Differentials

"I like your pink bike."

In her heyday.

A couple of Fridays ago, I took my beloved red three-speed in to the bike shop because the saddle had begun to crack and disintegrate after having been parked on the street every single day for the past ten years. The shop was clearly more geared towards the carbon-fiber road bike type of rider, but the repair guy was friendly and welcoming. "I like your pink bike," he said.

My pink bike? I really don't like the color pink. I do like red, which to me feels powerful, not girly. I'm not a fan of girly, or of female stereotypes. I wear red lipstick, not pink. When I smoked (a very long, bad time ago), I smoked Marlboros, Red, not Gold. I never had a Barbie, and I thank my mother for that. I also never bought my daughters Barbies. I'm not sorry. I'm an unapologetic second-wave feminist, and I acknowledge that a lot of the empowerment I have sought and found from that movement has had to do with wanting (and getting some of) what men have always gotten, without even asking. I don't respect lace and pink and frailty much, and that's probably a fault of mine, but anyway, to bring it back around, I was flabbergasted to hear my bike described as pink.

Then I looked at it and saw that yes, the decade that had crazed the pleather of the saddle had faded my red bike to a horrifying hot pink. I hadn't seen it. I'd been riding my kick-ass little steed around the city feeling red-empowered — for years — with absolutely no idea that I wasn't projecting anything like the energy I thought I was.

Which made me think about aging and mellowing and the fact that I actually enjoyed the Barbie movie when my daughters dragged me to it (by the hair). It made me think about character arcs in storytelling and how we depict change.

A great strategy for revealing change and also creating subtle rhythms that engage and entrance readers is to set up something small, an almost unnoticeable detail, and cash in on it later on. Something apparently unimportant may turn out to be different — pivotal — when re-encountered, whether it's the unnoticed clue that solves the case or just the red bike that turned out to be pink (in a way that illuminates a change in character, a self-misperception).

This sort of move generates narrative energy because of the differential between the two (or more?) different times or viewpoints. It may bring with it suspense, a feeling of surprise, delight, disappointment or dawning comprehension, all of which are useful to the writer because they trigger a sense satisfaction in the reader as they witness the writer reeling in what they had cast, perhaps now with a fish, or a different colored bike, on the line.

PROMPT: Revisit some previously introduced element of your narrative — could be a physical object or a place or a character — at a different time or from a different point of view, and explore the differential between the former and the latter.