“The Lesson” Original
The music drifted slowly, sweetly into the wind. Through the window with the intricate railing and down the white walkway the melody flew gently. Finally it tiptoed into the ears of a man, whispering delicate notes and a rich harmony. A light smile came to his face, and he continued to read the novel he held in his lap.
He recognized the music. It was the same music played every Thursday at 4PM, from the same window and from the same little hands that create them. The music stopped suddenly.
“The Lesson” Revised
The music drifted softly through the wind; through the open window and down the white walkway it soared gently. Finally it arrived at the ears of the man, who had been anticipating this melody, along with its rich harmony. A light smile came to his face when he heard it, and he flipped to the next page of his novel as he hummed along to the piano notes being played only a few feet away.
Suddenly, the music stopped. The smile from his face disappeared and the man looked up instantly to see what had happened.
“You’re not playing it correctly,” a woman’s voice spoke. “It’s C sharp, not C natural. Try again with that in mind.” She spoke gently, as if to not hurt the child she was teaching.
Once her sentence finished, the melody came back. He smirked and went back to reading, content now that he had music to occupy his ears and the words to occupy his eyes.
It had become routine to come to this park bench every Thursday at 4PM. He always sat in the same place and position on the bench, as he found it was the perfect place to listen to the young boy recieve piano lessons. Free music is what the man called it. This “habit” that he created for himself was never meant to be a habit, but he found it was able to take up his free time and kept him happy for that short period of time. The first time he had heard the music, he never wanted to continue listening. In fact, he wished for it to be over sooner than later; yet he came back. He wanted to hear how the child had improved, and the new music he was learning. That first day was over 2 months ago, and now the boy is almost able to play the song the man first heard him play.
He flipped the page in the book. It was one of his favorites; a story of a scientist who creates a cure for the deadliest disease in existence is hunted by other scientists so they can receive credit for his hard work. Although the ending isn’t really satisfactory, it certainly is a good story that he loves to reread whenever he can. In the story, the scientist had just escaped his colleague, who had tried to keep him locked up in a broom closet so he could publish the stolen findings. Oh boy, the man thought, my favorite part’s coming up. His attention was all on the book, and he was so focused on reading that he almost didn’t hear the C natural coming from the open window.
“No, no. Listen, if you need to mark in that it’s a C sharp, then do so,” the woman’s voice lightly scolded.
“Yes ma’am.” The child’s voice was gentle and sweet, and the man heard the pencil writing on the paper softly as he marked in his sharps.
“Now, just try this measure. Remember to count your beats, and to…” Her voice faded out of hearing as he stopped listening. Finally, he had come to his favorite part of the story. The man hyperfocused as he read the first page of his most beloved chapter. “The lights were shattered, and he ran as fast as he could from his own broken lab-”
“It’s time to go.”
The man on the floor stood up and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The boy flinched at the weight of the hand on his shoulder and nodded, grabbing his papers from the piano and getting up from the bench he had been sitting on. The elder man blows smoke from his cigarette towards the open window and scowls as he pulls out money to pay the woman for the lesson.
“Same time next week?” She asks him, a polite smile on her face.
“...Sure,” he says after a while. “Come on, let’s go.” He puts his cigarette in his mouth and pats the boy on his back as he turns to leave.
“Bye!” The boy exclaims before he leaves. They walk out and the door slams shut, presumably closed by the older man rather than by the child.
Looking up from his book, he realizes the lesson is over and begins to head home. Oh well, he thinks. Same time next week.
“The Lesson” Reflection
To write this narrative, Mrs. Jamison showed the class a painting, shown above, and told us to write the exposition of a story based on it. Of course, she didn’t ask us to write an entire story, which is what I ended up making the original into. I didn’t want to keep it just an exposition, however, so I tried to make it a story centered around the man in the background of the photo.
In adding to the story, I feel I made it much more readable, as the original was worded strangely and the order of events was weird. Added to this, the original was ended suddenly as I never got to truly finish it. The revision has much more depth with not as much unnecessary ornamentation when describing the surroundings. I gave the characters more of a personality and actually developed them, while in the original the only two characters “introduced” are the man and the little boy. To keep it impersonal, I made sure that none of them had names, and tried to refer to them without much repetition. Finally, I decided to add details to the book that the man was reading in the original. I wanted to keep it with the time period that the painting seemed to have been made in, yet I wanted to make the story kind of interesting. Honestly, that scientist story was the only one I could come up with at the time.
I changed all of this to make it an actual story. The characters were meaningless and had
no connection to each other in the original, and so I tried to give backstory to the man and the lesson. The man in the corner and the lady in the painting hadn’t even been introduced, and the writing was poor and full of too much detail. I wanted to make it simplistic and still enjoyable, which I feel I definitely did.