Story Discussion: Malachiteink, Main Queue May 28, 06

[Guest]

This is a short/short story from my writing journal I am considering for possible expansion. I don't really want to expand the story beyond 1500 words (it is currently under 1000) because I want to keep it focused on the time and events portrayed. I do not want to go beyond the space and period of time I have as limits in the story as it stands because I don't see any story beyond this. Basically I am pleased with the story, but since it is easy to be blind to possibilities, successes or failures in any piece of writing, I want to bring it in front of other eyes and minds to see if it works as is or if it could benefit from rewriting.

In addition to any comments about the story, the characters, etc., my specific questions concern potential for expanding the sex scene that is only touched on in the current draft. Would expanding it into a detailed scene add anything, explain anything or increase the reader's understanding of the character? Could it possibly weaken the story as it is or distract the reader?

Thank you in advance for taking the time to read and comment.


Hotel Room

Charlie glanced around the little room. Dead center on the right side was the bed. Almost perfectly on the quarter was the dresser, plain, clear pine, uncluttered by any personal object, holding only a pair of plastic cups and a bottle of dark red wine, open and breathing. Opposite the bed was a similar entertainment unit, closed now. Nightstands guarded the bed. Heavily lined curtains over pale gold sheers covered the window that led onto the balcony. In the corner was an upholstered chair and a small, round table. All the fabrics were tastefully bland, sage green with intentions of gold and rose flowers. On the other side of the room was the little hall that led to the closet, the bathroom, and the hotel room door. He stood at the window, one side of the curtain drawn back, watching the tiny speck people walking along the white beach. They were all too far away to see him, but he stayed hidden by cloth and balcony wall, naked, guilty.

His clothes created the only disorder in the room -- his shoes in the hallway, his pants and shirt tossed across the chair, his socks and briefs in a pile by the rumpled bed. All signs of Todd were gone now, as if Todd had never been, as if he hadn't met the man there just a bare hour before, hadn't looked at him and caressed him and rubbed nakedly against him. He felt tired and sore and very, very scared. Todd had not kissed him before he left. He'd risen from the bed like a ghost, slipped in and out of the hot shower water, glided into his clothes and out the door, leaving nothing behind but the crumpled condom on the nightstand.

Charlie wanted to cry. Instead, he rubbed a bruise on his shoulder, where Todd had bitten him, and wondered what he would say when Alecia questioned him about it.

Todd was certainly beautiful. There was no doubting that. Sculpted and tan, blond and muscular, Todd was all about looking beautiful. He said he was a good fuck when they’d met three weeks ago, but now Charlie wasn't sure. As much expectation as he'd had -- the surreptitious phone calls, the emails, the planning and waiting and ball tightening anticipation -- this hadn't been what he'd thought it would be. The feeling of voluptuous surrender had lasted maybe 10 minutes. Then he'd felt clumsy and shy, and very out of place. Everything he knew about making love he'd learned from his wife. None of it had been right for Todd.

No kissing, for a start.

"I don't kiss," Todd flatly said after removing his shirt. "I don't give head, I don't bottom, and I don't kiss." Charlie had let the shock of the declaration wash over him. He was already naked by that time, his penis tugging upward as Todd stripped, his stomach knotting. He'd let it go by, forgot it, and climbed onto the bed.

Alecia kissed wonderfully. She was dark and a little chubby, with soft skin and large eyes. She was usually timid and passive in bed with Charlie, but her lips always welcomed him. He loved her.

"I love her," he told the specks on the beach, gathered now to watch the setting sun. "I love my wife."

The specks below moved and paused, moved and paused, their motion mysterious and silent. He closed the curtain. The room became murky dim. The wine bottle was still full, so he poured some into a plastic cup and drank it. It was dry on his tongue.

"I don't like wine," Todd announced when he'd offered some. "Come on, you want this or not?"

The wine settled harshly in Charlie's stomach. Alecia hadn't liked wine when they'd met, and had been puzzled by his interest in it. Bottle after bottle he'd brought to her, and he'd spent hours teaching her about bouquet and sediment and the varieties of grape. Her preference was frankly more for the Kool-aid flavors, but she'd listened and tasted and nodded. He didn't think she ever drank wine without him, and rarely more than a few glasses. Wine flushed her skin and made her laugh loose and loud, but he liked her when she was tipsy.

He put down the plastic cup and stared a moment at the dark red ring at the bottom. She hadn't questioned his story about meeting a friend on this Saturday afternoon. Usually Saturdays were spent puttering around their little house, working in the yard or attempting one of the dozens of projects always looming. She could sew and paint and hammer with the best of them. More often than not, he'd wished she’d do it without his help. The old house was "quaint" and “cozy” to her, but to him it was just a place to live that occasionally squeaked and leaked.

The bathroom light was on, cutting a defining line of brightness through the dark hallway. He peeked around the door. Both towels were crumpled on the floor in a small puddle. A few blond hairs clung to the tiled wall and the fake marble vanity. In the mirror, his own face looked pale and empty. He turned away and picked up the towels. The faintest whiff of Todd's cologne still clung to them and he buried his face in the scented terrycloth, inhaling deeply. When he was numb to the smell, he folded the towels and laid them across the back of the toilet, then turned on the water. It would be dark soon, and he needed to be home in time for dinner.

 

[Matadore]

Promise of some more thoughts soon

Hey--this is a short short story! There won't be many damp handkerchiefs after this one is posted. I wrote a story that was about 2000 words and most of the comments were complaints that it was too short!

You have a lot of room to expand both the story by developing the promising characters and giving them a bit more motive to help the reader understand the behavior.

You could do much of that through more expansion of the action (and feelings) in the bed. A secondary goal might be to give the reader more information about the rationale that led the two men to the bedroom and what they are likely to do afterward only by what goes on in the sheets. That would keep you within your stated time and space goal, but add a bit of meat to the story.

Was Charlie a bi-curious first timer? May he be a Todd-in-training? Is this one-hour stand a typical reoccurring afternoon delight? Is Alecia "Moma" for him? What is the source of his guilt? Was the ten minutes a fix that makes it all worth it? Who is using whom? Is Todd a slut, or does he have other values. It seems that he is a life support system for a penis. He is the kind of guy who insists that he is not gay...he just likes to fuck men.

You have a wonderfully written little piece here. You have conveyed much emotion and action in a biting economy of words. The bones almost rattle. It is lovely, but is it enough? Not for most of Lit readers I would guess.

I’ll write more later.

Matadore

 

[dr_mabeuse]

This is a sharp and intelligent little piece of writing here, Mal, and I appreciate it. I personally wouldn't consider it a story, because to me, a story implies that something changes—things are different at the end than they wee at the beginning—and I don’t see any change here. I'd consider this more of a vignette or a scene, but that's just semantics anyhow. In any case, it's a tight, smart, description, in which the words have to do more than they seem to tell us what's going on, and so it's perfect for a close critique.

Ostensibly, it's a man's immediate reactions to a homosexual affair—his first, I assume, although that's not entirely clear, but he certainly doesn't do this all the time and it's apparently a very significant event in his life. He's married and seems to love his wife (or did), and one of his concerns now is focused on her. This a turning point in his life, but at the end, we don't know what's going to happen any more than he does, which is fine (confusion is a condition that's real enough to most of us), but it makes for an unsatisfying story, and I think readers are going to demand more or you're going to get complaints. As far as I can tell, Charlie doesn't even come to any realizations or conclusions in his own mind about what's happened. It's more like "Well, what was that all about?" and that's what the reader's going to think too.

This has obviously been a life-altering experience for him in some way, and there's no way Mal could describe everything he's feeling, so she pulls the camera way back and shows us the picture and lets us see his actions and his thoughts, and from those we're allowed to piece together what we think he's feeling. (The one place where she slips with this is where he wants to cry. I think that line's a big mistake, as it tips her hand right away. It's kind of like giving us the climax of the scene right there. {Well, two places actually. We're also told he's ashamed}) Because the piece is told so objectively and so tersely, with so few words, every image and every word is crucial as we examine it closely for some idea of what all this means to Charlie.

It starts with a close, detailed examination of the room, observing the banal reality of the place where this extraordinary event took place. It's almost as if the author has to nail down the scene because Charlie himself might float away. I'm troubled by the fact that Charlie "glances" around the room. As I say, in a piece this short, every single word counts, and his glancing suggests a kind of casual disinterest that goes against everything else we're going to learn about him. As the piece goes on, he seems to be in more of a state of emotional shock, and so the glancing bothers me. I also think the room description goes on a bit too long. I don't know. I just think that if I were Charlie, I’d more likely be standing there staring blankly at something, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

Now we have a conflict. You say Charlie's clothes created the only disorder in the room, but then we find that the bed is a mess because he just had sex in it, and later we find there's a condom on the nightstand and—maybe this is my reading—but seeing how Todd left the bathroom, it's hard for me to imagine that he didn't leave a wet towel or two lying on the carpet as he slipped out. Still, it's clever. Everything is normal and banal, but his clothes—his persona—are now all over the place. A mess.

He's standing at the window looking out at the world, bright and sunny, and he's ashamed. I don't want to be too picky, but I'm very interested in why he's standing there. Why did he get out of bed? I mean, I've just had gay sex with some stranger and I wake up and he's gone, and what do I do? I don’t get out of the bed and walk to the window like I want to check the weather. I sit in bed and wonder what the fuck just happened? What have I done? Who am I now? If I get up, maybe it's to look for Todd, or see if he stole my wallet, or wipe my dick off, or something, but there's some reason I get out of bed and knowing what it is is kind of critical in understanding what Charlie's feeling, especially in a piece this stark that gives us so few clues. So I think the reason that he's standing by the window is awfully significant, and we don't know what it is.

The image is Charlie looking out into the world of sunlight and normalcy from the shadowy ambiguity of his room and probably wondering which side of the window he belongs on now, and as such, it's pretty powerful. But still, the way I picture it, I see Charlie sitting up in bed, looking for Todd, checking the bathroom, maybe checking his wallet, and then staggering back into the room and staring for a while. Then he might go to the window. It may seem like a very minor point, but again, every word, every image counts, and I really think it's critical. Maybe I'm just nuts.

I love the way you described Todd. I loved the bite on Charlie's shoulder that told us a page worth of what their sex was like in one image. I loved the "ten minutes of voluptuous surrender" that tells us so much about what Charlie was looking for, and the way you show us without telling that he didn't get what he wanted from Todd. Todd's an oaf, perfectly drawn. "I don't kiss." But he bites, doesn't he?

There's so much juicy good stuff like that in here. The wine and the way it segues into his relationship with Alecia. We do need to know more about them though. How he feels about Alecia is a mirror for how he feels about himself now, and I can't tell whether he's just totally indifferent to her or whether they've reached that level of domestic boredom where he takes her for granted. I wonder too at her using the tools. Is he supposed to be a bit of a sissy? That would be a shame and I don't think you intended that.

This is a very skillful piece, Mal, and you’re a wonderful writer in my opinion. I love the way you suggest emotion with inanimate objects, and the way your describe by showing us those telling details of the blonde hair on the tilke, Alecia's taste for Kool-aid wines, the way he tells the specks on the beach that he loves his wife (particularly beautiful, with them with their backs turned away from him to watch the sun go down and the darkness gather.)

It suffers though. I think it suffers from the fact that you yourself aren't sure what Charlie feels right now, except ashamed and like crying. But ashamed for what? That he might be gay? That he just was fucked by an oaf? That he betrayed his wife or that she might find out? That he made a fool of himself in front of Todd? There's really not enough there to help us decide, so all we know is that something happened, and Charlie doesn't feel real happy about it.

What that was and why he feels that way need to be made clear, and whether you should extend this or not all depends on those two issues as well. I really don't know enough about Charlie or what just happened to reallay care at this point. He fucked or got fucked by some guy and he feels ashamed and like crying. I need more than that.

All the best,

---dr.M.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Mal,

After reading the crits given by Mat and Zoot, I’m looking around for some training wheels to use on mine.

Hotel Room, is good, even exquisite, writing, but IMHO it’s not good story telling. As Zoot mentioned, nothing appears to change. Charlie has just had a gay quickie and now has ambivalent feelings about the event and its significance. Perhaps the shower is a metaphor for his seeking to wash away the memory or his reflections, but it’s such a common post-sex event one can’t be sure.

Looking at the story from a Lit reader perspective, the opening description is way too long. Granted, it might be interpreted as symbolizing the neat orderly world he wishes he still had. But that isn’t immediately evident and would only occur later and to those still reading. There’s a real danger an opening that, at first glance, appears to have no value other than to establish setting and mood, might not hook many readers.

IMHO, story-wise, a better opening would have been the two last sentences of the first paragraph. Then he could have looked away from the window and studied the room.

Any expansion of the story should be directed at filling in the blanks concerning Charlie’s motivations and his relationships with Todd and Alecia. There’d more reads and votes if that was done with the two men in bed. But I’d rather see you stay with the current tone of the story and use Charlie’s internal monologue, possibly with reflections back to the sex, to give more insight on his personality, motivation(s) and change.

Technical note: both the K and A are capitalized in Kool-Aid.

Remember, I’m lousy at symbolism and lean more toward Hemingway than Faulkner. Judge accordingly.

Rumple Foreskin

 

[neonlyte]

Mal,
First impression - like a Bill Viola video.
I enjoyed this short piece immensely. Wonderful economy of words and managing to convey more with less. There is no story, in one sense, it is an event meticulously recorded to fill the gaps through which a story can be glimpsed. And the story can be anyones story, we can fill the spaces you leave for us with our own perceptions of this encounter and the symbolism of relationship, relationships that extend far beyond confines of the room you paint for us.

To the specifics your seek comment upon.
Personally, I wouldn't expand the sex scene, expansion might only serve to unbalance the piece, shift focus away from the ethereal almost gossomer like strands than span the passage and the characters.

I might make more comments later when I digested and re-read your posting.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this excellent (and writerly instructive) work.

 

[Guest]

I want to thank each of you for the time you took to read and comment on this little story. As some of you pointed out, "story" is a misnomer in this case, not quite precise, and I agree. At best, this is a "slice of life", in the post-modern, literary fiction, artsy-fartsy sense. It was the result of a writing prompt in my journal that wouldn't let me alone. That didn't mean I knew what to do with it. I've thought about it a lot, but you are seeing the piece as it comes out of my journal: no editing, no fiddling about. It had me stumped, so I didn't want to play with it until I broke it. I needed some ideas, and the expansion of the sex scene was one.

I hadn't really considered it seriously for Lit submission, because, as several of you also pointed out, readers here have certain specific expectations and I'm not sure if I want to alter this whatever-it-is to meet spec. But it might find a home elsewhere, if I manage to make something of it and if I'm lucky.

You've given me several points on which to think. Thank you so much. I hope that, as other stories come up, I'll be able to return the favor.

 

[Matadore]

Yw

Thank you so much.

Glad to respond. Hope to see more of your writing and critiques.

Mat

 

[BlackShanglan]

Sorry to drop in late on this one - do show me the door if you like.

I agree with Rumple and Dr. M. on this being very well written - I will nitpick just the tiniest bit below, but on the whole I think Dr. M. very right in saying that you make small details do wonderful work, like the two wet towels on the floor and Todd's reaction to the wine. Your use of concrete physical details to built emotional and psychological insight is quite masterful, particularly given the narrow scope of the story.

I think where I disagree with the others is on the topic of action, which they seem to me to have felt not wholly satisfying. While recognizing that the physical action is very slight, I felt fairly satisfied with this as a piece built around an emotional action. To me - and of course I may be utterly wrong here - the emotional action seemed to move me through Charlie's progress of disillusionment. He begins a bit numb in the hotel room, and through the rest of the description we learn how something that he took enormous risks to achieve turns out to be a shattering and humiliating experience, much less than he'd built it up to be. I get the impression of someone who, finally ready to admit this terribly difficult and crucially important thing to himself, discovers that the world is indifferent to it. There's a sort of bitter irony at the end; the one person who knows him well enough and cares about him enough to understand this huge step is his wife, the one person to whom he cannot reveal it. Now he's caught desiring the richness of depth of his emotional relationship with his wife while being doomed, if he pursues male lovers, to the sorts of people eager for an anonymous one-off with no strings attached.

To that extent, I felt that there was a good deal more action in this story than was immediately apparent, and that it settled and bloomed nicely after I'd read it, gradually opening up more things for me to see and more ideas that it encompassed. I suppose that it could stand to expand a bit, but the one area that I would absolutely not recommend expanding is the sex. Don't let Lit get the upper hand of this one. That the sex is perfunctory, anonymous, and without real power seems to me much of the point of the story; it's not the explosion of wild gratification that Charlie expected, and the simpler and more sparse and barren you keep it, I think the more you work to the purpose of the story (if indeed I have that right).

It's true that there is ambiguity in this, and that perhaps no one knows entirely what Charlie might be feeling here. I'm not opposed, however, to ambiguity. Perhaps one thing you might look to do would be to actually heighten that sense of ambiguity and confusion by strengthening the key tensions that go into it. If I'm reading this correctly, Charlie has some powerful emotions at play right now: guilt over cheating on his wife, shock and disillusionment about how this encounter has gone, craving for emotional and sexual intimacy that he can't seem to experience together in one person, and probably - I hope I'm not reaching too far here - a very ugly sensation, under it all, that his life might just have become unsolvable. I'd guess that up until this point, he's been telling himself that the source of his gnawing unhappiness and dissatisfaction is his sexuality. If only he could solve that, everything would come together. Now that easy answer has just been withdrawn; he's tasted the forbidden fruit, and it wasn't a stunning, world-reordering event. It was just a quick, rather dull fling in a cheap hotel, and it's not going to fix anything for him. Now he's got all of the problems he started with, plus the added burden of having sold out his conscience for something that turns out to be worthless and the knowledge that the thing he was counting out to make sense of his life isn't going to do it.

A lot of that is coming through - possibly too much if I'm imagining that latter. Intensifying those tensions and bringing them a little more powerfully to life would, I think, help the reader to see the taut emotional drama that is going in on this apparently motionless scene.

That's my two cents on the broad strokes scene. I'm just going to comb over the fine points now with a few notes on the text itself.

Hotel Room

Is it really fair game to pick on the title? I'm sorry to start there. But I think that this is one place where you can help to instill some of the tension of the piece earlier. A title can help to set the reader's mood going into the piece, and in a piece this short you'll want to make every word count, including the title. For me, this title does not carry emotional connotations that are likely to shape my reaction to the piece; hotels rooms are (as you note later) famous for their neutrality, but that means that my entrance into the piece is neutral and without a strong weighting in any direction. When I sit down to "Heart of Darkness," by way of contrast, or to "Angel in the House," I have an immediate perception of the text's likely feel before I start. I'd consider whether your title could serve as a means to get the reader into the proper mindset going in.

Charlie glanced around the little room. Dead center on the right side was the bed. Almost perfectly on the quarter was the dresser, plain, clear pine, uncluttered by any personal object, holding only a pair of plastic cups and a bottle of dark red wine, open and breathing.

I liked the way the wine toyed with me here, making me at first think that he was awaiting a lover, not thinking of one already departed.

Opposite the bed was a similar entertainment unit, closed now. Nightstands guarded the bed.

Through here, I got a little edgy because I began to lose the sense of emotional weighting. I could feel that the precision of the description of the first elements carried emotional weight; someone is either a very precise person by nature, or is seeking to distance himself from his emotional reactions to the room, and I soon learn which. The impersonality of the hotel room quickly ties into that, and so the dresser and the plastic cups (nice touch) by the wine feed me that feeling of anonymity and an unpleasant cheapness joined with the wine's romantic feel. It's very good through there, rich in detail the serves multiple purposes at once, giving me both the physical setting and the psychological weight.

When I hit the bed and the nightstands, however, I didn't get a feel of how they tied in emotionally or psychologically. They felt surplus, things that were mentioned simply because they were there, and I objected to them as such. I think that they could certainly play a part of the emotional/psychological set of the scene, but they need some of the attention that the other elements got in order to do that. I can see a few other places with similar issues, like the hall with the closet and the bathroom. Yes, it's a good description of the average hotel room, but I feel that I am with you by that point and am not sure what the extra adds.

All the fabrics were tastefully bland, sage green with intentions of gold and rose flowers.

"Intentions" seemed an odd word here. I hate to object to it on the grounds that poetic description should employ words in new and unusual ways, but this one more snagged than illuminated for me.

He stood at the window, one side of the curtain drawn back, watching the tiny speck people walking along the white beach.

I like that phrase very much. It captures his feelings of alienation and loss beautifully and succintly. In fact it captures him so well that I wonder if this is wholly needed -

They were all too far away to see him, but he stayed hidden by cloth and balcony wall, naked, guilty.

- but it's not a major issue. You've done excellent work letting the descriptions breath life and emotional weight, and it's an enjoyable thing to see.

He felt tired and sore and very, very scared.

This caught my attention the second read through because I didn't feel a great deal of fear from Charlie elsewhere. I sensed regret and unhappiness and some fear of the "what on earth do I do now?" variety, but not so much that "very, very scared" seemed to ring quite right. He feels more empty to me, at this point.

He said he was a good fuck when they’d met three weeks ago, but now Charlie wasn't sure.

Great line.

The feeling of voluptuous surrender had lasted maybe 10 minutes. Then he'd felt clumsy and shy, and very out of place. Everything he knew about making love he'd learned from his wife. None of it had been right for Todd.

I found this excellent in its complexity. It captures in a short, tight few sentences his disillusionment, lack of emotional connection with Todd, confusion about his own sexuality and how to do it "right," self-doubt and gnawing guilt about his marriage. This section worked very well for me.

"I don't kiss," Todd flatly said after removing his shirt. "I don't give head, I don't bottom, and I don't kiss."

And we know Todd, in a few deft strokes. Very nicely done.

"I love her," he told the specks on the beach, gathered now to watch the setting sun. "I love my wife."

This is another nice one, I think. Somehow the address to those little specks on the beach really makes this line for me, capturing that sense of tension between the inner and outer self, the private and public worlds, what he wants and what he thinks he wants and what other people want, and all of the emotional distance that has just sprung up between him and the rest of humanity.

"I don't like wine," Todd announced when he'd offered some. "Come on, you want this or not?"

Another great line. "Oaf," I think was Dr. M.'s word for it, and you capture it very well. It helps to heighten the sense of contrast between Charlie's expectations - excited, a little romantic, much like a virgin anticipating the first night - and the flat, vulgar, utterly unromantic pragmatism of his match. That, I think, in turn does good work in opening up the question of how Alecia fits into this; she offers the emotional world, and in lacking that in this experience, he sees more clearly what he may be losing.

She could sew and paint and hammer with the best of them. More often than not, he'd wished she’d do it without his help. The old house was "quaint" and “cozy” to her, but to him it was just a place to live that occasionally squeaked and leaked.

This was trickier for me. Houses and homes often being symbols of the people who live in them, my first reaction to his feelings about his home was that they seemed to indicate that he felt no affection for his wife. I don't think overall that that is where you mean to go with this, but for me - possibly for no one else in existence - it's difficult to seperate his indifference to the house from indifference to the person in it.

He turned away and picked up the towels. The faintest whiff of Todd's cologne still clung to them and he buried his face in the scented terrycloth, inhaling deeply.

I wasn't sure about this gesture. He seemed fairly heavily struck by Todd's manner and swift exit, and I wondered if this gesture of tenderness fit. I think possibly Charlie could become a little more consistent in his reactions - that is, his reactions can certainly show some ambiguity and confusion, but not pull quite so hard in differing directions, as with the earlier "very, very scared" and this quite opposite gesture of desire and lingering. Just a thought.

When he was numb to the smell, he folded the towels and laid them across the back of the toilet, then turned on the water. It would be dark soon, and he needed to be home in time for dinner.

His almost rote or mechanical return to everyday tasks works very well for me.

I like the piece very much as a whole, and I hope that you find much success with it. I think you will! But enough rambling from me, I think -

Shanglan

 

[Penelope Street]

Hi Malachiteink,

Since it's really short story, I hope a really short critique is ok?

I love your little story. And, for me, it is a real story. I see a man who tried something and it wasn't near what he wanted. He's discovered reality and fantasy are entirely different things and now he's gonna go back to his wife and never do this again. That little crumpled condom made all the difference for me in how I interpret his character and the story. Of course, that's just my interpretation- but you did leave it up to me.

I don't think it's an erotic story and it may not get much praise from the average Lit reader, but it's still a good story. Why do you want to expand it at all?

Take Care,
Penny