The First Time
№ 14 in the 💯Story Challenge
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He placed a wad of bills on the nightstand, and she spread her legs in response, looking up with a calmness that belied her fear. She reached between them to unbuckle his belt, his cock bulging to the brink of splitting his zipper.
Just a few thrusts was all it took, and he was re-buckling his belt, re-positioning his hat, tipping it in her direction with a wordless grunt before he slipped out the hotel room door.
She wondered if he could tell he was her first…come and gone so quickly he hadn’t even taken off his scuffed up boots.
The idea is that we grow as writers over time, perfecting our craft, honing our style, owning our voice. Since this blog began, I have grown exponentially as a writer. Going back and reading some of my early stories, I can see how my sentence structure has improved, how my characters have found greater depth, and my description has become tighter. Opening and closing lines are still a focus for me. I like to grab a reader and leave them with something to chew on…or a punch to the gut…at the end. I work a lot harder to vary my sentence beginnings, avoiding the repetitive subject/verb structures and pronoun starts. But, I still fall back on fairly simple sentence structures. That’s just my style.
Like any writer, I always have room to improve even more. For me, that’s what this blog is at least partially about. It’s my creative playground — like a test lab for my written craft. I experiment, save notes, and often go back to dabble in places I’ve been before. This story was originally published in 2013. I have taken it, hacked it to bits, and given it new life as a 100-word story for The 💯 Story Challenge.
Sometimes less is more. Sometimes it’s not. But this exercise, taking something already written and cutting it down to it’s core elements is a useful exercise. This is one way that I draft a story. I let it all out, cut the the basics, then rebuild, better, from there. If I were going to do that here, I would now take this 100 words and add on to it, knowing the story, but crafting better sentences and being more mindful of structure, dialogue, and description.
Just a little glance into my process.
