Nights

This what you might call an attempt at a first draft. I pictured a woman sneaking into bed after her husband was asleep and began to write without a plan. This is what I came up with. It is unedited and unchanged, and therefore not very good but I felt like posting it anyway. It was in response to sundayscribblings' prompt "nights". I haven't decided whether what I'm doing to do with this story yet, so you may see it again.

"Martha crept guiltily into her bedroom, each step as deliberate as the last. She reached out her arms in the dark and, feeling the firm confirmation of her bed, crawled in. She stiffly rolled onto her back and glanced at the clock. In blinking lights she saw that she had lingered to long in front of the television again. With great care she turned her head and looked intently at her husband. He lay naked beside her, limp and motionless. His breathing remained shallow. She had not woken him. No lecture tonight. Carefully, Martha rearranged the blankets to cover her nude man. She turned away from him once more and felt for her iPod, cupped it to block the light, and selected her nighttime play list: slow, Dylan songs chosen to empty her mind of her problems and absorb her into sleep. She closed her eyes and tried to let the guitar take her over. It was to no avail. In her mind she kept running through conversations she had had that day, inane, boring conversations, and lists of things to do tomorrow. File the papers. Find the papers. Clean the kitchen. Get quarters for the laundry. No, it was loonies now. Damn expensive laundry. Martha did little to fight these thoughts, as she was accustomed to thinking out her days just before she fell asleep, and she knew that soon she would be in a dreamland free of the mundane details of ordinary life, if only for a few hours. This night, however, she found herself still wide away and half past five and she could hardly close her eyes. Her heart was beating strongly and she felt like she had just drunk a boat of coffee. She began to fidget, risking waking Matt, and turned her music up, but nothing she did could make her comfortable and she wanted to get up. Her rational mind begged her to remain in bed and get what little sleep remained in the night, but she disregarded it. She whipped off her blankets and flung her legs over the side of the bed, and stumbled quickly down the hall. Arriving at her computer chair she excitedly pressed the power button and waited impatiently for the machine to start up. When she was finally able to open her word processor she could no longer contain the spark that was building inside of her. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, expertly tapping out a masterpiece of short fiction. She could feel the fire in her words and the passion that flowed through her for this, her art. A story that had been building in her for a long time was freed at last, and Martha was ecstatic. It had been a long time. As the typing slowed steadily after a period of time, she stopped and read her work. It needed a lot of editing. In her haste she had made several errors and, she had to admit, her character came across as flat and unappealing. Her mind was growing foggy and she found she did not know where to take the story next, or whether it had anywhere to go. By now she was too tired to read the entire thing again and to make it interesting seemed like an impossible task. She saved the file under the name “Grace”, after her one-dimensional heroine, and allowed the computer to shut down. Martha then crept back down to her room and crawled into bed beside Matt once more, this time with a sense of incredible relief. Her spark had some back, if only for a moment. She could work on her story tomorrow. She did not know whether or not she would remember to, but she felt like the evening’s activities were proof that she wasn’t all burnt up. She smiled silently at Matt and fell asleep."

I think I wrote this because I often feel like Martha. Not about avoiding lectures from my (nonexistant) husband, but about my creative urge. I have gone a very long period without writing very much at all (seriously, I have written around five or six things in the last three years) and I worry that I am no longer able to. The saying is "writers write." If I am not writing prolifically, am I a writer? I certainly hope so.