Original mini-fic
Sep. 23rd, 2010 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sour_idealistTitle: Something Beautiful
Rating/Warning: PG, no warnings but angst
Authors' notes: So many other things I need to be writing, and this is what comes out. Ugh. Inspired primarily by the writings of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fahye/mercurial_wit. Er... allegorically autobiographical? Don't let that stop you from ripping into it in terms of concrit, though.
She traces her fingers in swirls and circles. She always does. In sand, in bathwater, in finger-paints (and in paint not meant for fingers). In soap, on stone, against her skin.
Every year of school, she makes sure to buy notebooks and folders in plain, single colors. By Christmas, every single one is coated in layers upon layers of lacily curving lines. Some form borders or embellishments in the corners; some are carefully ornate names and subjects in her own self-invented sort of calligraphy; some trace out hearts and angels and brides’ dresses and swords (scimitars). Most are just lines, abstract when she’s in a good mood and crappy scribblings when she’s sad.
This year’s art teacher really hates abstract. It’s all about shading and balanced space. That’s fine, those are important too.
The pages of her specially-bought sketchbook, the one thing she doesn’t buy at Staples, fill up with spheres on tables and carefully posed little wooden figurines and draped, patterned silk. She gets used to it, even starts to like it. She learns to swirl her pencils and her pens in curves that spell out something without using words, and she smiles when the teacher says she captures the line of a fall of cloth better than anyone else in the class.
All she wants is to create something beautiful. She watches the paper under her pen as the clock ticks past and the lines grow more and more forced, less and less graceful. The teacher’s few smiles, the ones she fought all notions of abstraction and voice to earn, vanish in spite of all her best efforts.
She tells herself that it’ll pass. That she’ll pour everything she has into this and go on to make a name for herself. Somehow. She’ll do something, and it’ll be beautiful.
Someday. One day. She’s certain of it.
Just not tonight.
Rating/Warning: PG, no warnings but angst
Authors' notes: So many other things I need to be writing, and this is what comes out. Ugh. Inspired primarily by the writings of
fahye/mercurial_wit. Er... allegorically autobiographical? Don't let that stop you from ripping into it in terms of concrit, though. She traces her fingers in swirls and circles. She always does. In sand, in bathwater, in finger-paints (and in paint not meant for fingers). In soap, on stone, against her skin.
Every year of school, she makes sure to buy notebooks and folders in plain, single colors. By Christmas, every single one is coated in layers upon layers of lacily curving lines. Some form borders or embellishments in the corners; some are carefully ornate names and subjects in her own self-invented sort of calligraphy; some trace out hearts and angels and brides’ dresses and swords (scimitars). Most are just lines, abstract when she’s in a good mood and crappy scribblings when she’s sad.
This year’s art teacher really hates abstract. It’s all about shading and balanced space. That’s fine, those are important too.
The pages of her specially-bought sketchbook, the one thing she doesn’t buy at Staples, fill up with spheres on tables and carefully posed little wooden figurines and draped, patterned silk. She gets used to it, even starts to like it. She learns to swirl her pencils and her pens in curves that spell out something without using words, and she smiles when the teacher says she captures the line of a fall of cloth better than anyone else in the class.
There is a two-month unit on angularity, right in the middle of February and March when the world seems full of jagged icicles and scratching trees instead of inspiration, and she almost quits the class
She spends hours combing the art world – online, because she doesn’t live near any cheap galleries – and during the winter the worshipful love she had for lines and curves and patterns turns into a kind of hatred. Not for the art so much as for the people who make it. Who can make it.All she wants is to create something beautiful. She watches the paper under her pen as the clock ticks past and the lines grow more and more forced, less and less graceful. The teacher’s few smiles, the ones she fought all notions of abstraction and voice to earn, vanish in spite of all her best efforts.
She tells herself that it’ll pass. That she’ll pour everything she has into this and go on to make a name for herself. Somehow. She’ll do something, and it’ll be beautiful.
Someday. One day. She’s certain of it.
Just not tonight.
