University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 11-17-2004 They Shoot Single People, Don't They? Dianne J. Smith University of South Florida Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Scholar Commons Citation Smith, Dianne J., "They hootS Single People, Don't They?" (2004). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1252 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. They Shoot Single People, Don't They? by Dianne J. Smith A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Rita Ciresi, M.F.A. John H. Fleming, Ph.D. Rosalie A. Baum, Ph.D. Date of Approval: 11-17-2004 Keywords: romance, women, solitude, friendship, sex © Copyright 2004, Dianne J. Smith Table of Contents Abstract ii Introduction 1 Prologue 15 Chapter One 17 Chapter Two 27 Chapter Three 40 Chapter Four 60 Chapter Five 78 Chapter Six 99 Chapter Seven 126 Chapter Eight 150 Chapter Nine 173 Chapter Ten 200 Chapter Eleven 226 Chapter Twelve 249 Chapter Thirteen 275 i They Shoot Single People, Don’t They? Dianne J. Smith ABSTRACT They Shoot Single People, Don’t They? is a romantic comedy of errors set in Boston about Lexie, a twenty-five year old pediatric nurse with still perky breasts and lightly dimpled thighs who can figure out pediatric drug dosages, but is so severely relationship-challenged that she can’t make any choice at all when it comes to men. Her life becomes a convoluted mess that includes two guys and a tangled web of lies. After Marcus dumps her with a post-it note taped to her refrigerator door, Lexie thinks that her five-year plan to get married and have a baby are back in the crapper. She’d do anything to have ex-boyfriend’s tongue back in her ear; that is, until the chain breaks in her toilet tank and handyman Duncan comes into her life. When alpha-dog Marcus reappears to reclaim Lexie, she’s thrown into a tailspin and doesn’t know which guy to choose. She finds herself up a tree and in a dumpster, and on one memorable night, she’s standing on a toilet seat to discover whether Marcus is boinking her father’s hot new babe in a stall at the Charles Hotel. Lexie lets herself get caught in a tangled web of lies. She leads Duncan to believe that Marcus is her brother and lets Marcus think that Duncan’s just the guy who fixed her plumbing. They Shoot Single People, Don’t They? is a novel that uncovers the insecurities of Lexie, a successful single woman, who equates personal satisfaction with being in a ii meaningful relationship. The book focuses on the lighter side of Lexie’s pursuit, her frustrations of waiting for her real life to begin, and her awareness by novel’s end that Marcus does not define her. She discovers that Duncan is the guy she wants. She’s no longer worried about her five-year plan or worried that someone will shoot her just because she’s single. Lexie doesn’t know if Duncan is forever and ever, but she’s pretty sure that he’s the right guy for now. iii Introduction Only recently have I begun to consider myself a writer. Perhaps this is because much of my life was spent being practical instead of passionate. And even while I was being practical, there were stops and pauses along the way, markers that suggest I was this (writer), not that (nurse, teacher). These “markers” did not come as a result of the childhood plays I wrote or the plethora of entries that filled my journals, or the angst- ridden poems of my teenage years that told of unrequited love, or lost love, or the half-a- dozen times I thought I had found love. I see these earlier writings more as part of my development as a person than as a writer. Still, as a young adult, I recall that my inclination toward humor was what set me apart from what others were writing in my circle of family and friends. My poems, in particular, became expected at birthdays and later at weddings and occasionally at impromptu roasts that required snappy satires. “The Top Ten Things You Would Never Hear My Brother Say,” for example, might be performed on his birthday to an audience of family and friends. He would never say that the Chippendales asked him to join their troupe so he could perform his belly roll, and because he is a computer nerd, he would never say that “modem’” was what he did to his front and back lawns. There were other poems of this sort, written about relationships or the discord between two people in a relationship. My earliest experimentation with similes can be found in stanzas that had him hugging like an over-starched collar, relaxing like a piano wire, talking like an 1 instruction manual, loving her like a piece of gum stuck to his shoe, while she obeys like a pigeon perched on a No Parking sign, trusts like an “open house,” parties like the chicken pox, and loves him like a stripped and empty house. Later, my focus would be writing fiction that concerns itself with what it means to be a human being. In this more serious form, most of my writing as a nurse was expressed in careful documentation with an attention to detail and description. I wrote elaborate case studies that others said read like a good book because the patients had something at stake, because the conflict was evident, because the pacing created an edge in the study that caused readers to want to turn the page. One of these cases won an award, and I remember thinking it odd to write about somebody’s misfortunes, in this instance a young woman with multiple knee surgeries that left her overweight, handicapped, and with intractable pain. To be honored for telling her story so well was both rewarding and unsettling. There were long gaps in my writing when I was a young mother. Mostly I wrote stories for my daughter—about her imaginary friend, about her favorite doll and companion “Big Baby,” about Wanda, a scary witch with the flu, to whom the strangest things would happen with every sneeze—k-a-C-H-O-O! The book, complete with illustrations, won first place in the Hudson Regional Library contest and is still read in elementary schools today. I evolved mostly then, as a writer, in these last five years, paying attention to the craft of fiction, measuring my writing against the good and the great, revising at dizzying speeds for further clarity and depth, learning from my mistakes, taking risks with voice and style, and writing feverishly, not so much to make up for lost time, but because my 2 characters insisted that a story be told, because I fell in love with words over and over again, and because I remained passionate about keeping my writing fresh and alive. Prior to taking my first fiction workshop in the fall of 2000, I read whatever was on the bestseller fiction list as long as it kept my interest. I would learn later to recognize the craft in good writing, to appreciate, as Annie Dillard notes, that the writer “is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write. She is careful of what she learns, because that is what she will know . Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.” And so the short story became all that I read, and mostly all that I wrote. I learned to unpack short fiction, focusing on what the craft could tell me about my own writing. I learned about characterization by reading “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” by Russell Banks and others, and then I analyzed my first short story, “The Lesson,” about a young overprotective mother who watches as her five-year old daughter struggles during a swimming lesson. The story is told in third-person limited, focusing on the perspective of the young mother. In this story, I created a harrowing plot, as the young child nearly drowns. The mother sees her daughter in the water but is too far away to provide immediate help; the swimming instructor is seemingly unaware of the child’s danger because he is preoccupied with the demands of the class. My earlier drafts subordinated the characters to action without attention to motivation. I let the action drive the story, become the story, instead of the characters’ motivations underscoring what was at stake. I created motivations against no real oppositions, not allowing characters to find solutions to their problems. I evolved from this writing experience aware that I had a proclivity for writing fast-paced, action-packed scenes and, perhaps, aware that I was too in love with my own 3 words instead of focusing on the effect my words would have on the readers. With new confidence, I deleted the inconsequentialities that had no greater purpose than to beautify the page. In my later versions, I learned not to resort to such extremes—the child did not need to drown at the end of the story; the “drowning” might have been misinterpreted by a too-protective mother; the child may have been making her first strides away from the dependency of her mother.