Numbers and Exercises 2/21/06

Someone’s playing the radio on the twenty seventh floor. I have the misfortune of hearing it one the twenty sixth floor. I imagine turning into one of those old cranks who bangs on the ceiling with a broom handle. At twenty five, I am too young to play those games. Instead, I decide to leave. The elevator stops at the twenty fourth floor where I am joined by a pair of elderly women wearing tract suits and weights on their wrists. They chatter aimlessly as we descend. Twenty three floors later we are in the lobby. The women begin speed-walking out of the building as I slowly follow. “Twenty two years of marriage and he just up and leaves her for a younger woman,” one of the ladies says. I hear the other clucking at this comment before I am unable to hear anything else from them.

I wonder about that situation as I walk away. My husband and I were married when we were merely twenty-one. “So young,” my mother had said at the time. “It will never last.” I thanked her for her unwavering support and went ahead with my wedding plans. Mike and I were married on the twentieth of June. The date was convenient because it was the only day the church was free that month. Things have been fairly uneventful since then but these old women had me wondering about the next nineteen years. Would Mike leave me for a younger woman? I found this unlikely as he hadn’t married me for my youth or beauty in the first place, or so I liked to think.

I ponder this for eighteen blocks at which point I relies that I have been walking aimlessly, doing nothing but avoiding the noise that was formerly coming from above me. Seeing as that is not far behind me I take the next few blocks much slower. I have no destination, just a seemingly endless supply of street before me. There is a bookstore at the corner of 17th street and Miller Avenue. I walk inside in hope of sitting down and resting for a while.

Sixteen minutes later I am back on the street. In the bookstore I found a book on the statistics for people who marry young. I grew morose as I flipped through it and quickly left.

Back on the streets I wonder if Mike has the same doubts as I do. It was unlikely seeing as he hadn’t heard the conversation that I had earlier. If he had been there would he have grabbed my hand and given it a light squeeze to reassure me that it would never happen to us?

Us. We. We had met on our fifteenth day of our freshman year at college. He thought it was magic that led me to him. I knew that earlier that night I had had too much to drink and wandered up to the wrong dorm room. When my key didn’t work for the obvious reasons I banged on the door yelling for my roommate to open it. Instead, I got Mike. Half asleep and barely dressed he agreed to let me sleep n his couch in the hopes that I would better recognize my surroundings in the morning.

Ah, numbers. I remember this story coming from a prompt which makes up the first sentence. I think that after that I just started counting down because it was happening fairly naturally after I had come up with the character’s age. I think that I was doing a lot of work out of a book of prompts at this time because I wasn’t writing all that much. I felt very stifled and when I feel stifled I have a difficult time expressing myself. I knew that I needed to write and so I was turning to prompts to help me through it. I still use prompts sometimes because they help me get ideas going when I think that I have none left.

I particularly liked this prompt because it gave me the chance to mix letters and numbers. It was a very interesting idea for me and I thought about expanding it, but I figured that if I were going at the rate that I was going I would have to start at something like 10,000 to get a novel and I couldn’t think of what I would use for 9998 or really any other number before I got down below one hundred. I also don’t like having to rely on devices like this. It would be one thing if I could write a story like this and make it work and make the characters compelling, but I’m not sure that I could. I think I would be too distracted by the act of counting down.

This brings me to an important point. There are a lot of times when I think it would be easier to rely on something other than my characters to move the story forward. I know that there are times when there are things other than my characters involved in the story. While I think that plot is important, I don’t want it to move forward simply for the sake of moving forward. Maybe this is why I don’t write mystery novels. I wouldn’t want the characters to suffer just so that they can solve the mystery. I think sometimes when writers rely on devices and plot they miss out on creating a character arc. I wouldn’t write a story without a plot but I also wouldn’t want to write a story where someone didn’t change something about themselves from the beginning to the end. To me that’s more important. The plot comes out of the character’s desire for something and the character’s need for a change.

I guess my stories are just more character driven. That’s just something that works for me. I like devices such as counting down and if I could ever figure out a way for it to work in a story without the story actually suffering I might use it someday.