It helps me to use this punchy little tune, when I am writing the evil in this character. Maybe because it’s light, and so I can kind of skate over what the character is doing. I’m behind again. I need two days — for Nanowrimo — yesterday and today… 1667 + 1667. It’s hard to turn off the distractions and write. This morning there is a bee in here, or there was — even that adds to the jumpy feeling. I was watching this great documentary of Hemingway’s life yesterday. What a writer. He got up at 5 and wrote every day, with discipline. You have to. Any breaks in that, and it’s hard to get back to the train of thought you had. See if you can spot what the dynamic is in this scene, by just using dialogue…[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNuX7bs2qAM]
“Come on,” he said as he began to run down the beach ahead of her. He had his camera out and he was beginning to take the hundreds of pictures he would be taking of her, from all angles, running and jumping all around her, sometimes charging her, sometimes standing very still as she walked toward him. He was laughing and smiling as he kept shooting.
“What am I to you?” she asked him once she caught up.
“You’re beautiful.”
“What do you mean.”
“Just what I said.”
“Look I think we have to stop.”
“I don’t.”
“I do.”
But then he hooked one of his legs around hers and she fell into the soft sand, suddenly he was on top of her again and they were kissing as if they were back in bed at the motel.
“Look what you do to me,” he said.
He took her hand and pressed it against his jeans. “See that?”
“She doesn’t do that to me, Tasha.”
And then he started in with the kisses again. It felt real, even though in her stomach there was a knot forming, made of twisty tangled threads. Half of the time he held her she was rigid and knotted, and then as he kissed her he was prying her desire out of her. It was hot and cold and hot and cold, in ways that were unpredictable.
“Let me see that purse,” he said.
She carried a large satchel full of all the things that girls who are students carry in their purses. He wanted to photograph it. “Look at all that stuff,” he said.
He laughed as he snapped it over and over and over.
“What’s this,” he asked.
“Just notes.”
“What kind of notes?”
“For class.”
But it wasn’t true at all. Natasha had carried that picture of the two of them kissing in her purse, wrapped inside some paper she had been writing a poem on. He grabbed for it, and unfolded the paper quickly. His postcard of the two of them tumbled onto the sand.
“Oh,” he said, looking at her. “I see.”
“John, Mr. Sandman, I…”
“What?”
“I was just…”
“What?”
“I was…”
“It’s a poem.”
“It was the start of one.”
“About what?”
“Nothing.”
“Really?”
“Nothing at all.”
“I’m going to read it.”
“No!”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Please don’t.”
“It’s about us isn’t it?”
“It was about looking at you.”
“Do you think my wife ever writes poems to me?”
“I don’t know.”
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 