Review (4.1) of Nails (3.4)

KEY: My voice,  Not my voice

Fragments of light do acrobatics across the surface of her Revlon red acrylics.

Clack clack clackclackclackclack clack. 

The pale meat of her fingers reddens at her dry knuckles and the back of her hand is sprinkled with sun spots. A pale gold wedding band cinches the pink flesh of her right ring finger. She has what her mother used to refer to as potato-pickin’ hands. 

Clackclackclackclack Clackclackclack. 

She pounds against her keyboard. The click of acrylic against the plastic keys has always seemed professional to her. In the next room the ancient fax machine creaks out a letter. The dull whisper of shuffling papers rises from the adjacent cubicle. 

Clack clack clack.

She’s had the acrylics since she was 22 and read in a magazine that they visually lengthened fingers. Every other Tuesday evening at 7:00 she has a standing appointment at the salon with Tammy, who she doesn’t like but who is admittedly the best beautician in Reno. 

Clackclackclackclack clackclack clack.

The soft electronic chiming of the front desk phone floats across the room. Someone somewhere is using a stapler. The hard clicking of her typing keeps the beat of this interoffice symphony. 

Clackclackclack clackclack clackclackclack clackclack.

She pauses, rolls the sleeves of her brown turtleneck up, pushes the creaking roller chair away from her laminate desktop and stands up. She has to check something with Trudy at the front desk.

….

In the next cubicle over he silently thanks God for the relief, however small and temporary, from that hellish clacking.

The sentences and phrases that I identified as being in my voice are all descriptive. They examine the woman, the room and the different objects within it. The phrases that seemed alien to me were either colloquialisms or they outlined the thoughts and feelings of the characters. I wanted to incorporate some emotional and colloquial content into the theme because I felt as if the character called for it but the phrases don’t seem natural. I was attempting to imitate David Foster Wallace’s ability to mix disarmingly simple turns of phrase with beautiful and complex description. Informal aspects of speech or thought often feel awkward or self-aware in my writing. I’ve never been good a creating dialogue or adopting a plain tone. I’m more comfortable in the realm of description. I’m unsure of what my relationship to the reader is. I always imagine my readers as being intelligent and hope that I am treating them as equals. I don’t think there are too many obvious elements in theme but don’t know. Again, I don’t know what I would think of the writer if I didn’t know it was me. I can’t disentangle the knowledge that it’s my own piece of writing from whatever objective criticism I may have of it. I would be self-consciously focused on how my appraisal of my own work would seem to you, my reader. I would try to painstakingly balance serious criticism with modest praise in order to appear perfectly aware and yet refreshingly optimistic about what I had written. In short, I can’t even begin to imagine what I would think of my own writing if it wasn’t mine as it is mine and that fundamentally changes my relationship to it. I don’t know if any of this is helpful.