Jeannine Atkins's Blog, page 21

Homes and Other Places We Remember

Inspiration often begins for me when someone’s inner life resonates with mine, no matter the variations of time and place. If a setting stirs my curiosity, and actions offer at least an edge of a plot, I read to find out more about what someone did and where she lived. Sometimes we don’t know why we’re drawn, but write to understand the pull, finding buried connections that may not matter to readers, except, perhaps, from traces of feeling left by our search. The details of houses, landscapes, and private drawers or boxes, the places where someone rested her head and put her hands, often give me a framework to work within. Places and old things don’t tell time or have calendars, but we can use them to create a sense of order by asking where someone was when she heard some kind of call to adventure, found hope, or felt her belief in her family, who may be almost all she knows of her world, break.

Setting may a good place for writers to begin because while it doesn’t seem as glamorous as theme, which we can argue about all afternoon, it also seems less threatening. Maybe we can’t always write deep, edgy, fantastical, or funny characters but, hey, we can put down what can be seen. We can let rooms, towns, or woods that haunt our characters haunt us, too, until we understand not so much what they mean, but where they fit in a story. They might begin adventures from fairly ordinary places, such as the wardrobe Lucy finds in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is stuffed with fur coats. We hear something crunch under her feet – mothballs? – then touch something soft, powdery and cold. Instead of furry coats brushing her face, Lucy feels prickly fir branches. The transformation of the particular lets us believe in the magic, just as the description of the barn that begins chapter three of Charlotte’s Web acts as a portal leading to the animals talking together for the first time. The development of the farm animals as seen by Fern to characters in their own right happens so seamlessly that we blink only when some people call this novel a fantasy. The old barn is a place of refuge as much as The Secret Garden, with its hidden bulbs, overgrown briars, rotting swing, and rugged bluebells, which let two angry children discover love. Childhood sanctuaries and haunts behind sofas, under the stairs, in tree houses or forts may evoke both a sense of safety and traces of fear that foster imagination.

Beloved places of the past are often a source of inspiration, as they were for C.S. Lewis, whose mother died when he was ten, bringing about a temporary loss of faith and him being sent to a boarding school that he remembered as being worse than his stint as a soldier in World War I. His friend J. R.R. Tolkien moved from his home in South Africa when young, and spent much of his adult life creating new worlds. Even after P.L. Travers moved from Australia to England, she carried an early memory of telling fairy tales to a younger sister when her widowed mother left the house after having announced some sort of plan to jump off a bridge. In some ways P.L. Travers never stopped telling those tales, creating new worlds that fit better than the places her mother chose for her.

As we wonder why a story or place haunts us, we may find a way toward theme. C.S. Lewis wrote, “We do not write to be understood. We write to understand.” What does the main character learn?  What insight about life does she need to understand by the end that she doesn’t know at the beginning? While we want to be able to say somewhere in our process what our book is about, and make sure each chapter if not each scene somehow address that, theme is not our job to state. The right setting may suggest a way.

I’ve been thinking about time, place, and plot as I prepare for the NE-SCBWI conference where I’m leading a workshop called “Nests, Rooms, and Gardens: Using Setting to Structure Fiction.” If you’re interested in more ideas and exercises, I hope you’ll consider coming. The conference is filled but if you’ve signed up for May 3, I understand seats are still available for this workshop. I hope to see some friends!

Three

TELLING TRUE STORIES: A NONFICTION WRITERS’ GUIDE
 edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call is a treasure trove for writers with any interest in narrative. The opening piece by Jacqui Banasynski brought tears as she shifted from describing effects of famine in Ethiopia, including digging shallow graves, for not much dirt was needed to cover thin babies, to an account of the starving people singing stories every night, through the coughing and keening. I loved Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo’s remarks about how her career developed in part from having never learned to drive, so she took the bus, looked out the windows, and made unexpected stops. She mentioned that while it’s painful to omit stories that took hard work to find, she’s learned that “three well-articulated, nuanced examples – backed by sharply documented evidence of a broader problem – are far better than twenty examples that raise more questions than they answer.”

I learned something from almost every writer in this collection, but what struck me was that while none mentioned fairy tales with three bears, three beans, three spins around, or three wishes, several alluded to the power of that number. In “What Narrative Writers Can Learn From Screenwriters,” Nora Ephron tells us that Martin Scorsese says that the dream movie scene is three people in a room, and how she used this writing the film Silkwood, focusing on the whistle-blower Karen, her roommate, and her boyfriend, while piecing together where to begin and end and ways to keep up tension through the middle.

Jon Franklin writes about the three layers of stories: the events, ways the characters react to what happens, and a rhythm that evokes the story’s universal theme. He writes of how this seems backed by the work of neuroanatomist Paul MacLean with what he called triume brain, finding that we all have a brain that is cognitive, another that registers emotion, and another rhythm. Other writers here also mention layers of what happens and an emotional response, but instead of something musical they cite a hope to evoke why the story matters, what it all means, perhaps how the particular tale connects to the greater world.

Three objects on a page can give us the satisfaction of symmetry, but is also dynamic, whereas two by two, side by side, can leave us unmoved. Three is a good number to remember and isn’t just for those who like magic, trilogies, the trinity, tercets, sky-land-and-sea, or the Fates. I’ll be thinking of ways layers can unfold as I look ways for concrete and abstract to meet, while getting back to my own untrue story. It strikes me that triangles can have the enduring nature of circles, while being less cozy. Have you encountered the tug of three in an unexpected place?

Writing through Hesitations to Certainty (Or Close Enough)

I don’t think many writers would suggest this is a profession for the timid. We’ve got to set up sentences and stand by them. We may look as if we’re the sort of people who can’t be pushed around, but we have to be off the ground before we find sure footing, maybe off track to appreciate the one we finally make. Inspiration makes as many traps as footholds. While I shuttle between excitement and fear about a new path, my muse gets distracted, craving too much salt or sugar. It’s hard to settle down.

In The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, Richard Hugo writes, “To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance – not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write. By arrogance I mean that when you are writing you must assume that the next word you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there.” We follow the mind’s inclinations, even when they first seem random, trust change to reveal connections that seem permanent.

While a sentence may look like it stood as long as a mountain, and never have been written any other way, we can remember the sprawling or skimpy strands of words, the rehearsals with syntax, that went into its making. A sentence may look as inevitable as the shape of a life does when looking back, but look deeper, and we recall the mire of opportunities, setbacks, decisions, and whims that went into its making. We take one sure step, the next tentative, but within that hesitation we may find our best prizes. We first imagine, then impose.

Maybe we look particularly arrogant when we slip through the details of history to bring back a voice from the past. I do such work with what I consider humility, feeling respect for what I find and a sense that this work carries a great chance of error.  But when has it not been so? I loved reading this from poet Eleanor Wilner: “I am in the habit of saying, when people wonder about the chutzpah of revising biblical stories, that they should imagine the chutzpah it took to write them in the first place.” Before paper and screens, stories were passed along by mouths, and literary sorts would step in with their own renditions of, say, a girl who lost her glass slipper or animals lining up two by two before an ark. Sources that seem certain to some are a puzzle to others. Scholars still unwind strands of what has been published as the Bible, the Torah, the Old Testament and other titles, trying to figure out who first wrote down what from a panoply of sources. Stories about Adam, Eve, Noah, Sarah, Abraham, Hagar, and others have long inspired poets and fiction writers, including those in the present day such as Sena Naslund, Anita Diamant, and Alicia Ostriker. Some see ancient stories as invitations, not lectures, a beginning and a place to stand together, not an end or spot to sit alone. And for me, history holds a similar poetry, presenting holes and questions as much as facts. History bends, depending on where one stands when looking. I try to leave pictures of how something once leaned toward me or whispered, what was pure chance, a narrow escape, a glance at just the right time, and make a frame with a hint that it could crack.

Intruders at the Laptop

A writer friend invited me to meet her this morning at a café, where we talk as a little girl and her dad at the next table sing “Itsy-Bitsy-Spider,” running their fingers up each other’s arms. Spring-starved people drink coffee at picnic tables, pointing at small green shoots. I’m glad to be warm inside, opening my laptop and hearing the tap-tap of my friend’s new novel being born.

This rhythm of getting back to normal is just what I need. Yesterday my desk was crowded with spirits pressing me with sweet or sad memories and as many rogue conversations as I’d recently fielded in the church basement where I’d tried to thank people who should be thanked, see that hungry people ate soft sandwiches, stop people from apologizing for things that need no apology, listen to people I love, and people I never met before, and my neighbor who told me about her goat, Stinky, and another neighbor’s clothesline with clean sheets and a rifle. Maybe not the most appropriate funeral story, but then did I cross a line speaking about the fraught, fragile beauty of my last conversation with my father-in-law? Well, I told this to a friend I later learned had given Peter a small box of totemic figures not part of the pantheon of this old New England church, telling him the names or purpose of each being, which of course he promptly forgot. It was all we could do to hold onto stories from the woman who said she seated my in-laws at the same table sixty-five years ago or a man who joined the entire Clarksburg Baseball Team at their wedding.

It’s hard to leave such days behind. Writers may have it both harder and easier than people returning to tasks with boundaries that parallel those we’ve been performing, such as picking up flowers or tracking down a missing prayer shawl. Such tasks can steady us, but grief pounces when my hands hover over a quiet keyboard, wanting to set old characters in new motion. It’s tricky to get back to work when grief, like life, sets its own schedule. Memories spiral, offering revelations with each re-telling,  or burrow in, creating the sort of richness we expect from compost. Or sometimes they just lead to places dim as the early drafts of my fiction. Such murkiness doesn’t rise just because we can’t find the right words or structures, but reflects our minds, which pull in all that we don’t know, overwhelming what seems certain. Letting thoughts stray and puddle may make new connections or ideas. The wandering mind is also the creative mind. We might need to dwell in what’s uncomfortable, trying not to bat off sadness or even loving gestures in an effort to hold on to a world that has changed. We have to respect everyday time and ritualized time, when we may contemplate cycles and fit the everyday into bigger patterns.

And there’s a time to try to rein in wandering thoughts, and no clock to announce when to use a little force to separate waves of plans and waves of mayhem. Just as kind friends try to figure out how much quiet and how much company the bereaved might need, we also try to figure out how much we should sit or nap with sadness and how much we need our feet on what we guess is normal ground.

Now it’s lunchtime at the café and I smell grilled cheese sandwiches. I look up to see people carrying bags of hot cross buns and braided bread. A baby in a green sweater gurgles. Those people at the picnic tables aren’t quite as hunched as they were; one even unwinds a scarf. I’ve put together a blog post, which may be a step back to my novel. I’ll take a walk through snow-melt and mud, then see what’s waiting at my desk.

Bread and a Knife: For Don Laird

Last night I wondered how long the orange-yellow tulips

would last, petals stretched like arms bound to ache,

stamens sturdy but exposed. The call came

just  before dawn, voices soft in the dark.

It’s over, Peter said, and we remembered another morning

with light on his father’s face as he held our baby

in perfect contentment. How he adored her.

Peter talked to his brother and drove to what is now

his mother’s house. We were glad his sister spent

the night there. I mused until my eyes stung, then

recalled the blackened bananas on the counter,

the bread pan I’d set out yesterday, wanting to make

something whole and sweet. I’ll bring bread to Alice

who might eat or stare or leave  like the baseball

a friend brought for her husband to hold in his hands.

The ball is solitary now on a wheeled table, like the belt

I left coiled after washing Don’s last worn shirt and blue jeans.

I don’t yet know who will want the knife looped

through that belt, but someone will open

the blades and find uses as good

as those made by a man who left a garage

filled with rakes, saws, saved nails and wire,

a cloud and cluster of all that he fixed

and cherished and will endure.

Thank you for all the kind and thoughtful comments here, on facebook, and in emails on my post from three days ago. I’m lucky in my family and lucky in my compassionate friends, too.

My Father-in-Law

It’s been a hard week for my father-in-law, and also all of us who love him. There will be more tears ahead. We have lots to be grateful for since Don has been healthy for most of his eighty-six years. Still, there’s the raw sense that soon our family will be smaller. Soon there’s a voice we won’t be hearing. I’m tired, as if we carry more of the world for he who can no longer, or is it just a reminder that this is a time to act slowly, to pay attention?

Writing about history, I’m in the habit of pulling the past to the present, polishing scenes I believe should be remembered. Now I feel like I’m scrambling to keep up with my own past as it knocks and invades my life. As I sat with Peter’s father, I thought of my father, too. I didn’t see my dad before his sudden death, but instead got a call at the high school where I then taught. Teachers flocked around like angels saying, “You get five days. Take them, take them, even if you don’t think you need them.” I was thirty-two, young enough so that five days was long and I knew little about the particular ways of remembering that is mourning. In a daze I listened to those kind teachers who sent me home saying, “Don’t worry about lesson plans.”

I can’t write much else now, but I wrote this about yesterday.

For My Father-in-Law

Even before we get the news of cancer

and how it’s spread, Don says, Whatever happens

now, I want it to happen fast. Like the ball

he used to play, with not one of his three sons

caring much for sports. Later that Tuesday,

I hold his hand while he sings

If I Were a Carpenter, breaking off

when a nurse caries in a razor and bowl,

shaves him, and proclaims he looks thirty years

younger. He isn’t in pain. He isn’t hungry.

The next day a diagnosis comes, with slim choices.

On Friday, no sirens blare as an ambulance brings Don

to a nursing home where he gets a bed. I lean

close to hear his thin words, offer questions:

Does anything hurt? Does something itch?

Are you hot? Do you want to take off your socks?

Do you want more covers?

No. No. No. No. No. You’re a dear girl.

He refuses even a sip of water.

I’m in pain. I itch. I want to take off my socks

and pull up the covers. I would take a thousand sips

of water. I want, want, want, and leave the room

to phone Peter. Along my way to cold air, I pass through

the parlor, where a woman in a wheelchair bends

her head toward her lap in front of an unlit hearth.

Her husband’s arm stays around her like stone.

Back with my father-in-law, I keep bending close.

A hospice chaplain arrives and says a prayer for peace.

Don says, That was love-el-y.

I say, You’re a good man.

He says, I try.

He doesn’t take a single sip of water.

Soon a light snow falls outside the window. 

Beyond Broken Lines: What Makes a Verse Novel?

A few days ago at the Associated Writing Program conference in Boston, I was lucky to attend several panels about writing poetry. The question of what a verse novel is was raised in a session called “It Could Always Be Verse.” Helen Frost, author of the forthcoming SALT, answered poetically, comparing verse and prose to water and land, and saying that a verse novel is neither one nor the other. She cautioned about how narrative’s need for clarity can weigh down the poetry. Lesléa Newman mentioned how verse is a good fit for intense subject matter and that she chooses the form when it can do something she can’t do in prose. She gave the example of how in her collection OCTOBER MOURNING, which is a response to the murder of Matthew Shepard, as a poet she could personify the fence and stars and let them tell stories that a journalist, for instance, could not. She noted that the repetition some forms call for let her go deeper with each round.

Marilyn Nelson, author of books including CARVER: A LIFE IN POEMS, said that she does not write verse novels, but considers herself a verse historian, a title she was given by a seventh grade girl. She said that as a formalist her definition of verse has to do with rhythm that’s intentionally made different from prose. This combined with being book length gives the double pleasure of narrative and verse. Meg Kearney, whose books include THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR about a teen dealing with wanting to know her birth parents, felt the form was right for this as poetry’s white space reflects the silences of a family who could talk about some things, such as the moment the mom and dad got a call that a baby was waiting, but not at first the daughter’s wondering about her birth parents. She spoke of each poem representing a scene or emotional state that moved the story forward, using “the tool of the line break, which layers meanings, creates tension and rhythm, and undercuts expectations.”

In a session called Staggered Tellings: Immediacy, Intimacy, and Ellipses in the Verse Novel, Kevin Young, author of ARDENCY: A CHRONICLE OF THE AMISTAD REBELS, spoke about wanting to reclaim the word epic as used by Ezra Pound, and noted that one important thing about poetry is that there is no division into fiction and nonfiction sections. Poetry naturally lets us move back and forth between truth and imagination. Rita Dove, former poet laureate and author of SONATA MULATTICA, told us how this book was inspired by seeing a lone black violinist on a biopic of Beethoven, wondering who he was, finding the bare bones about George Bridgetower’s life via Google, then becoming obsessed with a story she first resisted telling, not wishing to spend years with men from eighteenth century Europe. She was pulled in for about five years, and felt bereft when she finished the book. She spoke of knowing the basic plot points, so that her work became an “excavation of a life.”

I didn’t speak on a panel about poetry, but in the hallway, some friends asked me about what I think makes a work poetry. I muttered this or that, but now that I’m before my computer hope I can be clearer about why I love to read history and poetry together. The elevated language of poetry can shed light on what’s wrongly been forgotten. In BORROWED NAMES, I worked around big moments that made the women famous, and focused more on what happened before and after them, which may be as important as what might happen in a family between posed snapshots. I used common moments to frame poems and let us see bigger ones from a more intimate angle than one usually taken by historians. These ordinary moments can connect an extraordinary person with the rest of us, and using devices such as alliteration or metaphor, repeating sounds or imagery, was a way to suggest those links. Each line should have a weight and a reason for being there. A clunky sound may be forgiven in a novel in which readers are gripped by characters, but a thud in a poem may stop the reader. Line breaks can offer a way to enter silence that may tease out a feeling.

I like beginning with facts, and using them as a framework, then inviting in my imagination and that of readers. Poetry gives me a license to do this, for as Kevin Young pointed out, this is a form that historically blends fiction and fact. I read primary and secondary sources with an eye out for things such as who quarreled with brothers, messed up on tests, or kept a spectacularly untidy room. I read a lot and select ruthlessly, like a person who spends a long time in attic and returns with one small, revelatory object. A biographer or historian would be on more of a lookout for general patterns, which I watch for, too, but I depend upon small moments. Looking for the right word is like approaching possible treasure with proper reverence. As I polish until it shines like something sacred, I may find my way deeper into theme or plot.

We know the rules of grammar for sentences and the beats and sounds of meter and rhyme in formal verse, but we may feel uneasy with free verse in which we get few clear ways to measure. Some say a definition of verse novel isn’t so important, but all of us working in the regions where verse and narrative cross should struggle to define what we do and why we do it.  What does the form tell us about the speed with which someone might read? In yet another panel, David Levithan, who both writes and edits verse novels, mentioned that all publishers seemed to have placed the form as sold to young adults under novels, which seems a good decision, as it’s likeliest to find readers there drawn to story but who may be invited into poetry.

For Poetry Friday posts, please visit Check it Out.

Creating Characters in the Dark

Last weekend I walked with a friend who laughed when she mentioned my facebook posts, saying something like, “You make writing sound so complicated.” I’m not sure what she said, but there wasn’t envy in her voice. I really don’t mean to suggest there’s a maze on my desk every day, even if I often feel a little crazy. Most of the writing I’ve done for the past decade has begun with a real person with a real history, so starting now from a mix of whim and obsession makes me feel as if I’m floundering in deep water. I remind myself that a long distance swimmer might have to swim a long time with no markers. But doesn’t she usually have a boat beside her, someone ready to pull her aboard in case of jellyfish, frigid water, sharks, or getting lost?

Looking for a direction, the state of mind I’ve called feeling stupid, isn’t entirely unfamiliar. It’s just not one I usually choose. I want to know what’s going on, but as a fiction writer, I pretty much have to wait for strangers to speak. Will they, and will they say anything worthwhile? I feel awash in doubt, but am trying to rename that, calling it a space where something new can happen. I need to find my own balance of drawing from life and sheer imagination, recollecting and letting memories go. I’ve been here, or somewhere like it, before.

Some fictional characters have origins in real people, often strangers, or those we’ve read or dreamed about. Something about the way someone bends to pick up a stone at the beach or turns her neck to see who’s behind her while in line for popcorn may become the seed of a story, and even carry the importance we feel when an owl appears under moonlight in a fairy tale, all omen-y. We may feel a softening in our belly or a pinch behind our knees, as if a ghost has entered the room. We might call it chance or coincidence, and may feel haunted, gifted, or bedeviled. Or simply relief. Here’s a place to begin, even if the process leaves behind the moment that set off the sparks.

We don’t need to analyze this too much. We probably don’t need to analyze anything too much. A novelist may be best off honoring a moment that whispers to us by writing it out and seeing where it leads. In fact maybe it’s that imbalance of knowing and not knowing, an awareness of life’s quiet connections and many missteps, that starts the story. Maybe the overheard sentence or semi-familiar gesture stirs a memory, so someone steps out of the shadows, though perhaps not too far. It seems good to work within a sort of dusk for a while, where characters may be  comfortable enough to confide in ways they might not at a dinner table.

Following these chance encounters takes a willingness to end up in the mind’s back alley. I ask myself a series of questions to develop characters which I’ve posed to students, but suspect it helps to have the questions spoken by an instructor with perhaps a little chicken-shaped timer at her elbow. Surprising answers may come from the unmystical format, the measured box of time that lets writers hurry past the inner-decider-of-what’s-stupid, which most of us have been taught to cultivate more than the hey-whatever-happens part of us. I’m talking neuroscience here, referring to the same principal as writing too fast or steadily for the discriminating part of our brains to catch up.

I ask about characters’ favorite dreams and worst nightmares, the contents of their handbags, knapsacks, or top bureau drawers. What was the most damaging thing their mother ever said to them? What was the happiest moment of their life? What color is their favorite shirt? Such questions can be useful, especially when limited time means we’re bound to use our first thoughts, which can be developed later. It’s not so much interrogation as hanging out with someone that deepens a friendship or characters. It’s important to step in and commit to bringing in some of what we know and some of what we didn’t know we knew. And also important to step back and listen up. Characters we so-call-create have some kind of free will, and if we respect it, we may be swept to places we’d never have thought to go if we’d just relied on our judgment. “Keep your pen moving,” I tell students, and tell myself. Sometimes we slam through words into something never seen before, perhaps a character that readers will feel that they’ve met before. Some readers may even recognize themselves.

Shaping a Theme

I started my work-in-progress with a quiet, curious girl and an intention to write for children about ten years old, tossing in some magic. I had a big old house in mind and a shimmering sense of a world beyond. That’s really not so much, but I managed to get a few characters talking, and started to learn more.

Of course I bumped into silences as I worked my way through the first few chapters and tossed ropes toward what might be a corner of the ending. At the ends of my chapters I stuck in notes about what might happen or be spoken, but not yet. I followed up on some of these, but when I feel disoriented, or wonder if the plot I’ve lightly sketched will hold, I’ve been returning to a single scene in my second chapter. The action there takes less than a minute and it’s not particularly spectacular. I mean there are no tornadoes picking up houses, boys flying through bedroom windows, or governesses sliding up banister rails. But it’s a scene I found early on and feels important to me.

So I keep coming back to shine up this little scene of a sister and brother on a plane. I knew a bit about what they’re leaving and where they’re going, but learn more as I return to the snapping seatbelts, safety plans, tray tables that rise and fall, the paper sheets meant to protect them, armrests that can hardly fit two elbows, an aisle that pretty much goes nowhere in either direction, and small windows looking out to the night sky. What I find gives clues about the roles in my book of safety, intimacy, getting stuck, and looking out.

And I’m looking for other ways to suggest the theme through gestures or the subtext of conversations. Maybe I’ll even be so bold as to spell it out in a conversation. In Save the Cat, Blake Snyder tells us that in the movies, a minor character often states the theme within the first five minutes. Composers of musicals speak of songs early on that express the main character’s yearning. In poems, too, I’ve often been swept in by images, then found direct statements in the second or third stanzas. So now I‘m looking for ways to slip a sense of what my book is about into the dialog without being heavy handed. Or maybe I’ll try to press my hands a little harder. I don’t want to set up placards with arrows. A theme should be the bubbles under the waves. We don’t necessarily need a girl to tap her shoes and murmur, “There’s no place like home,” to get a sense of a journey’s meaning. But sometimes a song or wise person speaking up can help.

Second Chapters

Writing a first chapter is like tracking down the perfect outfit for a big occasion, then knowing the hem needs to be adjusted, or the right scarf found, while  already having second or seventeenth thoughts. Did the scarf change everything, and should I start again? A second chapter is more forgiving. We’re older, and the outfit doesn’t seem quite as important, and if it’s a little bit wrinkled, so what? We’ve set up the characters, and can let them speak. A second chapter doesn’t have all the bother of pulling in readers with neither too much nor too little information, but it’s time to develop what’s at stake in the small world we created. We’ve brought readers through, but can we keep them? Maybe we should get out the iron one more time.

Like every chapter, my second one will go through a lot of drafts. But because it’s not quite so slippery or delicate as chapter one, this is the place I keep coming back to when I stall on my way forward, peering for threads I might be able to use. Looking back over my own work is a little like reading as a diligent English major. Themes or symbolism can pop into view. Back when I was in college, I never wanted to take this too far, and I don’t want to take it too far as a writer, either. It’s good to carry maybe a plastic toy shovel, not a killer spade. And the trick is to not bring in the vocabulary of someone who’s infatuated with literary theory, but to register, say, the differences that might come from describing someone’s hair as silver, tin-colored, or some other variation on metallic, make a choice, and move on, trying not to leave footprints of an author who thinks too much. Sometimes a rose is a rose, a bird is a bird, spring is a season, and swings, seesaws, and slides are just part of a playground.

Whenever we look back we’re likely to find something new, the way something may emerge from memories of someone’s long ago words, pauses, or gestures. Most of us grow up with shadow stories, and perhaps ten or twenty years later think, Now I get it. Let’s hope understanding as a writer isn’t quite that slow, but something can always be spotted from stepping back, like a new feeling that rises from an old photograph.