Being Gorgeous, Part 2
We're feeling our feelings today
INSTRUCTIONS: In a paragraph or so, describe an action, or a person feeling strong emotion – joy, fear, grief. Try to make the rhythm and movement of the sentences embody or represent the physical reality you’re writing about.
David Whitney strode into the office, a grin on his face and a skip in his step that made everyone else stop for a moment.
Ella looked up from her laptop. “Everything… okay, Dave?”
He dropped his satchel bag on his desk next to her and spun his chair around once before dropping into it. “Definitely, Ella. Couldn’t be better.”
She watched him as he took his own laptop out of the desk and set himself up for the day, humming a tune under his breath. “Okay then,” she muttered with a tight smile. “Just not used to… this side of you is all.”
David leaned back in his chair, arms behind his head. “That’s because today’s a different day, Ella.” He snapped his fingers in tune with whatever song was in his head, and then logged in, tapping at his keyboard like each key in his password was part of a drum solo.
Ella shrugged and went back to starting her own day while David logged in. He couldn’t sit still in his chair - his head bopped from side to side, and he found himself drumming on the edge of the desk. Moreover, his gaze kept drifting to the door of their boss’ office. Between web pages loading up or passwords being accepted, he looked over to the pale wooden door of Ed Carson, Senior Manager, currently closed, but potentially open at any time.
“Gonna be a good day,” he said to himself.
“What was that?” Ella asked.
He turned to her and winked. But this wasn’t the wink of an indecent suggestion. This was the wink of secret knowledge. The wink that said, Today has already been written, and I held the pen.
“Today,” he repeated, “is gonna be a good day.”
The door to Ed Carson’s office opened, and Ed himself, an older, graying man in a mid-tier blue suit, stepped out. David was on his feet before Ed finished saying, “David, could you come in here a moment?”
It was only a few steps from his desk to the door, but David took his time. He put his shoulders back and surveyed the open-plan space, looking not only at Ella but at the other men and women on the team with him. He had a smile on his face that was the smile of a man who’d never see these people again, and wasn’t all that broken up about it.
Ed closed the door behind him and then moved to his desk. Standing behind him was a woman David knew by sight, but had never spoken to: Nina McCray a senior VP. David nodded to her, and then took a seat across from Ed. He leaned back in the chair, crossing one leg over the other with the casualness of a man without worries.
The office was silent for a moment except for the gentle hum of Ed’s computer. Finally, after a discreet cough from Nina, he cleared his own throat.
“David,” he said. He wasn’t looking directly at the man. His eyes seemed to be looking somewhere above David’s head. He clasped his hands together and unclasped them again. “David, we… have to let you go.”
David’s smile froze, and he felt a tingling in his chest that he thought he’d never feel again.
Reflection
This was a lot of fun to do, and I think something that I need to work on. One bit of feedback I sometimes get on my writing is that I rely too heavily on emotive words, where describing the physicality of the feeling is a better way to approach it.
In my dark heart, I think it’s probably fine to sometimes say, “David came to work feeling confident,” but I can see the “show-don’t-tell” logic at work. I suppose it depends on whether I have the word count to get into a whole Feeling that way, or sometimes I just need to tell the reader what the character is feeling so we can move on.
It’s something to look for in more professional work, honestly. Maybe I’ll go through some published works and see where the emotive language lives, and try to reverse-engineer from that.
Anyway, I picked “confidence” as the strong emotion for this piece because there’s nothing quite so funny as watching an over-confident person get completely shut down. Is that because I don’t get to be over-confident?
Perhaps.
Still funny, though.
