, to see remind herself they were nearly at 125. It had taken them a couple years to get that many, and she was starting to think the chore would never end. Much as her dad wouldn't admit it, they both knew she had good reasons for buying a truck of her own, seeing as their horses were no longer reliable transportation around the snake-infested ranch.
Her dad drove slowly, and they both kept an eye out for anything that suggested the snakes had infiltrated anywhere nearby. Their best way of telling was to detect the smell the snakes gave off, but on particularly windy days, that could be misleading. So instead, Cheri was keeping an eye on the birds. Where there were birds, there were no snakes. The birds had long learned to stay away from them. Unfortunately, the ranch's livestock had not, and that was the problem.
They had tried traps, poison, even animal control, but nothing seemed to work as well as just hunting them down and killing them as soon as they could find them. Cheri and her dad--and the hired help, whenever they were handy--went over the entire ranch every month, using a couple hours every day to look, hunt, kill. The carcasses were always burned, following some unspoken rule that they weren't to be used in any way or buried.
When they got to the field, her dad stopped the car and they got the guns out of the back. Each also had a knife on hand, just in case the devil was too close to shoot.
Cheri laughed inwardly as she and her dad stood back to back and walked away from each other, showdown-style, scrutinizing the ground in all directions. About-face at the trees, check the air for the stench and the skies for the birds. No birds.
They had been at it for a half hour when she heard a shot from across the field. Nodding to herself, she continued onward, stepping over a lichen-covered rock and trying not to make any noise in the thick rubber boots she was wearing as protection from a possible attack.
When she reached the middle of the field and prepared for another about-face, she realized she couldn't see her dad.
All desire for quiet left and she started yelling for all she was worth, running clumsily toward his side of the field and looking in every direction.
Rule No. 1 while snake hunting: Don't make noise.
Rule No. 2 while snake hunting: Break Rule No. 1 the instant your partner goes missing.
Rule No. 3 while snake hunting: Never lose your cool, or your weapon(s).
By the time Cheri reached the other side of the field, where her dad should have been, she had successfully broken rules one and three. She had dropped her gun in stupidity and panic, and her knife, well, who knows. She only realized it was gone when she saw a snake where her dad should have been and reached for it.
The snake was staring at her.
It was coiling its body, raising its head, staring at her. The screaming had done the opposite of scaring it away; it had attracted its undivided attention.
Cheri reached down slowly for a rock, forcing herself to maintain the eye contact. Once her hand touched a rock, though, she could tell it was buried in the ground and not handy as a weapon. Her next course of action was to scream more, because there was no hope of outrunning the snake. So she started screaming at it.
"You! Snake! Hey ugly! That's right, I'm talking to you! You got anything to say back? Or are you just going to stay there?"
It edged closer, tilting its head to one side and, she could have sworn it, smiling.
...To be continued (possibly).
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