‘I don’t know what I think until I write about it’. The first time I heard this statement, it sounded a bit ridiculous. Then I heard many other variations of it, and it got me thinking.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized it does make sense.
Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões
Write To Know Your Thoughts
In daily life, you’re preoccupied and can’t properly focus on any number of random issues that are not immediately relevant to your life. In the writing process, it’s just you, the page, and the topic at hand.
This is why writing prompts work so well. You’re given the push, and you’re invited to fully concentrate and find out what you really think about the theme and put your thoughts into words.
Then something magical happens. You pour yourself into verbosity, and it seems like it’s coming through an unknown part of yourself. If you leave what you wrote on the side for a while and come back to it later, you may be pleasantly surprised.
Besides being surprised at what you really think after having written, another startling thing is that often you can’t recognize where the thoughts came from in the first place.
I’ve caught myself staring at a piece of writing of mine, unable to identify how I came to write it. Some will say that it was the muse. I’d like to define it as human consciousness.
Human Consciousness in Writing
Human consciousness has always been a mystery, and artists have been busy exploring it. To plunge deep into your consciousness means to find more, to get to unknown waters. It’s a dangerous endeavour. All those artists who have gone mad are believed to have gone too deep into their consciousness. It makes you wonder if creating great art comes at the cost of going mad.
So how to explore consciousness creatively? My way is to push forward, to think about what you’re writing as deep as possible, explore all possible angles and perspectives and exhaust any thinkable possibilities.
It means not being satisfied with finishing what you’ve started, but trying to make it better and deeper. It means a preoccupation with it. It means taking notes of your thoughts at all times of day. It means staying up at night to see whether your tired condition may actually bring inspiration from the subconscious. It means thinking about form, voice, language, dialogue, details, characters, topic, subthemes, intertextuality, POV, description. It means overthinking.
In the end, by doing all this, you’re not only trying to create great art, but invent. Inventions don’t come easy, and they imply walking at the edges of consciousness.
How do you see human consciousness related to writing?
PRACTICE
For fifteen minutes write about a character who is struggling to create great art. Alternatively, if you prefer non-fiction, write about human consciousness: how do you see it, and have you explored it?
When you’re finished, post it in the comments. As usual, be supportive of others’ practices.
Ainsley knew her father loved to educate people. He wasn’t dry and hard to listen to. He never put his students to sleep. It was his passion and eccentricity that engaged them. In Lennox Harold spoke to lecture halls full of students, paying students, everyday. He would stand in front of them wearing a dashiki and an African tunic, with a wooden pipe in his mouth. His deep baritone voice would fill the room as he spoke of the fall of the Maya, the Greek Empire, and the Nazi occupation of Poland. He lived and breathed world history and you could see the way his love for it widened his eyes and smile.
On the north side Horse Shoe, though, paying customers were hard to come by.
“Maybe you’d have more success if you also looked for students on the west side and in the suburbs,” Trent Randall, Harold’s only paying student, said.
“I want to focus on the place where people need my help the most. The young people here need help to break the cycle of poverty and crime,” said Harold. A car with heavy bass shook the neighborhood as he spoke.
Trent and Ainsley exchanged a glance, filled with the mutual understanding that Harold was taking on a huge, insurmountable challenge. They pitied him.
As if he could hear their unspoken thoughts, Harold said, “I will be writing a book to supplement my mentoring income. Who knows, maybe that will help me get more students!”
Soon Harold seemed to be holed up in his office all hours, only emerging for food and the bathroom. He filled the office with African masks and artwork and pictures of young black kids he found on the internet. He wanted his inspiration to be all around him.
When Ainsley visited him in his writing den, he would seldom talk. He would just look up, smile brightly at her, and then let out a puff of smoke from his pipe.
When he did talk, he tried to talk through ideas or read her a recently written chapter.
“It’s amazing, Ainsley,” he said one day when she came in to bring him breakfast, “some of the things I’ve written for this book seem to come out of the clear blue. It’s like the ideas passed through the air, I breathed them in, and they came out through my fingers on the keyboard.”
He was writing from the deepest part of his heart, but Ainsley felt the danger of his writing making him lose sight of reality.
So, does the writing make him idealistic? Or does the idealism make him write? 🙂
Good question 🙂 I’d say the latter.
🙂
I’d vote for this guy. 🙂 Great practice!
The blank sheet of paper stared back at Joel, mocking his incompetence with its unsullied purity. Joel could almost – but not quite – hear it singing, but the notes were lost in the distance like the rustling of a handful of leaves in a great forest, or the splashing of a single fish in the ocean.
The words, at least, were clear. They had made themselves known right from the start, as soon as he had opened the book of poetry the day before. They leapt joyfully off the page, dancing in front of him and hypnotising him with their beautiful movement and rhythm.
The book sat in front of him, open at the page that had seemed so inspiring. He could hear the beat of the lines, the voice of their author ringing out across the room.
But the manuscript remained blank, except for a key signature that had already changed five times before a single note had made it onto the stave.
Joel remembered the advice of the master. “If in doubt, just write out the rhythm first.” But even this simple exercise was proving to be beyond him: there were too many choices, too many different ways of reading the words.
Dammit, just pick one, he cursed at himself.
In the window, the dog stirred for a moment and then, hearing nothing, settled back down into the sunshine.
Joel got off the piano stool and paced around the room, reading the poem over and over again, willing the muse to enter his dusty room. He read it loudly, he read it softly. He changed the tempo and the emphasis. There were a hundred, no a thousand, different ways he could read this thing, but none of them inspired him.
He cast the book to the floor and sat next to the dog, shoving him to one side to make room for himself on the windowsill. The dog was not impressed but grudgingly made way for his owner, snuffling as he re-settled in the newly reduced space.
Outside, the sun was shining. Overhead, a lark sang as it flew around and landed in a tree at the bottom of the garden. It continued to sing, calling for a mate, drawing attention to itself in the brashest way possible.
Joel heard the song. E flat, perhaps. An interesting key, he hadn’t thought of using that one. The song soared and dipped, chasing the wind through the leaves, came in through the window, and landed on the manuscript. The muse had landed.
I love, “he could hear the beat of the lines.” For me, that’s very vivid.
Was this meant to be a bit of a mystery? I had trouble figuring out what he was trying to do until the last paragraph. He is trying to set a poem to music, right?
Yes, Joel is setting a poem to music: it was intended to be gradually revealed, though I’d hoped that it would have been clear by about para 4. Then again, it was written in 15 minutes!
Yes, 15 minutes is tough. 🙂
Sorry about the limit guys, but feel free to take longer. It’s there only to get the juices flowing and then – the longer the better. 🙂 Though, I didn’t find the part of setting the poem to music part ambiguous. Anyway, good practice – and happy end – always nice to have the muse visiting.
I’m not complaining. There are some days when 15 minutes is all I have. I’m glad we all know that up front. 🙂 Saves me the scrutiny afforded a final draft.
Beautiful Alex B. I enjoyed all of it until the lark. I thought the lark was a little mundane. The dog’s breath escaping in a sigh would have taken the music somewhere else.
You’re quite right: having introduced the dog I should have made better use of him. Lark = song is a bit cliched. Maybe the dog could have barked at the lark and driven it away, and the dog’s bark been the inspiration. Moral: eschew the obvious.
Staring at the blank screen in front of her, she tried to remember what she was going to write.
These days she was too easily distracted. If she didn’t write her thoughts the moment they popped into her head they’d vaporize within seconds. Perhaps it was the years of abusing booze. It had robbed her brain of the needed nutrients and now she was paying the price.
What a dumb ass, she thought. Why did I waste so many years? What was I thinking?
She wasn’t thinking. She was living in the moment without a care. She cared now. But was it too late?
She put her fingers on the keyboard, willing them to type. Write for heaven’s sake. Create something meaningful. She shook her head. Her eyesight was blurry. Her head throbbed. Basically, she felt like shit, something she was doing a lot here lately, at least four out of seven days.
She wasn’t getting any younger. If she went to rehab, cleared her mind, detoxed her body, would her soul be cleansed as well? Would she still be able to write? And what of her husband? If she didn’t drink or smoke they’d have nothing in common.
She had a choice: to live a healthier, perhaps longer, life or continue her current path, feel like crap every other day, and maybe die from lung cancer or liver disease. It shouldn’t be that hard to figure out what choice to make, should it?
Words to a song came to her, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’s just a day away.”
She would change. Just not today.
Interesting hypothesis: writer’s block is all down to substance abuse? Don’t tell anyone…
All secrets are safe with me. I always change names to protect the guilty.
I liked the image of her thoughts vaporizing within seconds.
Thanks! Sometimes it happens to me but for different reasons.
Haha. Me too.
And me too. Oh, we writers are a special breed. 🙂
This is very straightforward writing and it works really well here to show this character’s personality. It also feels very relatable to me–regretting the wasted years.
Yes, Sophie, a most compelling subject. I think many of us write to get beneath all the conventional thinking that controls our lives. I imagine my unexamined thoughts to be gravel over the bedrock of truth. So we dig and dig and dig to remove all that borrowed knowledge. Wow! it`s a lot of digging and sometimes it seems hopeless. But there`s often a faint cry heard from the heart… like it wants to be released, and it seems like our duty to free it, and we do that by being as conscious as we can… an endless job of digging out all our bogus beliefs. I`ve hit that bedrock a few times, and those “aha!” moments have convinced me that “In the opposite of our principles lies the truth.” I think we have to even give up our principles if we want to expand this consciousness of ours. What say ye?
PJ, this reminds me of our discussion last year on The Artist’s Road regarding diluted and deluded truth. We have to dig through the silt of our delusions to render truth. Otherwise, our writing falls flat, two-dimensional.
I love “gravel over the bedrock of truth.” Great metaphor.
Isn’t it wonderful when you get those “aha!” moments PJ.
Definitely! Digging beneath the conventional thinking that controls us is a great explanation PJ. Challenging and surprising ourselves is the way to go; else we are just another fish in the sea, and most importantly we’re boring our own selves. Thanks for your thoughts.
Felix watched the naked woman sit motionless on the stool in front of him. He looked at a blank canvas, also in front of him, and his eyes alternated between the two. Every time he moved the brush close to the blank page, something inside him jerked his hand back as if to say, “No, don’t make that stroke. You can think of something better.” Frustrated, he dropped the brush to the floor and sat down.
Marlene saw this and wrapped herself in a sheet. She walked over and sat down opposite him. They were on the ground at the base of his easel and it loomed over them.
“Felix, what’s wrong? The material is already here, all you have to do is show me how you see it.”
“I don’t know what I see. That’s the problem. I have the power here in these colors to create anything, and all I can think of doing is painting it exactly how it
already is. How boring is that?”
“Not boring at all!”
Felix sighed. “I disagree. If I paint exactly how you are, right now, with the correct colors and shading, I might as well take a photograph.”
“Now listen. I’ve worked with a lot of artists. You have to trust me when I say
even if you paint it like a photograph, your unique perception will still show
up on the canvas. What I mean when I say that is if you start, something will happen. You’ll find a certain brush stroke you grow fond of, and you want to do
more of that. You’ll paint my hair, and you’ll think, ‘Marlene, brown isn’t really your color, let’s go with orange today. And that haircut is hideous.’ All you have to do is start; the rest will come. See that blank canvas? It’s waiting for you. Nobody is going to paint on that except you. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘You can’t win if you don’t play?’ Now it’s your turn to play.”
Felix had listened carefully and nodded along with her.
She’s got some good advice.
I really like this Karl. Also, you strike a chord with the painter worrying about his creation being like a photograph. Photography set new standards for painters: they were trying to use what they can from photography, while being different. It’s not easy. Great job.
He was born with no imagination. Like a robot. As a child, he couldn’t play with toys. Even the fake dump trucks that so closely resembled the real thing didn’t work. He just couldn’t process something unless it was real.
His childhood became an exercise in flighty reality. Instead of playing with plastic carrots and hamburger patties, he dug through the fridge. He ruined a tube of ground beef and his parents got sick of his practicality.
“You have an entire room full of toys. Go play with them.”
But that didn’t make sense.
He grew up extremely successful. He was incapable of creating idle dreams that never happened. He couldn’t post pictures of mansions around his computer for inspiration. If he wanted to experience something, he had to bring it to fruition rather than in a daydream. He liked cars and business and sports. He did them all.
His friends felt sorry for him. “Your life must feel so boring and uninspired,” they said. He disagreed. After all, he couldn’t imagine a different life. “Actually, I’m quite content,” he said. They wouldn’t believe him. Finally, at their badgering, he signed up for a creative writing class.
“Write a story about a cowboy,” the teacher said.
He couldn’t, so he took horse-riding lessons that week. Then he wrote about the experience. “That’s so realistic,” the teacher exclaimed. Then she learned about the student and his inability. She thought long and hard of a way to break him.
“For next week, I want you to write a ghost story.”
The man had never seen a ghost. He went out and paid psychics but they couldn’t help. He visited a haunted house but got very bored. Frustration set in.
Then his wife gave him an idea. “A ghost is something that can’t be seen,” she said.
When the man didn’t show up for class the following week, he thought it an appropriate submission.
This is a stubborn man. 🙂
or a misunderstood man!
I like your story, this is an interesting character to star in a fiction. I thought maybe he would try to kill himself at the end, but I like what you did better. 🙂
He’s a hands on kind of man. I like him.
That’s great! Nothing better that a big smile ending!
So entertaining. Very engaging story line. It got me thinking of a potential story title. What would you choose?
Jolyn sat on a puffy, orange piano bench, tastefully upholstered by her Finnish
grandmother, the cat’s head rested peacefully on her pedal foot. He didn’t seem
to mind as her foot moved up and down as she practiced her music hour after
hour. His favorite composition was Holst’s The Planets. For that, he would
snuggle the speakers of her father’s large stereo system, but for now, Hanon
would have to do. Jolyn practiced Hanon finger exercises for one hour, scales
for one hour, and performance pieces for two hours. This was a daily occurrence
and as much time as she could fit in while going to school. She fell asleep
deconstructing movie scores and woke up humming Beethoven. If hard work made a pianist, that was what she was going to be.
She arrived at her piano teacher’s house for her Thursday lesson, nervously
clutching her canvas bag of sheet music. Mrs. Mulligan, her teacher, lived in
the poorer part of the rich side of town, around the corner from the city’s
French Garden. The wide elms lining the street and the cracked cement gave a
feeling of European glamour to a thoroughly boring, red-collar town. As she
walked toward the door, her mother behind her, she could almost taste breath the rarefied air of high art. Her library copy of a Beethoven biography banged
against her leg in her army canvas coat, reminding her that she hadn’t been
born into a family that could teach her Art. She had to learn it herself, fight
for it, struggle.
She opened the door and stepped into the warm room. Cheap but impressive Persian rugs protected the hardwood floor from the legs of two grand pianos paired back to back. Mrs. Mulligan waved them over to the creamy French sofa and ran off to the kitchen to check her potato. She always baked herself a potato on teaching nights. She’d eat it after the lessons. She returned with a practiced smile on her pink-painted lips. Her hair was blond. Her build was slight. Her posture was straight. She tended to wear unremarkable yet elegant tiny floral patterns.
“Jolyn, hello! Hello, Amanda,” she said, turning to Jolyn’s mother. “Let’s get started. Can I see your practice record? Four hours. . . four hours. . . four hours. Jolyn, we need to talk. Look at me.”
Jolyn was staring blankly at the keyboard, hoping that this time her teacher would be pleased. Mrs. Mulligan was the first good teacher she’d had. All of her other teachers just taught her to bang on keys. They didn’t teach her how to balance the tones, to give inflection to the melody. She had to make everything of this opportunity. At sixteen, she had so much catching up to do. She knew what was coming, but she didn’t know how to do her teacher’s assignments in less time. Maybe her teacher just talked without thinking about how long each task would take. Maybe next time she would think about it and be happy.
“Jolyn, we didn’t practice four hours per day until we reached the Conservatory. It is ridiculous for a high school girl to devote this much time to the piano. You need to do other things. You need to meet other young people, join the school play. Stop trying to be my best student. You never will be my best student.” She looked at Jolyn intently. “You do understand? When you get your Ph.D., your attention to detail will serve you well, but this is just a waste of time.”
Jolyn twisted her hands in her lap. Her wrists were a little sore from all the playing, and the angle of her thumb was starting to change. The bones were bending themselves to the contours of the piano. “Maybe next week,” she whispered inside.
I was totally rooting for the girl. When I read “You never will be my best student”, I literally cringed in my seat. Nice.
Thanks, Newbie.
I thought she was a bit rude to make that comment, especially in front of that girls mother! But I suppose the truth hurts sometimes. Is Jolyn any good? If she isn’t, I can see that making sense.
I like the cat. And your technique.
Thank you, Karl. Jolyn is behind her peers due to poor early education, but she might catch up if given the opportunity.
Cruel. Reality is cruel. It’s cruel. And real. 🙂
For weeks Patience had been chipping away at herself, digging deep into thick layers of being. This excavation, however, was taking longer than she had expected. She wanted with every muscle in her body to make something real. Something vivid and . . . honest. The word hung over her like a foreboding presence in the room. She began to feel it’s brittleness, a cheapness developing after so many passes through the dark tunnels of her mind. Unsure of everything she sat at her rickety dining table and reclaimed her tired and rusty tools. Now deep into the night she began yet again.
Love this. You’ve captured the process and the desire to create. Thank you.
The name suits her doing – Patience with patience. Cool.
By this description I have always gone too deep for some and not deep enough for others. That is the curiosity of writing, or creating any form of art = who else is at that level of the well? I have written a little more on these ideas before this prompt here: http://www.patiencegracetrust.com/
Thanks for sharing. Your conclusion is to the point: act, start, create, and re-create.
Lovely post Sophie.
Yes, who writes is a deep question? Are we even writing? Or, is the story writing us?
Part of my process is “Reading the Libra Mundi” or the book of the world. What’s that adulterous couple at the next table telling me? What was that phrase I just heard?
Another part of my process is exactly what you said, just sitting down and focusing and writing, almost channelling the daimon you might say.
Sometimes, my characters insist on taking over. They appear and want their story told. Or they insist on taking the story somewhere that I don’t like. One of my most recent ones insisted on being killed. It was sad.
Surely we writers are not just scribblers or word smiths as some would like to disparage.
Thanks for the thoughts Sophie.
Thanks for sharing yours. I love what you said about the book of the world. And yes, we are not just word smiths – lacking the perfect word description, perhaps creators will do.
“Write to know your thoughts.” You’re definitely right. That’s something that I’ve always been aware of, especially having a technical background (computer science and electrical engineering), where you often don’t really understand your algorithms and methods until you try to explain them in a journal article.
Anyway, I liked this post very much, and I thought I would like to process a dark chapter of my past by writing a story about it. And I’m happy that I did. I have given these events some thought over the years, but I think I only truly realised their dimension now that I wrote this story. It took more than 15 minutes to write it, but I had some free time today anyway. And thank you all in advance for your feedback.
——————–
Two weeks after the day that Katrin learnt about the true meaning of my glove fetish (the day we had had sex for the first time), I proposed to her. It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday in early October, and as it would be one of the last mild days of the year, I put a picnic basket together and invited Katrin to have breakfast on the top of the hill behind her parents’ house. She accepted happily, and we went up the hill, enjoying the crispness and fresh moisture of the morning air. We arrived at the top of the hill about thirty minutes later, and she spread out a ruby-coloured picnic cloth while I searched for stones to fix the cloth’s corners to the ground.
“Katrin, there’s something I’ve been thinking about,” I said, taking the food out of the basket. I didn’t know what I was going to say next, but I wanted to say something mysterious, something interesting.
“What?” she asked, without looking at me. Instead, she let her eyes wander over the extensive fields of intertwining vines stretched across the mountain on the other side of the narrow valley. It was rather early and we were the only people around. All we could hear was the sound of the rushing river at the bottom of the valley and the songs of the birds slowly coming to life around us.
“Marry me,” I said. That would catch her attention!
“Yes! Yes, I will!” She almost exploded with laughter, reached over and kissed me, long and sweetly.
“Really?” I asked.
My surprised face must have looked very stupid, because the next thing she said was, “Don’t tell me you were just playing with me, Janey Alexandra! You don’t make jokes about marriage!”
Of course I was playing! We had been together for only six weeks.
“Seriously, honey!” I said nonetheless. “Marry me.”
“Where’s the ring?” she asked, rummaging in the basket.
Was I really going to play this game? I remember wondering whether she thought my proposition was true, or whether she was just teasing me, in which case she was a hell of an actress. That made me very nervous because it made me recognise that, if I decided to go on with this, she would be the boss of our marriage. She was the stronger one, the one who was able to control her emotions to control me.
Katrin’s smile deepened, as if she had heard my thoughts. “So?”
“Katrin, I…” I stammered. “I didn’t buy… I was joking. But you seem to have taken it seriously.”
“I know you were joking, and yes, I’m serious,” she said, casually taking a big bite off her sandwich. “Will you marry me, Janey?”
“I will,” I said. “But only if you wear gloves on the day we marry.”
“Let’s say yes, but only because I’m in a good mood,” she said flatly. “Give me some tea, please.”
I took the Thermos flask, poured tea into her cup, and looked at her, knowing that she had more to say. God, she looked so beautiful!
“But we both know, even if I said I wouldn’t wear gloves, you would still want to marry me.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I lied. “What’s the dream of every girl who wants to marry?”
“To marry a blue prince?” she chuckled.
“Every gay girl.”
“A pink princess, then.”
“Exactly,” I said triumphantly. “If you wear gloves, you’re going to be my pink princess. If you refuse to wear gloves, you will be a tramp. And I won’t marry a tramp.”
Her expression darkened. “You really mean that?”
“I do,” I said, and I regretted it only a second later when I saw her honey-coloured eyes turn watery green, the way they do when she’s about to cry.
“No, Katrin,” I said, and kissed her hands. “Please don’t cry. I love you and I want to be with you for ever. I want to kiss you and lie down with you every night and wake up with you every morning of my life until I die, years and years and years away. Every morning I want to find your hair and mouth and nose and eyes and hands on my bed. And you will make me the most happy woman if those hands are gloved, every night and every morning. But I will be happy, too, if you choose your hands to be naked —”
“Oh, shut up!” she said, and she let her tears flow uninhibitedly. “If you need to cite Pullman to tell me that you love me, do it! What do I care that you’re not able to find your own words!”
Ouch! That hurt, and I knew that she knew that that would hurt me. And that meant that my princess-and-tramp analogy had really touched a nerve. She wasn’t playing.
“… but don’t butcher Pullman with your bloody glove talk,” she continued. “Listen, Janey. I will marry you if you love me. And I will wear gloves, because I want it. But you better ask yourself if you do really love me. If you will be able to love me on days on which I don’t wear gloves. Be sincere, and if the answer to that question is no, don’t marry me.”
I hugged her from behind, kissed the back of her neck, and whispered, “I love you, Katrin, with or without gloves. Marry me, please.”
We married two months later, on the first Friday of December. Nothing big. Just us, her parents, my parents and my sister, and a few close friends. “Registered same-sex partnerships” had been instituted in Germany only one year before that. Things have progressed since then, although we still don’t have the same rights as “normal” marriages, but back then it was new. The civil registrar was sweet and gave his best trying not to act too awkward, but it was obvious that marrying two women was not normal for him. I can understand that it was awkward for him, especially considering our attire. Katrin wore a long skirt made of black satin and a red corset with a floral pattern, and red roses in her hair. And shoulder-long black velvet gloves. I wore a long white gown with black opera-length leather gloves. And I remember that I put on very girly make-up and took off my lip piercings because I didn’t want them to mistake us for goths.
Thinking back about that day, it is true that the day of your wedding is the most happy of your life. We were happy. After the ceremony, we all had dinner at my parents’ house. Katrin and I kept our gloves on all afternoon, even during the meal. I remember that I was not able to take my eyes off my beautiful gloved bride all day, and all I wanted was for that day to end soon, so that we would finally go home (we had moved into our own flat one week earlier) and have gloved sex as wife and wife.
“Did you like this night?” I asked the next morning, we both lying naked in bed, our wedding gloves still on.
“I loved it!” she said, and she kissed me. She came closer to me, took my leather-gloved hand in hers and made me hug her from behind. “Promise that we’ll be together for ever.”
“If you promise to wear gloves for ever.”
“That’s the rudest thing to say to your freshly-wedded wife,” she snapped.
“Sorry, but that shouldn’t be a problem for you. Aren’t you starting to love gloves anyway?”
“Shut up, Janey!” she said, putting her velvet-covered hand over my mouth, which turned me on instantly. “And kiss me.”
“No, seriously,” I said after the kiss, fondling her curly brown hair with my leather fingers. “Don’t you love how good it feels to wake up next to your wife and to be naked?”
“We are not naked,” she said, waving her gloved hand in front of my nose.
“We are naked,” I said. “These gloves are not garments, they are our skins.”
“Whatever,” she said. “It’s time to wake up anyway.” And before I knew it, she had disappeared into the bathroom and her beautiful velvet gloves were lying lifeless on the still-warm spot where her soft body had been only a minute earlier. That gave me a sting. I suddenly felt empty and desolated. I knew that I loved my wife, and I knew that I would love her without gloves, too, but I wanted her gloved.
That night I placed a pair of red satin gloves on her pillow.
“What’s with these?” Katrin asked as she came to bed.
“Put them on. They’re your pyjama gloves. Officially.”
“You’re so crazy,” she laughed. She crawled into bed beside me and let her head fall on her pillow, ignoring the gloves. “Now hug me. I’m cold.”
“Sorry. No gloves, no hugging,” I said with an air of finality.
A minute later, she lied flat on the bed. Without saying a word, she took her gloves from under her head and laid them on my stomach. Then she extended her hands towards the ceiling, her long and slender fingers spread like a starfish. I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at her face. Her gaze was distant and stern, but I hoped that she was reserving a sweet smile for later. ‘And even if not’, I thought, ‘I have to educate her. I won’t have an ungloved wife.’
“Now help me, please,” I said, trying to make her stiff starfish hand fit into the opening of the satin tube.
“It’s your project,” she said coldly. “Help yourself.”
I pressed her fingers together, careful not to hurt her, but against her will nonetheless, and forced her hand into the satin glove. A minute later, her hands and arms, still pointing at the ceiling, were covered in red satin all the way up to her shoulders. Katrin still didn’t move or change her facial expression.
“Isn’t it better now?” I asked sweetly, but she didn’t respond. “You look so beautiful, Katrin. Now you’re my princess.”
“Have a good night,” she answered, without looking at me, taking her gloved hands down and rolling over away from me.
“Now come to me, my beautiful gloved princess,” I said, hugging her. “You said you were cold. Do you know that I love you?”
“So you say,” were the last words she said that night. Recalling this situation after so many years, I feel ashamed that I was such an egoist. I was blinded. I couldn’t believe my luck. All my life I had been dreaming of finding a woman who would love gloves as much as I did, and I thought I had found her. I was not aware that she didn’t love gloves, that I was forcing her. I didn’t want to be aware.
For the next one and a half years, Katrin wore gloves to bed every night. Every single night. And every time we had sex. After one week the starfish strategy stopped, and after one more week she started putting the gloves on herself. Night after night I would choose a pair of satin gloves and leave them on her pillow. I made sure to always be the first to go to bed and to be warm and welcoming only after she had put the gloves on. If she ever decided to ignore the gloves on her pillow, I would take away her blanket and spread my legs across her spot, saying things like, “Sorry, no room for ungloved girls in this bed,” or, “Sorry, this spot is reserved for gloved princesses.”
Thinking that I was being successful in making her love gloves, I started demanding more and more of her. After some time, instead of leaving the selected pair of gloves on her pillow, I left it in the bathroom while she was readying herself for the night.
“New rule, sweetie,” I said, smiling brightly. “No entering the bedroom without gloves.”
After a few weeks, there were long satin gloves scattered all over the flat. Pyjama gloves, breakfast gloves, TV-watching gloves. And if there was no good reason to make her wear gloves, I would hide her favourite lipstick or the book she was reading and invent the silliest chasing games for her to recover the hidden piece. The first rule of the game was always, “put your favourite pair of gloves on.”
Bit by bit, step by step, my obsession with her wearing gloves won over, until there was nearly no space for an ungloved Katrin in my life. She complained all the time, but I choked every objection with the princess analogy. Sometimes I would even say, “I don’t love you, you ugly, ungloved tramp. Who are you and what have you done with my beautiful, glove-loving wife?” thinking that it wouldn’t hurt her if I smiled and kissed her while I said it.
Fifteen months after our wedding, Katrin was increasingly dissatisfied with me, we were having arguments about the most stupid things nearly every day, and our fairy tale of a lesbian marriage was becoming an unforgiving, never-ending chain of the boring and the mundane. At that time, a bloke at uni started courting her. Katrin would often go out with him and his group of friends (different from mine, because we were studying different careers) and come back home late. Night after night, I made huge scenes because she turned her mobile off, because she came too late, because she had been smoking again, because she had drunk too much, because that bloke was texting her all the time. And her discontent only grew when I started reading his texts and emails and deleting them before Katrin could read them.
One day, I called Katrin and told her to come home early; we needed to talk. I waited in the kitchen, determined to end this farce of a marriage if she didn’t dump the bloke.
“Do you love him?” I asked, as soon as she opened the front door of the flat.
“I don’t do blokes,” she said drily.
“He says he loves you, he invites you to spend the night with him, to go to the disco, and you giggle like a fifteen-year-old when you read his texts and mails. When did you last giggle for me?”
“When did you last try to make me feel special?” she asked, lighting up a fag. She knew that I didn’t want her to smoke in the flat. Hell, I didn’t want her to smoke at all!
“When? Every day! Don’t I kiss you all the time? And shag you? And call you my princess?”
“All I hear is tramp,” she said.
“Do you still love me?” I asked, and I let my tears run freely down my cheeks, hoping that would soften her heart.
“I love you, Janey. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. But this has to change. Look what you’ve made of me,” she screamed, drawing deeply on her cigarette. “I hate these things, I had given them up for good. And now I’m smoking them again just to show you that you can’t bloody control every fucking aspect of my life. You’re a control freak and I’m sick of it. And I’m sick of your bloody gloves!”
“You knew about my bloody gloves before you married me! Nobody forced you to do it!”
“Wear them if you want! I knew who I was marrying. But I didn’t know that I was signing a contract that allowed you to force me to wear those damn things. Sleeping gloves, eating gloves, smoking gloves, computer gloves… If it was up to you, you would never see my naked hands again, Janey! Are they so ugly? Are my fingers crooked and my nails rotten and smelly? Why? Just tell me why!”
“Oh no, missy,” I said, grabbing her cigarette and tossing it into the kitchen sink. “Don’t flip the pancake. This is not about my gloves, this is about your bloke. How many times has he shagged you?”
“Don’t you understand, you bloody idiot? I don’t do blokes,” she screamed, and slapped me on the face. “But I enjoy how he tries to make me feel special. Something which you stopped doing a long time ago. If you want to know the truth, I told him to leave me alone at least two weeks ago. When was the last time he texted me?”
“With whom else have you been going out all these days, then?”
“With other friends and fellow students. We’re not shagging around. We sit in the library and do homework together.”
“Then, why are you always unavailable? You never answer your phone any more!”
“Because I’m sick of you controlling me, Janey! Listen, this is your last chance. You have to change. Now! For starters, I am going to decide whether and when I wear gloves and when not. And be sure, I will never sleep with gloves again. Never.”
“No, Katrin, please,” I said, hugging her and kissing her, like that would be enough to change her mind. “Please wear at least you pyjama gloves.”
“Pyjama gloves,” she sneered. “Do you listen to yourself? You’ve become so ridiculous! One more thing,” she said, turning away and walking to the bedroom. “If I ever hear that princess-and-tramp crap again, I’m gone.”
That night, lying in bed, I took her hand and tried to slip it into a satin glove, but she grabbed the gloves off my hand and threw them across the bedroom. “Last warning,” is all she said.
The days that followed are registered in my memory as sad and melancholic. I was extra kind and loving, and Katrin allowed me to show her my love, but she didn’t smile for a long time. But she started coming home earlier, she stopped smoking, and I never saw her giggle again at a text or mail sent to her. Making her happy again was a long process that took several months and that required me to change. And I changed, because I realised that she was right. I was a control freak.
Still, I didn’t clear away the gloves that Katrin had worn. I left them all in the same places, hoping that she would start wearing them again. Every time we sat in front of the TV set, I put on my TV-watching gloves, slowly and fumbling, throwing fleeting looks at her gloves, hoping that Katrin would take notice and put them on. She just ignored me. When I was done putting my gloves on, she would grab my hand, maybe kiss it, or kiss me on the mouth, but she would never acknowledge the fact that my hand was gloved. And her own hands remained naked for months. But I never said a thing.
One day I came home and felt a stream of cold sweat down my spine when I saw that all the gloves that used to be scattered all over the flat were gone. I ran to the bedroom. Katrin was watching a cheap talk show on the small bedroom TV, the ironing board in front of her and a huge pile of clothes next to her in a plastic tub. I gave her a quick kiss and asked, “Where are all our gloves, Katrin? Did you throw them away?”
“I washed your gloves,” she said matter-of-factly. “You should say thank you.”
And then I noticed a pair of long purple satin gloves, clean and shiny, lying on the ironing board. She folded them neatly and handed them to me.
“Take these,” she said. “I freed that drawer for your satin gloves.”
“You mean, our gloves,” I said, taking the warm gloves and putting them on instead of depositing them in the drawer.
“No, sweetie. I mean your gloves. I’ve got only two pairs of short leather gloves, and they are in my winter drawer, with my scarfs and caps. I don’t want your gloves lying around everywhere. I’m sick of this mess.”
I decided not to argue. She had been very clear. “OK, my gloves, then,” I said. “But just for the record… If you ever feel like borrowing them, just take them. No need to ask me first.”
“Thank you, sweetie,” she said, and she kissed me. “Now go away. I’m watching this.”
“And I also mean my latex and leather gloves,” I said. “You know where they are.”
“Go!” she said.
I went to the kitchen, wondering what the sweet smile that followed that “Go!” meant. Maybe she had been testing my reaction. A test. Which I had just passed, although I was not aware of it.
I woke up early the next morning. It was Sunday and I wanted to take a long shower while Katrin was sleeping. I was finishing rinsing the shampoo off my long blond hair when I felt the shower door open.
“Good morning, beautiful,” I heard Katrin’s sweet voice behind me. “Nice bum!”
The next thing I felt was a pair of latex-covered hands grabbing my bottom. I rubbed my eyes and turned around, getting crazy with excitement. And there she was, my beautiful Katrin, naked, wearing nothing but a pair of tight, shoulder-long, black latex gloves.
“I need some cleaning, too. Wanna help me?” she asked, grinning mischievously.
“I thought you never wanted to wear gloves again —”
“Shh,” she put her latex-covered finger on my lips. “I didn’t say that. What I said is, I wouldn’t let you decide whether and when I wear gloves. And right now, I feel like wearing gloves. You said I could borrow them…”
Twenty minutes later we climbed out of the shower. After drying each other off, I took her by her gloved hand and lead her back to the bedroom, where she helped me put on a pair of red latex gloves, also shoulder-long, and we had the best sex session after a long pause.
This girl was the best that had ever happened to me, and I had just learnt a valuable lesson. I knew that I would lose her if I tried to control her life again. Eight years later, I’m still aware of that lesson. And I’m not going to forget it.
I’m speechless, and I mean literally speechless. It’s such an unusual experience. I’m glad that you used the practice and got this off your chest. Thank you for sharing. I can imagine it was difficult to do. I feel I’ve learned from it as well. And I read it all in one breath hoping that it will have a happy end. 🙂
She’s a piece of paper, flat and white. Turn her over and start to write.
Not getting it. No idea. Brain freeze. Mediocrity.
Huddled over a mechanical companion, her body shifts in its chair. She’s writing, stuck in the plot; then suddenly, a booger appears through the window and flies into her face. It tries to enter her nasal cavity, but the space is small. (Note: the booger isn’t bad; it lost and trying to survive.)
Trouble. The booger doesn’t fit into the writer’s nasal cavity. The writer’s finger sweeps inside the nostril, but the booger has slid down and dives into the writer’s mouth. Ah, better, more space, the booger can breath.
The writer, however, can no longer think; she chokes, fights. The lights dim, the keys of her mechanical companion fade. No more stories, no more ideas. She’s through. She’ll never write again. The booger has invaded her body and devoured her creativity. Life has ended and ideas are gone. Whoa is me, whoa is me. But wait; the writer lifts her head and a sparrow sings. She’s not dead. There will be tomorrow. Surely the booger will have been digested by then. Yes, then there will be more stories, more words; and maybe, just maybe, Attack of the Booger Monster will make the New York Times best seller list. Never the end.
Such a fun practice Karen. Really, really fun. You should definitely make a story out of it.
A. J. sat, legs crossed, staring at the ghostly canvas sitting on the branches of the steel easel. A photo of herself, leaning against a lamppost, hung atop the easel. Behind the easel stood a line of painted canvases, poked, punched, dented, and slashed. She dipped a paintbrush and stroked the bleached blanket brown, then threw the brush down.
A. J. stood up. She wiped the sweat from her brow with her teal smock. She tossed her platinum blonde hair, and paced around the canvas. Her toes gripped the blanket and slid on the paint puddles. A. J. paced around the canvas for a few minutes, then ripped the photo off the easel. She glanced at herself against the brick red backdrop and shook her head.
“And I used to think I could be a model.”
A. J. crumpled up the photo and tossed it against the wall of violated canvases. She let out a sigh.
“There’s no way I going to get this done before the fair.”
She blew out a puff and sat back down in front of the canvas on the easel. She plucked a thin brush from her wiry hair, and dipped it in the puddle on the blanket. She stood up and drew bricks without effort. A. J. stopped and smiled.
“I got an idea.”
Steven cupped his hands on either side of his face and rested the weight of his empty head on his elbows. He stared for a minute at the picture of the waterfront hanging on the wall to his left. Pushed back, leaning on one elbow and scratched his eyebrow with his other hand. Unconsciously hoping that some sort of external stimulus would take his brain out of park and put it into drive, first gear at the very least.
Nothing.
He glanced at the photo cube of his family sitting on the window sill. The pictures were old, fading. How long ago were those pictures taken anyway. He tried to gauge the years by looking at his youngest. He must have been 6 at the time, 10 years ago. “Wow” he thought, “time flies”.
Still nothing.
The cat scratched in the litter box at the end of the hall. The aroma wafting his way would kill any inspiration if there was any. He scratched the top of his head, took a hit of his warm beer. Squinted as the bitterness inched down his throat. Yuck!
He thought to himself “dammit anyway, the first draft is due to the client in three days and I got nuthin’. The boss is gonna kick my ass if I don’t get him some prelims by the morning”.
Steven pushed back away from the desk, rubbed the back of his neck, pinched his left ear because he was pissed at himself and went to get a cold beer. “Something has got to give” he thought to himself “or the boss is gonna give me a boot up the backside. I’ll get back to it in a few”.
The brush clattered to the floor as Patrick clasped his hands together. It was finally complete. He stared wistfully at his work. Perfection. Every single brush stroke was exactly how he had envisioned it. Every nuance of color accentuating not detracting. The rough texture of the canvas now smooth from his strokes.
He stepped back to admire his labors. His heart was pounding so hard all sound in the room had faded save the rushing blood pounding through him. He wiped the perspiration that had gathered on his lip above his pencil thin mustache. He had kept the lights as bright as he possibly could in the room to pick up the minute corrections he would need to make as he worked but now he walked toward the switches.
With a snapping flourish , Patrick flicked all but one switch. Now his masterpiece sat with only a single over head light casting its illumination on it. Dust motes drifted through the air as was expected in such a cramped and musty work space but he hardly noticed. His perfectly tousled blonde curls that took an hour each day to coif into a look that most people simply had when they woke up each morning had drifted down over his eyes and he pushed it back with his fingertips. The accumulated stress sweat of the last hours work coated his hands which he promptly wiped on the front of his clinging t-shirt.
His breath caught in his throat as he viewed it in its singular glory. His eyes roved over its surface taking it in. His fingers began to curl into his palms and a wave of heat washed over his face as the light at this angle struck it. The roots of his hair tingled with the tell-tale feeling of shame and he let out his breath as a rattling sigh.
” Too much blue,” Patrick growled low in his chest as he reached for his brushes. His breath coming now in short pants as he feverishly dipped and spread colors trying to even the tones. A single droplet of sweat trickled down his temple to pool in one of his now scarlet ears. It was his one dead give away to his frustration. His ears would grow inflamed at the thought of his work being seen in such a shameful state.
His hands were all but a blur as he fired brush stroke after brush stroke like a fighter throwing combinations of punches. He simply couldn’t get the right blend of light and dark, composition and form. He was near frantic when a splash of pink seemingly appeared out of no where and it simply refused to be covered. He was now holding his breath as he worked and his vision began to darken around the edges as he neared fainting.
The damp concrete walls of his work space began to close in on him and the musky scent from the racks of clothing hanging on what looked like hotel luggage carriers permeated every rattling breath he drew in through his nose and expelled with a hiss through his clamped together teeth. His jaws were clamped together so tightly the muscles of his lower jaw bulged like a bulldogs jowls.
Sweat whipped from his brow as he turned quickly and grabbed a rag from a low slung wood desk that he stored his supplies in. Practically foaming at the mouth, he wiped away whole sections of his work and tried vainly to recreate what he had just destroyed. A pounding began to build in his head that simply wouldn’t cease. He blocked in from his mind as he worked even more diligently to blend and shape the colors. Perfection was a fickle thing he knew but he sought it nevertheless.
The pounding became must more insistent to the point Patrick realized it was actually someone knocking on the steel door he always locked when he was deep into his work. With a snarl on his lips, he snapped the brush he was holding in his hand and threw the shattered pieces on either side of him. His breath coming in now in the short bursts of a prize-fighter in the late rounds of a fight as he stomped to the door and unlocked it. As soon as the click of the lock could be heard, the door burst open shoving him back in the blaze of the well-lit hallway.
” What the fuck is taking so long?,” A gravely voice demanded, preceding the entry of its owner into the room. Patrick staggered back as the imposing frame of his employer stalked past him to see his work. The scent of cologne bought from a gas station bathroom wafted over Patrick causing him to nearly gag. It was a personal favorite of Max, his boss of over three years and it never failed to produce the same response. He coated every inch of his chiseled and spray tanned body with it every chance he got.
” It’s not perfect,” he mumbled as he drifted over and stood beside the fuming pile of muscle. His slight and pale frame the exact juxtaposition to the man who lifted his work from the chair it had been propped on and setting it on the floor to fully inspect it.
” What the fuck are you talking about?,” Max said coldly as he turn his steely gaze to the cowering man ” She looks fantastic.”
They both then looked at the smiling face framed by straight blonde hair hanging perfectly over tanned shoulders. A smile spread over the young woman’s face and she shifted uncomfortably in the ill-fitting pink lace shift she wore. Her makeup, that Patrick had labored so intensely on, covered the fact she was barely out of her teens and fresh off the bus from some backwoods town no one even asked the name of. She pressed herself against the rippling frame of actor/director/producer Max Steele as she kissed his cheek before giggling and sashaying out the door.
The instant she was out of sight, Max grabbed the front of Patrick’s damp shirt in his massive balled fist and hoisted the smaller man of the floor until the tips of their noses were actually touching.
” I know you have some fancy fucking degree from some fancy fucking art school but I am paying you to paint the zits off whores before they get gang banged by the college basketball team not create next Moaning Lisa,” Max hissed as he shoved Patrick back across the room.
His hip bumped the side of the battered desk, spilling the contents of his makeup cases on the floor. With a sigh, he turned and began the process of putting things back in order. He had to hurry and get set up again. His next canvas would likely show up any second.