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Writing in Bars Annoyed: Examining Writing and Location Leah Kuffner Christian Beck 06 December 2013 LIT 3206

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She undresses in the dark. Its the way shes always done it and the way that she believes she will continue to do it for the duration of their relationship. She might very well be undressing in the dark for the rest of her life. She wouldnt mind. This habit isnt necessarily an issue either. When her friends jokingly ask her about her sex habits, her kinks, she laughs and tells them that he hasnt seen her body with the lights on. Or, she adds, if he has, hes done it without her permission. They laugh. She laughs. She doesnt look at it as a problem, although she knows, she feels, that he does. Hes kind about it, hes tender with her, but she can hear the frustration in his voice. Of course, he says. He does his best to feign understanding. Hes gotten worse at it over the years. She thinks that its because hes gone from genuine understanding (or at least genuine concern) and only slight frustration to only slight understanding and genuine frustration. She certainly cant blame him. Of course, he says. He emphasizes the course just a little bit too much to fly under the radar some nights. Its just, he says, you must not trust me. Dont you trust me? She wants to laugh. She wants to laugh and run her fingers through his hair and kiss his forehead. Instead, she stiffens instinctively and she can tell that he can tell but she doesnt try to fix it. Of course I trust you. Hes beautiful and he doesnt understand. He took her breath away the moment she saw him and, unlike any of her other partners, there ended up being more there than that stammery thing her heart did. Hes beautiful and thats just the problem. His skin is amazing, his hair darker than anything shes seen and his eyes are rich and intelligent but with all that intelligence, he still cant understand her as well as he pretends to. She doesnt tell him that he doesnt understand. The overhead light hurts her eyes. His hands surf over her hips.

Kuffner 3 She tries to loosen the tension in her brow by looking at him instead. Hes even brighter. He pushes her shirt up and she tries, she tries desperately, but she panics before he reaches her bra and halts his hands. She watches him release the breath that he was holding. His eyes drop from hers to the bedspread. She shuffles to the edge of the bed on her knees and stretches up to tug at the light cord. The room goes dark and she pretends, for a moment, that shes disappeared. As her eyes adjust, he comes back into focus and her chest releases the panic that contorted it the second that the light went out. This panic, she realizes as soon as her eyes meet his, is worse than the panic that she feels when his eyes threaten to see her naked body. The panic she feels at the threat of losing him is worse. She crawls toward him and he welcomes her back against him. He undresses her. Im sorry. I know.

This was my first draft. It was written in the comfort of my bed at about 2am just before I went to sleep. It is 529 words long. This draft is going to act as my control in order to examine the way that my writing changes based on setting and any other influencing factors. I do most of my writing in my bed in my apartment so I wrote this here in the hope that it would emulate closely something I might write without the prompting of this project.

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Come on. I Her voice trailed, eyes dropping to her lap. Please. He retreated just a bit, leaving her alone on the couch. She shivered despite herself and watched him move back. He was just a little bit further away but he felt a world away. His eyes disconnected as soon as she said it. He disappeared. He was gone. She could tell that he hadnt noticed, though. She saw the ticks in him, his countdown. He said come on and she could see the countdown from when she said the word. Just one word. 3, 2, 1. It was over. He shut down. She could almost hear the sound of his machinery, just the low lull of his brain checking out. She stood from the couch and straightened her shirt, tugging it down to hide any sliver of skin that threatened to be exposed. She watched him stand and shuffle into the bedroom and she knew it was over for the night. She wanted to think it would be okay, but she knew he wouldnt be present. She couldnt blame him. Before following him into the bedroom, she bent to pick up a throw pillow that had been shoved to the ground just a few moments prior. All it took was a few fingers grazing the sensitive skin of her hip and she panicked. That was all it took. She stood there and stared down at the couch. Hey, he called from the other room. She took a slow, deep breath and moved into the bedroom, pausing at the door to consider the lightswitch. She looked to him where he sat on the bed. He was shirtless, striking. His eyes bore into her but he didnt mean to, she knew. His beautiful face and those dark, full lashes. Her chest tightened in the way it shouldnt have. It should have been butterflies, should have been excitement but it was intimidation, dread. He was stunning. He couldnt exist. She flipped the switch off and crossed the room to crawl over him on the bed. His hands found her hips and she almost shrunk back. She didnt though. Every time he touched her, she thought shed burn. How could he touch her? It was unreal. He was stunning and she was just there. He was with her but she was nowhere near him. She could see people eyeing her, she could see girls eyes sparkle when he spoke to them, she could see their eyes and the pity. Their eyes asked, why is he with her? What is he doing with someone like that? She held onto him though. She had her nails dug in and it was hard, it was difficult to keep her

Kuffner 5 claws dug in, but she was doing it despite the knowledge that he was above her. She wouldnt let him go but her stubborn resolve shattered as soon as their lips met. She melted. Youre beautiful, he mumbled against her. Thank you.

I wrote this draft in-class during our last day of class. It ended up being 498 words. I think that, with this draft, its obvious that I sometimes had a hard time getting down exactly what I wanted to say and form a complete idea. Class that afternoon was loud and conversational so I was constantly being drawn out of my writing and into the conversation going on around me (though I didnt participate). Because my attention was divided, its clear to see that I reiterated the same points multiple times without really establishing anything new at a few different spots in this draft. This is a process that I try to accomplish in my head without putting it on paper, or else put it on paper and then eliminate the first few choices and stick with my favorite. Because I couldnt really think as well as Id like in the classroom, I ended up writing most everything that wanted to be written instead of filtering some of it out. I also did a lot of writing that was safe and familiar to me, like including sentence structures that Ive used incessantly in other writing. This too is a consequence of having a difficult time thinking with the conversation going on around me. I have a much easier time concentrating when there is either no background noise or so much background noise that I couldnt possibly discern any threads that I could follow. Because of this, I had a hard time writing in a setting where there was conversation going on that I could clearly hear and follow along with. While the feeling of the classroom was relaxed, simply writing on campus, where I

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usually go to force myself to finish papers, prevented me from not being able to focus at all. Because [p]lace-based writing is grounded in reflection, observation, and personal histories, I felt fairly comfortable writing in class (Jacobs 50). No one pays much attention to me during this class and it allowed me to write this fairly easily without having to talk to anyone about it. I didnt feel as if there was any attention on me, which made it easier to concentrate during the times that I could concentrate and I didnt feel any pressure to finish writing within a certain amount of time. While my structure is safe and typical of my writing, it is fairly coherent and met the length requirements that I set for myself.

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The first time it happened, he stared at her like she was making the most unrealistic request hed ever heard. Turn the light off? What? Why? Uh Okay, I guess. And the lights went off. It was easy enough to accomplish and he didnt seem to mind after the initial shock. Six months later, he still understood but maybe minded a little bit more. After the first few times, he stopped asking about it but he didnt become less frustrated with it. She could tell that he didnt want to seem like a jerk by telling her no or prying too far but he still felt the same way, he was still frustrated and unhappy. He was dissatisfied. She couldnt blame him. The truth was that hed stuck with her longer than anyone else had. Most guys tolerated it for the first or second time, maybe third, but hed stuck with her through months of this, months and months, and every time, she felt guiltier for ir. He was patient and sweet and she knew he deserved better. He deserved someone closer to his level, someone who was a 10 (like he was) and not a 5.6, someone who turned heads and got numbers and had confidence. BUt he insisted that he didnt want anything but her and it startled her to the point that she idolized him. How could he be so generous, so perfect? King and stunning and intelligent. He was more than shed bargained for and she was constantly torn between pushing him away and drawing him in closer. She turned the bedside lamp off and pulled him close.

I wrote this draft at The Station, a bar near UCF, around 1:00 AM on a Wednesday. This draft is 273 words. This draft was the most difficult one to write. The music was extremely loud and I brought two of my friends with me to the bar to make the situation a little bit more comfortable for me. However, this only increased the discomfort I felt in the situation. Because my friends

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arent the sort to enjoy the booming house music and the sort of people that frequent the bars in the UCF area, I felt guilty forcing them to hang around while I wrote the paper. This resulted in me both putting things on the paper that werent at all the best choice and rushing much more than I had with either of the previous drafts (which is evident with the word count). I was distracted frequently by the people passing by our booth and a sense of uneasiness over being in a bar writing a paper, which is something that Ive never seen done in a bar and have never done in a bar either. Because I was performing an action outside of the acceptable area for that action to be performed, I was highly aware of how I was behaving and all of the people who were paying attention to me. Fortunately, there were a fair amount of people in the bar and many of them were very intoxicated so it was easy enough for people to ignore me. My friends tried to chat a little bit with one another but that distracted me as well, because I had to both listen to them speak and read their lips.

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I wrote my first draft in the present tense, which is something I seldom do. I find writing in past tense much more comfortable and I usually abide by most rules of writing. However, with this draft, I chose not to arrange the dialogue with quotes. Because I was writing outside of my comfort zone (physically) with the second two drafts, I fell back into my habit of writing in past tense and using a more conventional writing style. I mentioned this in the brief look at my second draft, but it is obvious with both my second and third drafts that I wrote in a safer way than with the first draft. With my first draft, there was nothing going on around me and with my second, I was performing many of the same actions that I usually did during class: sitting, being quiet, breathing. With my third draft, however, there was activity all around me and, while I am not one for dancing or flirting with strangers, I wanted to get up and be a part of the bar. I finished my writing quickly in the hope that I could interact with my friends and experience the bar but they preferred to leave so we left. The pressure to finish is apparent in my third draft and because of this, it is embarrassing. While LK Watts mentions that she know[s] other writers thrive with background noise and people around them, I have to wonder if anyone could write their best in a setting like that. Many writers are accustomed to listening to music while they write but unless what Im listening to is something that I know well or cannot understand the words to (something in another language, typically), I find myself focusing on the music instead of my writing. This loud music definitely had an influence on how I was writing while I was at the bar. Not only was my third draft the worst, it was also the most difficult to get into the rhythm of. The first draft came out effortlessly and, after I got the idea, it took me about twenty minutes to write the whole thing with only minor, immediate edits. The second draft was fairly easy to write as well, though I had a little bit of trouble with an opening line and the last paragraph. The

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third draft, however, took me a much more substantial amount of time to get started on and, once I got started, my attention was not held strongly by the piece. The bar demanded my attention and, unlike in class when I could glance up and return to my writing, I had a hard time even trying to focus on the paper. Many of the sentences in the third draft are either too long or too short, and they are disconnected. My inability to form a complete thought from top to bottom is clear in this draft as well. I normally can think through an idea and execute it without writing the same sentence multiple times in different ways, but many of the sentences in my final draft do this, which is a bad habit I managed to avoid in my first two. When I initially picked up this project, I didnt realize just how different my three drafts would be. I thought that the differences wouldnt be as obvious without using five or six different iterations of the same story, but this turned out to be a very effective way of looking at the differences and it helped me fully understand the way that (although in extreme forms with two of the cases), my location and surroundings really alter the way that I think and how I write.

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Works Cited Watts, L. K. Does Location Affect Your Writing? LKWatts Confessions. 17 April 2013. Web. 22 November 2013. Jacobs, Elliot. Re(Place) Your Typical Writing Assignment: An Argument for Place-Based Writing. English Journal