For the last stream’s exercise, we did an exercise we haven’t done in a while: writing about one, small activity in excruciating detail.
This exercise forces you to slow down your pacing and really use the Hammer of Details to crack open your scenes and describe them as vividly as possible.
Last time we did this, we wrote about sitting alone at a carnival. This time, chat voted for something a little darker: removing a bandage.
How did we write 500 words about removing a bandage? Read on to find out.
Watch a quick video of us coming up with
the topic and writing/reading the story here, or read it below.
The bandage wrapped around my arm is a dark reminder that I will never pick up anything with that hand again. Because that hand is off frozen somewhere in a hospital refrigerator. All I have now is a stub covered in white gauze and sticky blood, screaming at me to be changed.
I sit down on the bathroom toilet seat, all of my supplies ready on the sink counter next to me. A roll of thick gauze, a dark plastic container of anti septic, enough Q-tips to dry out an Olympic pool, and the white gauze tape to seal it all back up when I’m done.
I take a deep breath, exhaling so hard I can feel the warm air underneath the bandages and crusty blood. I grip onto the gauze tape and start peeling it off, like stripping the skin off a potato. I bring my hand around my arm, more and more tape coming with it each rotation, the red stains getting darker and darker. The iron smell of dry blood fills up the bathroom, like I’m shoving a homeless man’s old change into my nostrils.
After what feels like an eternity, I’ve removed all the tape. It dangles from my fingers, lifeless, like the shed skin of a snake. I drop it into the trash bin, feeling a moment of relief to see it gone, until I remember why I’m doing this in the first place.
What’s left are the cotton pads, stuck to my stub so hard they probably didn’t even need the tape in the first place. The sticky blood seeps through them, like little murder scenes attached to my arm. All I can hear are the pads’ mocking voices. You think we look gross? Just wait until you remove us and see what’s underneath! You should’ve been more careful, mister.
I grit my teeth and start pulling away the pads. They don’t come off as easily as the tape. I remove them in chunks of fluffy, crusty white and red amalgams. They make a ripping sound, like tearing velcro. The biggest bits come off first, leaving behind wisps of fuzz that stick to my newly-grown arm hairs, ones that have just started to come back after they’d been shaved away. I pluck off the leftover puffs one by one, cringing in pain as they drag my innocent hairs to death along with them.
Finally, my stub is revealed. It’s like having a dead end for an arm. Where my hand once was, there’s nothing but air. And yet, when I close my eyes, it doesn’t feel like anything is wrong. In my mind, I still have fingers I can move. I can wiggle them, point, clap; it’s only when I try to touch something that my heart drops and reality slaps me in the face.
The stitches are still fresh on the tip, surrounded by bruised purple skin. Splotches of dried blood run down all the way to my elbow. The end is sore, like I’m carrying around an invisible brick nailed into my wrist. The doctors said there would be some leakage for the next week, and I had to be sure to clean it up, or else it would get infected.
What they didn’t mention was the anger that leaked throughout my body. As I stared at the stump, every vein and artery pumped pure hatred through me. There was no way to clean this mess up, and I’d already become infected by rage.
I was going to get my revenge.
In the end, we wrote almost 600 words, and we could’ve easily done more, but we had to stop at some point. And all we described was removing the bandage; nothing before, nothing after, just the current, painful procedure in all of its physical and emotional grittiness.
Quite often, authors think that they need action to keep readers interested, but that’s simply not true. The best way to keep readers interested is by ensuring that they can see and feel everything that’s going on, and to do that, sometimes you have to slow down the pacing… even slower than peeling off a painful bandage.
After that we did a writing prompt and chat voted for this one submitted by ADigitalWizard: You are a fanfiction author well known in the community for writing happy endings for fictional characters whose stories end on a sour note. One day, you receive a massive bag of letters in the mail; letters from those characters you gave closure.
This one was a lot of fun to brainstorm. We had to really think about which stories had sad endings, and it was harder than I expected. There’s far too many stories out there with happy endings, I think it’s about time we balanced it out a bit!
But that aside, I really like the format we chose to write this in — as one of the letters itself. There’s twists and turns along the way, plus a final punch to gut. I couldn’t even read it with a straight face, and I doubt you will either.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch Rubbish to Published, the writing exercises, or the writing prompts on YouTube, or watch the full stream reruns until Twitch deletes them.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming November 2018.
Featured image: Pakutaso