Co-authoring a story with Sheila Ferguson

A writer can learn a lot from co-writing a story with another author.  Recently Sheila Ferguson (a member of the Emerald Plaza writers' group that I used to facilitate in pre-Covid-19 days) and I decided to collaborate on a short story using the prompt below: Write a story about a runaway bride.  We took turns, each contributing to the plot and providing interesting detail.  I found it fun to see what she'd come up with next. Sheila then went through the manuscript, pruned out extraneous detail and put it in chronological order.  Here it is:


THE PROMPT: WRITE A STORY ABOUT A RUNAWAY BRIDE.

Ellery was a young lady of twenty-one, who was planning to marry the love of her life, Tom, on their special day. As she was getting ready for the wedding, an urge to bolt came over her while she was in the ladies' parlor of the church. As she looked out the window, she saw the florist’s van pull to the side of the church and her mother-in-law and bridesmaids ran to meet him because he was late. There was a mix-up at the florists. Ellery was alone in the deserted room in her satin bridal gown. Looking into the mirror, she thought she was seeing a ghost, she was so pale.

“ If only my mother was here?” she thought. But her mother had died nine months ago of cancer. “What am I doing here?” she asked herself. Then, out of the blue, she looked around, grabbed somebody’s raincoat off the coat hook by the door and put it on. She then went into her mother-in-law’s purse and took the keys to her car. She dashed out the door, along the hall, down the stairs, past the Sunday School room, and out the fire escape to the car. She sped down the main drag that led to the bridge out of town. She was way out of town before realizing what she was doing and where she was going. She slowed down and decided to go to the old cottage her grandfather owned to clear her head. “Nobody will ever think of looking for me there,” she thought. “It  has been closed down for years.”

As Ellery was driving down the paved road heading towards the cottage some forty miles from the church, she finally got to the bumpy dirt road to the cottage. As she proceeded, she heard a loud bang. She stopped the car and got out. “Oh no, what am I going to do now?  I have a flat tire.”  It was getting dark and she had her wedding dress on. She could not possibly change a tire now. She turned off the car and started to walk the short distance to the cottage. As she walked, she thought, “This dirt road is no good for my satin shoes.”

When she got to the cottage, she was cold and tired. Even though it was May, it had not warmed up much as of yet. “Now, if only I can remember how Granddad did the fire.” She put in some of the wood that he'd left stacked by the cabin door, then crumpled some old newspaper on top of it. She turned the damper the way he used to do and she hoped the chimney would draw the air. One year something blocked the chimney and the cabin filled with smoke. Grandpa had to climb up on the roof where he removed an old bird’s nest.


The fire started. Ellery sat down on the couch, put the old blanket around her to warm up and left the coat on as well to protect her wedding dress.  She waited for the place to warm and planned what to do next. “Tomorrow I will see if there are any old clothes here to change into and walk back to the car, fix the flat and bring the car back to the cottage.” She was tired so she lay down and slept. Early in the morning she walked back to the car. While she was walking, she was going over in her head how to change a tire. She had only done it once before. That was when she met her fiancé Tom some two years ago. He was tall and handsome. He worked as a bank manager in the town of Osgoode.

She fixed the tire, drove back to the cottage and sat and enjoyed the morning sun on the balcony for a while. Feeling a little hungry, she remembered that Tom’s mother always kept drinks and chips in the trunk for when she picked up Tom at the train station when he came home to visit. She went to see what there was. She had a drink and ate a bag of chips. That would hold her over till later.
She then went inside to think. They would  be looking for her for sure. She could not stay there forever.  She could not take the car. While she was deciding what to do next, she cleaned away the spider webs all over the walls. Maybe it would be a good idea to leave this afternoon, the sooner the better.

She remembered Grandpa always kept maps on the book shelf in the living room, so she got a kitchen chair to stand on. As she reached up to get the maps down, the chair slipped from under her. She landed hard on her back and lay there for a while before she got up.

“Now how can I walk to the highway?  I hurt all over.” She took two Tylenols, lay down and fell asleep. When she woke her back was slightly better, but she didn’t feel well enough to hike through the bush to the highway and flag a car down, especially in the middle of the night. Traffic would be thin, she might not get a ride, and who knew what sort of people would be out in the early hours of the morning?

Her idea was to hitch a ride to a city of about 80,000 people about two hours to the south, where some friends of her late grandparents used to live. This couple, in their early seventies, missed her grandparents as much as she did. Tom’s mother had invited so many guests to the wedding that this elderly pair hadn’t made the list of invitees. They would understand why she’d run away and would let her stay until she figured out what to do next.

Ellery had always imagined a fall wedding at the church she and Tom attended, then pictures at the little park at the end of the road. A simple buffet style meal, music and dancing, then they would drive off into the sunset. But Tom’s mother had invited so many people Ellerys did not even know and arranged for a full hot meal. Also, she'd hired a band to play some kind of old fashioned music, not Ellery's idea at all. When she tried to tell Tom, all he did was agree with his mother.

“Enough day dreaming. I should be off,” she told herself.  So through the woods she went. She knew she had to get to the highway as soon as possible as it had been forty-eight hours since she went missing and Tom would have gone to the police by now. They might even have figured out where she had gone.
As she walked quickly through the woods, there was a noise behind her. Then she heard a voice calling her name. She stopped.

“Ellery, stop! It’s me, Tom.”  Tom came to her and said “Why did you leave?”

“You would not listen to me. I wanted a small fall wedding. Let me go.”

She broke loose and ran down the path. As she did, she hit a ground hog hole and down she fell. Her head struck a boulder on the path. It knocked her out. Tom picked her up, took her  back to the cabin, put some cold water on her head and suggested that they go and see a doctor.

While the doctor was checking her out. Tom called his mother to tell her that he’d found Ellery and that she was all right. That evening Ellery and Tom talked and he said he was sorry that he let his mother manage the wedding. “If you still want to get married,” he said, “we will plan it ourselves.”