Tag Archives: writing exercises

6 March 2010

Ode to a Night-in-Jail (not really, but it could’ve been close)

By thefallenmonkey

I’m on a roll with other writing today, but so as not to entirely neglect the blog this weekend, I thought I’d post a wee little short-short story that I found in my computer files.  It’s a true story, actually, that I wrote about my brother for his birthday, and it chronicles one crazy night we and our other two brothers had in the Windy City.

Context: ‘Keo Dog’ is a nickname his buddies gave him back in high school, and the setting is none other than the legendary Wiener Circle.


KEO DOG, with relish and a side of cheese fries

It was a brisk April day, an overcast day, a Windy City, too-cold-to-even-really-want-to-speak-at-the-Cubs-game day.  But who really needs to speak at a Cubs game anyway, other than to heckle the home team?  One man, at least, did speak.  This was a man who was never at a loss for words.  And he spoke of wondrous things indeed.  He spoke of a remote dwelling that burned fiery reds and yellows into the monochromatic greyness of our arctic environment.  He spoke of the abundance of culinary delights to be found there, and of the distinctive language the indigenous peoples uttered there by night.  Our frozen eyes teared up at the thought of this urban oasis; it can’t be real, we thought. Believe, he told us.

In fact, throughout the entire duration of the day, he continued to speak of this local legend, how it was no legend, for he had been there, he had seen it, and, most significantly, he had heard it. When the time is right, he promised us, I will show you.  Our southbound pilgrimage brought us progressively deeper into the realm of inebriation, dulling our senses and warming our extremities; but his focus remained keen, and his belly burned for one thing only.  For a moment my confidence in him faltered as he slipped into a margarita-induced coma TWICE while engaged in conversation with me, but I realize now that, as he nodded off into oblivion, slumping ever so slowly forward toward the tabletop, he was only reawakening within himself the vision of the dream to come but a few more blocks southward. It’s the greatest, he said, You’ve got to experience it yourself, he said.

His demeanor became all the more energized and self-assured as he continually described the surreal and foul obscenities that flew in the wind of the wee hours there…Everyone does it, he said, Even the venue elder and those in his employ; in fact, you may not even obtain what you seek there unless you join in the custom. While there was one innocent doubter among the group and another who appeared more preoccupied with parking-meter hurtles and leaving assorted personal possessions strewn about the city, this man stayed his course, and, oh yes, his goal would reach fruition.  As the warm light blanketed our faces and beckoned us inside, we heard the filthy vulgarities abound, and the man’s eyes glowed like smoldering coals as he cackled with wicked delight at the offensive display.

This was it—the threshold of hell, and far too late to turn back to the refuge of Clark Street.  With a confident stride, he stepped to the counter, paused a moment to consider the luminescent options of temptation hovering before him, and, as we huddled in eager, almost nervous anticipation of what crude, ritualistic phrases would spew forth from his throat in the tongue of the after-hours natives…his lips parted…and…in a meek, gentle voice, he sweetly articulated:

i’ll have a char dog, please??


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4 March 2010

Touch No Evil

By thefallenmonkey

The Prompt:

In wrapping up this series of writing exercises on sensory detail, today’s challenge (page 18, Room to Write) is to write through texture.  Again, we have 3 different approaches we can take on this:

1.  List textures;

2.  Describe the textures of a person, place, or thing;

3.  Reflect on how the textures help us find understanding.

I think I’m going to interweave #2 and 3 for this one, at least at the outset and just go wherever that takes me.

Response:

To lull myself to sleep at night, I often rub my fingers along the edges of my pillow case; it’s a habit I’ve had since childhood, one that I developed as a substitute for massage (I was very used to nightly back rubs from my mom).  So when I repeat this ritual as an adult, the tickling sensation of that thin fabric whispers kisses on my fingertips to assure me everything will be okay.  On the occasional night when I’m really sunken into a mode of regression, I’ll lay there in bed snugglng my panda bear, a gift from my parents when I was five.  Holding her close, I’ll run a thumb over the course, pebbly fur, matted down and hardened from decades of hugging.  Now and then I’ll still find a soft spot, a silken smooth patch that was not prone to friction and reminds me of the fluffy fuzz that once went up my nose and tickled my nostril hairs (and sometimes caused that sharp, almost stinging, muscle-constricting anticipation of a sneeze) when I sniffed the bear to find my own scent.  I run a finger over the rugged, scratched surface of its eye wondering when I would’ve let my guard down to have ever let harm come to there.  I feel how flattened and condensed the stuffing has become, the reason why this panda had actually grown an inch once on the family growth chart.  I roll onto my stomach and worry that the weight of my arm is putting the panda into a strangle hold as I feel its unyielding lump beneath, and as I turn my head the opposite way, the slippery straightness of my fine strands of hair slide across my cheek in feathery protection.  I nestle my face into the moon-cooled part of the pillow that I hadn’t yet laid on and sense its soft, suede-like fibers brush against my skin, which, newly cleansed and burning from an invigorating sandy scrub, prickles a bit at the thin fuzziness just skimming its surface, almost velvety after multiple washings.  I feel the thick raised bands of its pattern press into my cheek to stamp its existence into my damp epidermis.  Awareness of the tepid, downy pressure  of my breath upon the back of my hand distracts me from sleep, so I move my arm outwards, outstretched until it bumps dully into the warm life-force emanating from my husband’s back.  In short, vertical sweeps, my hand rubs up and down against his t-shirt, which has become flimsier and less abrasive to the touch after continuous wear has relaxed its threads.  Through the fabric, my fingers feel a twinkling of bristles as tiny needles of hair penetrate through.  Sensing a shift of the mattress below me with a tug of the sheet above me, I realize I’m waking him when not meaning to and so withdraw my hand to the top of the duvet and let it sink into cloudy puffiness as a brief escape of air from between the feathers huffs around either side of my wrist.  I lose concentration of the regulation of my breathing as, limb by limb, my body numbs against these textures and my mind delivers me into anesthetized dreams.

Reflection:

Huh.  So I didn’t really know where I was going when I started out.  At first I thought I might be listing different textures that have come to have meaning in my life and then reflect on that, yet when the pillowcase and panda that both connote safety and reassurance to me (in representing childhood nostalgia) also both coincide with bedtime, I found myself just running with that image in my mind.

I didn’t realize it until the very end how much the sense of touch comes into play at that time of night when it’s quieter and darker, and, therefore, sounds and sights are more subtle.  Touch logically comes to the forefront, then, as we try to situate ourselves in comfort conducive to fading from consciousness.   A challenge was searching for different adjectives to describe what basically boils down to a bunch of different fabrics–the textures within a bed are not all that dynamic, so I kept wanting to describe things as “soft” all the time.  On rereading, I notice how I used a visual word (“twinkling”) to describe a sensation of touch, and while that may be cheating, I don’t know, it works for me because there’s a sort of motion and sound that go with that word that lets me understand how it would touch against my fingers.  I don’t even know if what I just said makes sense, but I am realizing that the boundaries between the categories of sensory words can be crossed time to time, as the different senses so often work together to elicit a shared sensation, so that leaves us open to all the more creativity in how we spin our language into the thread of a story line.

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2 March 2010

Hear No Evil

By thefallenmonkey

The Prompt:

Continuing on with my previous posts related to the senses, today’s writing prompt (page 17 of Room to Write) delves into sound.  Writers benefit from being good listeners, so Bonni Goldberg asks us to comment on what we hear in any one of 3 ways:

1.   Listing  sounds we love or hate;

2.  Describing the sounds we hear around us now; or,

3.  Developing a dialogue that employs purposeful rhythm in accentuating the subject and tone of the conversation.

I think I’m going to dapple in the first two for now, though I’d like to challenge myself with the third sometime soon and will update this when I do so.

Response:

1.  Sounds I love: the melodic vocals of the song birds that wake me and sing me lullabies in the summer.  The crisp Pffftt when someone opens a can of soda.  A genuine belly laugh gurgled from a niece or nephew.  The satisfying crackle of a fire, or cereal just submerged in milk.  The fluid ripples of a harp.  The melancholy of piano music.  The tap-tapping of corpulent rain drops on the rooftop.  A tongue clicking…once.  The ting of wind chimes and crystal.  Ocean waves and the way their foam sizzles through the pebbles.  Sounds I hate: TV commercials that blare louder than the shows they invade.  The dull thuds of neighbors existing above and around me in apartment buildings.  Car alarms.  Phones and classroom bells ringing.  Cheesy R&B vocals and the ootz-ootz-ootz of dance club music.  Buzzers.  Car horns.  The creaking of my desk chair.  Human voices babbling too loudly on public transportation.  Belches, and the laughter that follows them.

2.  What I hear now: Echoes of children’s voices undulate on the air as it carries their afternoon playtime imaginings across the square.  The steady pulse of a car or building alarm cuts through persistently with a piercing beep that makes my left eardrum throb and contract.  The hum and buzz of street traffic ebbs and flows with the Doppler Effect as cars and lorries approach and flee, the road too stop-and-go to allow continuous whirring and vrooming to meld into the whooshing roar of a waterfall that could let me remotely imagine I am amidst and one with nature.  The upstairs neighbors return with thumping and scuffling on carpeted stairs and a child’s commentary on the school day before jangling keys swing and collide as one of their own unlocks the door with a heavy click muted by friction.  The thumping continues overhead, plodding about more swiftly with a child finding freedom back in her home quarters and is soon accompanied by scuffs and skids and creaks.  All the while, I hear the clacking of the keyboard keys beneath my fingers as they yield and either stomp out letters in quick succession like the notes of a piano concerto (clicking and space-barring to a waltz, perhaps) or pause with the dreaded silence of a writer’s hesitation…a silence that is not quiet, but containing the overlapping tracks of sound previously described; a silence that a writer fortunately does not always hear when seeking out the soundscape of her storyworld.

Reflection:

As I attempt to quiet all the sounds and voices, real and imagined, swarming in my mind so that I can concentrate on reading for a while, I’ll close with this little tribute to onomatopoeia:

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