Today’s the last day of writing freedom. For the next twenty-five to thirty days, I will be pounding out 2,000 words a day in what will hopefully be a coherent, continuous, consistent story. If it’s not that, then I’m hoping it’ll at least be 50,000 words, which is what it takes to call yourself a Nanowrimo winner (there are no real winners, in the capitalist sense, just people who finish the 50,000 word goal, with no weight given to quality of words or how many repetitive words or pages there are—and even less weight given to the number of useless asides that have more to do with consternating than moving the plot forward, but, as I have a tendency to do, I digress).

But before I get there, there’s time enough for one more story. One more thought experiment, where I’ll throw out an idea and start building on it until I get close to the 2,000 word goal for the day. Let’s see where that thought takes me today.

“Stop writing about chairs,” Claire said. She looked intently at Tomas, his hands poised above the keyboard, his face scrunched up with a constipated look. She used to love that look. She used to love how he could be in the middle of a train station with thousands of people passing around him, and as long as he typed, he was oblivious to everything, even her. “No more chairs. No more red chairs, no more rocking chairs, no more chairs with personality, and certainly no more chairs with memories of the people who sat in them. Please! For the love of everything that you hold holy and dear and for my own sanity—something you used to think about and care for much more—please, please, please stop writing about chairs.”

Tomas didn’t look at Claire as she spoke. He couldn’t understand her anymore. She used to support him in everything he did. She was why he was able to write for as long as he wrote and as freely as he wrote. She never worried about what he wrote or complained about how it came out. He just knew that she was there for him no matter what happened. He stared at the computer screen unmoving after she finished. His head then turned slowly toward her, his neck craning and twisting in an exaggerated almost unnatural movement. When his eyes finally met hers, he stared patiently. Flakes of yellow hovered in his bronzed eyes, which burrowed into Claire, searching for something deep in her, something he used to know and understand. She was never able to last under that stare, and today was no different. She turned away. “What is wrong with chairs?” Tomas asked finally.

“What is wrong with chairs? How many times must we go through this? Everything you’ve written for the past three years has been about chairs. And every single story, and there must have been a hundred of them, from short shorts to novellas to poetry to books to short stories to, I don’t even know the names of all your writing experiments, what they all involved was chairs, lots and lots of chairs. They all started nowhere, went nowhere, and ended nowhere, but they all had a chair as the central character. You’ve described every type of chair that has ever been made. You’ve describe how the chair was made, who has sat in it, when it was destroyed, how long the legs lasted under the weight of garbage when it finally arrived at the dump. You’ve developed histories for generations of chairs, dating back to the middle ages, and followed the course of the chair, its family, its technical development, its, I don’t know, its everything through to modern times and sometimes into mythical futures. Not one of your writings has been historically accurate or valuable. You’ve spent pages and pages of precious words and time—god knows how I know how much time you’ve spent hunched over that computer screen—describing every scratch, dent, and broken leg in your imaginary chairs. I think you’ve exhausted every plot possibility, twist likelihood, character relation to and with and concerning a chair. You are addicted to writing about chairs—that must be it—and it’s not healthy. There is so much more that you must want to say. There is so much more that you used to say.

“When we first married, do you remember that? Do you remember the beautiful poetry you wrote? The wonderful stories that magazines actually wanted to publish? Do you remember the checks, the money you used to receive for your writing? Do you remember any of it?”

Tomas pushed his glasses higher up his nose and snorted. “It’s not about the money, Claire. I told you before we married that it wasn’t about the money. It was about the art—the creation.”

“I used to believe you, Tomas. I used to believe in your artistry. I used to laugh at the thought of the starving artist. I was willing to support you in your art. I was the one who convinced you that you should pursue it. Don’t you remember any of it? Don’t you remember almost giving up on your dream? How you used to struggle for hours to write one word and just sit there, swearing to all the gods in the heavens that you would never lift a pen in a creative way again. How you would accept a job, any job, and give up on your dream. How, even when your work was published, you were never satisfied with the product. That it felt like you had more to say and a better way to say it. Does any of this ring a bell in that warped mind of yours?”

Tomas rose from his plastic chair and snatched the papers that Claire held. “I didn’t ask you to read my story. I know you don’t like my writing anymore. Please don’t read it again. I know you think I should have more important things to say. That I should tell better stories that will find a larger audience, perhaps win a few literary awards. That’s not what I’m about, Claire. I’m about the writing, the words, the, the, you know, the art. You used to understand that. I thought you loved me for that.”

Claire couldn’t talk to Tomas. Everything he said was true and yet she could not understand what had happened to him. She did believe in him and always had. She would probably continue believing in him, in his potential. But she saw him wasting his talents. She didn’t care about the money—well, she did care, but not because she needed him to make any. She just wanted him to feel accepted. She remembered how happy he was when he felt accepted. But it had been so long since anything he wrote was published, and worse, since she enjoyed anything he wrote.

“Claire, maybe I should stop writing for today. I can finish this later. I know it’s been years since anyone has published my writing, but I am trying. I send out my manuscripts every week. They just don’t understand what I’m trying to do. I thought you did. I thought you were finally coming around to it. Do you remember last week when I showed you the yellow chair story? You laughed! I haven’t seen you laugh at one of my stories in such a time. It was such a relief to see you take enjoyment from a story of mine. That’s what I need from you, Claire. That’s what I love about you.”

Claire’s heart pumped blood directly into her stomach. She couldn’t tell him that her laugh was not at his jokes or his clever asides, but more of an insane cackle when she realized that a perfectly good story, one that started with a family dominated by a scheming mother and a weak father, degenerated into a treatise about the evils that a family could impart on a wooden rocking chair. She just didn’t understand him anymore. She didn’t understand his art or why he bothered with it.

“Talk to me, Claire. Tell me what you’re thinking. I want to understand you. I want us to go back to the way we used to be. Do you want me to give this up, stop writing? I can’t do what you ask. I can’t stop writing the way I write. I can only stop writing completely. Never put another word on the paper. I’ll do it for you.” Tomas willed Claire to understand him. He willed her to understand that he was not trying to manipulate her or guilt her or change her. He would stop writing if she asked. He almost wanted her to ask. He sometimes didn’t understand his writing anymore. He knew it was valuable, that he was pursuing something, searching for something, but he wasn’t sure he would ever arrive. He’d rather just hang up his hat and give up his art. Yes, that’s what he would do. Never write again. Accept that no matter how hard he tried, how hard he strove for the perfection that he knew existed, he was never intended to reach it.

Claire chewed her cheek. “I don’t want you to give it up. I fell in love with you because you wrote and reached that part of yourself that I knew I could never reach. I want you to continue it, continue it because you want to. I never want to drag you down, but I want you to write something else, anything else. I don’t understand your writing anymore. I don’t know why you write about chairs. Maybe if you could explain it—”

“I can’t, Claire. I don’t understand it myself.” There. Now she would finally realize. His writing, his methodology, his chairs, he didn’t understand any of it. He just knew that he had to write it, that there was something there, something that if he could find the right way to say it, the right way to write it, he could share something beautiful.

“Oh, Tomas, I know! I see you struggling with it. I see you strangling each word, each story. Just put it aside. Don’t ever mention a chair again in your writing. Find something else to focus on. Tell your stories. Go back to your fantasy shorts. Do you remember Ernie, the editor over at Dragon Magazine? He loved your work. He wanted you to supply him with as many stories as you could generate. Why don’t you go back to writing those stories? Just, please, no more chairs.”

Tomas felt crestfallen. He was sure that she would see it. But she didn’t. Like him, she didn’t see what he had to offer anymore. “I don’t know what to do, Claire. I can’t write those stories for Ernie anymore. I can only write what I’ve been writing. Please, tell me not to write again. You know I’ll listen. It’s so frustrating to be so close and not get to what I know is out there. Free me, Claire. Please, free me.”

Claire knew that all she had to tell him was to stop writing and he would do it. When it came to his writing he never joked around and never used it as a bargaining chip in their relationship. She wasn’t sure if she could do this to him. He was a great writer and who was she to doubt him? How could she live with herself if she was wrong, and if years later people discovered his writing and understood it? She knew what she had signed up for when she married him and now she had to live with the consequences.

“I can’t, Tomas,” Claire said. “I can’t free you. I can only support you and feign understanding. That’s the most I can offer.” Claire cried. Tomas watched her for a moment and started to rise. Before he reached her, his face brightened and he sat down and started typing furiously. Claire cried. Tomas, bent over his computer, wrote the outline for a story about a beautifully carved smoking chair that watched the lives of three generations of librarians struggle to keep a underused library open in a small town in Colorado. Claire cried.

There you have it, my final exercise on this hallowed Halloween. I’m curious to see what I write over the next month. I promise it won’t have a chair as the main character (it might be a minor character with a supporting role), but, as I said before I started writing tonight, it will have lots and lots of useless words. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

Word count: 2,089; writing time: 2 hours; editing time: variable (I think I might stop tracking this since I’ve returned to editing in parts while writing); caffeination: tall mocha; word count after editing: 2,163.