What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? This is an older story so I’m not sure of the exact dates. But I believe I began it in late 2015 and finished it around mid-2016. Some of my stories take much longer to write! But this is a short one so it took less time.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I drafted a good portion of this story during a New Year’s writing marathon at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, a community organization in Denver where I teach and sometimes take classes.
https://www.lighthousewriters.org/
The rest I probably wrote at my desk in my home office, which is basically a glorified hallway and is currently too cluttered for me to use. (I work elsewhere now.) You don’t want to see a picture of my disastrous former home office, but here is a picture of Lighthouse (BELOW) back then. (Lighthouse now has new digs—like I said, this piece is pretty old and a lot has changed!)
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? Save my writing marathon at Lighthouse, I mostly wrote this story in the morning, after dropping off my kids at school and before turning to my various work-from-home gigs. I almost always write directly on my laptop. My handwriting is horrible and if I compose in pen and ink I can’t read it later!
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
Man in the Night
I awoke suddenly in the night, as I often did, thinking I’d heard a noise, as I often did, and I rose from bed to investigate, following a dark, worn trail from bedroom to front room, where I switched on the nearest lamp to allay my fear.
In the middle of the room stood a man, flush-cheeked as if battered or buoyed by extreme weather, his grey eyes infused with the light of winter sun. If not for his strange glows, he could have strolled forth from a catalog of boring and dependable casual clothes, his hands stashed in pants pockets—though his hands weren’t in pockets but black leather, so lovely in the way of certain gloves, how they hugged the hand into abstraction, a form without flaw. My bladder seized and my legs shook, but my upper half kept calm, my heart’s thump, thump a distant assurance.
He smiled. For a moment, I expected him to offer his palm in introduction, but the smile soon melted into a glaze of contempt.
“Are you here to rob me,” I said, “or to do something else?”
“Why would I rob you?” he said, glancing around.
“Maybe you like books?”
“Oh, I like books. But they don’t do enough for me.”
“What does enough for you?” If I kept asking questions, maybe we’d become friendly, have a chat. A table of hors d’oeuvres would appear and I’d excuse myself to fill a plate.
He said, “You’ll see.”
Yes, it was comical how I stuck my hand beneath my robe, like I’d seen resourceful thieves do in films. “I have a gun.”
He laughed. “No, you don’t. Even if you pulled out a revolver and pointed it at my head, you still wouldn’t have a gun. You’re the kind of woman who’d never own a firearm, even one in your own hand.”
“How do you know?”
The flush in his face darkened. “It means I take one look at you and see everything. Who you vote for, what you ate for breakfast, what shows you watch each night. Everyone’s so fucking predictable.”
“That’s not true. You can’t tell what anyone will do.” These were words I lived by. Even I couldn’t tell what I would do. What was I capable of? I often fretted. Like everyone, I liked to believe that deep down I was courageous, skillful, and kind. But I also liked to believe that deep down I was craven, inept, and mean. This belief supplied me with a perverse pleasure, a confirmation of my worst fears about myself and the world, even as it fueled them.
“You can’t tell what anyone will do?” he scoffed. “You would say that. And you would be wrong. You can tell what I’m going to do.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You know. You’ve always known. I didn’t even make it to your room. You came to me.”
All the times I’d played this scenario out in my mind, everything had happened so fast, be it my escape or failure to escape. The slowness now threw me, allowed me the leisure of disbelief. Where were the instincts I thought would spring to action? Why hadn’t I screamed?
“You know why you haven’t screamed?” he said. “You’re not scared.”
It was true. My legs had stopped shaking, and I knew that was a bad sign, that somehow after all these years, I’d finally convinced myself, at the worst moment, that my fears couldn’t be true.
It was hard to imagine the harm those elegant gloves could inflict on my neck. In fact, the thought of them around my throat aroused me, though I’d never been attracted to such things. What had I been attracted to? So much: Men with wry smiles and sad eyes. Women who chewed gum hard. Chatty children. Dogs: their shameless panting, their brown sugar gaze. Turquoise skies. The pure confection of new snow. The mountains, how they tore beauty into the horizon and raised the eye.
So much love for the world trapped inside my fears.
As if from afar, I commanded myself to run. I zigged and zagged like a hare, but the man blocked all ways I tried to go and what for me was graceless and sad was for him a ballet—a step here, a leap there, arms down, then wide, and when he caught me, for a moment I mistook him for a place to rest and maybe he mistook me for something else too, because we were still, I warm from effort and him warm from my life, my little, pulsing, glorious life, in his beautiful, hidden hands.
(from This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. (Split/Lip Press, 2019), 151-153; originally published in Columbia Journal, November 14, 2016)
https://jenniferwortman.com/book/
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This is a such an interesting question because I entered this story, as I do much of my writing, with a sort of bemused emotional detachment, trying to parse the absurdities of my own experience from afar—in this case, my experience with chronic anxiety. But the work then becomes to overcome that detachment, to mine the raw emotion beneath. The love for the world and her life the narrator acknowledges by the end of this story mirrors my own begrudging love, and while writing about it, I felt it deeply.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. Usually I’m a terrible overwriter and have tons of deletions. For this story, each draft involved more additions than subtractions. I did, however, cut this line from the end of the paragraph beginning “That’s not true”: “Would you rather be happy or right? pop psychologists ask. Happiness passed. I would rather be right, every time.”
I don’t have much by way of marked-up drafts for this piece. I just created new files and made changes as necessary without comment. (This story took four drafts/files.) But I did find one note to myself, which I sometimes write in boldface, and am sharing here:
https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.wortman.5/
Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html