Elizabeth
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Lee,
This is a gruesome and brave scene—you did not look away from the dark drama here! Bravo!
I like that you jump away from Amina to give us the murder. New layers . . .
There are some places I think you can open out the scene, give us details, and, in passages where you have long thought out of context, instead you can put it in place and time—scene. I note, too, where you do this exactly.
I noted, too, that due to his being in the Amina sections (I believe) as well as here, at the site of the murder, and even referenced as a source of security, Rudy has become a fairly central character. Probably a suspect, maybe an ally for Amina?
Lots of great stuff here, Lee. Keep going!
Warmly,
ElizabethBree,
I love the adventure you’ve launched Bambi on. You suggest three trajectories for what she might do with the money. Which one is the one that sends her down to 16th and Mission? This is where your character is not going to do something so out of her comfort zone without some idea o a plan, is she?
On that note, what else is going on is this couple’s life (and individual lives, more to the point). What else is on their minds? This kind of story will deepen away from any cliché is you give the characters a little more dimentionality.
Finally, dig into the stakes. Does she want to keep him from leaving or does she want to leave him herself? What does she want?
I really want to find out how it’s going to go for her to try to sell drugs on the street! I want to see her using her Estee Lauder selling skills! So funny.
Warmly,
ElizabethDear Liz,
I really copy edited these, as that seemed the next step. I am not sure about the bullet format, as the sentences are not always grammatically parallel and similar points. Rather, they seem like the text of what you might be saying on the tape. Yes? In this case, it might make more sense of have them in paragraphs. I think this would still work with the grey boxes, which are an excellent idea. I had one or two questions or places where I thought you could give us a little more information, marked in the margins. Otherwise, these are great.
Warmly,
ElizabethMaureen,
I know that you are constrained by the space limits of Salon, and I see that you are also juggling a lot of potent material and trying to figure out how to lay it out, how to tell the story.
Time needs to be staked out very clearly, as you move between three times—Gloria dying, conversation with the parents, and one line that suggests a now of writing the scene, of looking back and thinking about these events. Help the reader move between these times by marking them with sign posts clearly. Think, too, about where we need to jump out and where we might be able to stay in a scene, see it through.
Could you just give us the scene of Gloria insisting on her dead visitor, and then, after that, the scene of leaving Gloria. Then perhaps on the airplane remember the conversation with the parents, or if that comes later, have it when it happens? Something like that—your story but consider how it unfolds.
You have so much rich material. One of the challenges of memoir/ nonfiction is making choices. The exploration you are doing about theme should help you hone in on what must be included in this book. I look forward to seeing more!
Warmly,
ElizabethJanet,
As always, I love your voice, your humor, your original insights. And I learned things about technology in this piece.
My main comment is that I want a scene with the car salesman who first convinced you to try automatic transmission. That’s a key moment here. And it will lead to a stronger moment of realization that heads you into these future discoveries. Many of the advantages of these seem to be presented in a tongue-in-cheek manner. And yet some are intriguing . . . . I think there is more here. Will we circle back to the idea of these new inventions making life easier? Do they? Well, we see that they do, though again some of the benefits are slight or humorous, others practical. What is the conflict here? What do you learn? Keep digging, keep writing. This is a funny and engaging piece that isn’t finished yet. (I have a few questions in my marginalia as well.)
Warmly,
ElizabethLeila,
You are a fluid, engaging writer, an honest writer and just a very good writer, so I always enjoy everything you produce. I love the humor and the juxtapositions and surprises. This piece has wonderful turns of expectation.
I think what you want to do next is to push beyond summary. Your summary is wonderful, vivid and amusing, and you can definitely use some great summary, but the piece never lands in scene. The character shift—from appalled to part of—happens in the first paragraph. The second paragraph touches on the tension of the shift, too. Then we have the mamas groups. Again, wonderful humor and summarized images here (summaries that encompass a swath of time—the habitual).
The penultimate paragraph touches on conflict—with the mother and with the child—but again, it’s all in summary. So what is this piece about? You note that you have lots of ideas for expansion, and I think that’s the way to go. As I said, yours is a voice and point of view I am always delighted to spend time with, so dig into the conflict, in scene, and use your strong summary and musing for sure, but a bit more sparingly.
Warmly,
ElizabethSusan,
You evoke Anne’s discontent here so well. When her daughter breezes in the collect her son, it’s just marvelously painful, the tension between them and how you are able to show it and make us feel it without telling us.
I’m not sure what’s at stake in this story yet. I see the strains of buried conflict. I see the discontent. I see the world. Vivid. Strong writing. I just don’t see the stakes. Why are we coming into this life now? What will happen if nothing changes? What will happen if everything changes? What stands to be lost, to be gained?
Because this is a short story, I think I am more eager to understand the stakes. Were this a novel, I’d be content with the gorgeous unfolding of discontented character, knowing that story would be forthcoming.
I hope this makes sense. It may be that you don’t know yourself, but you are writing something strong and important, so keep going and you’ll learn more.
Warmly,
ElizabethJoyce,
These pieces contain some lovely images and interactions that I’d like to see attached to existing scenes so that they do not feel fragmented but are part of the build of the story.
I want to hear what’s going on with your editor! And for you to focus on how to make the book the best you can make it. I had a few questions that might help you expand these slightly. They are heartwarming bits that bring Judy to life. I love that.
Warmly,
ElizabethMelanie,
Again, more of this strange world from the vivid, enlarging perspective of this observant, mystified, powerless child. I love the bit about the stuffed animals not speaking loud enough. I love the descriptions all through.
You asked me about the need for causality. I never want to coral or squash genius. After all, how would Virginia Woolf or Faulkner, for example, have fared in a workshop? But neither am I simply forcing a formula on your writings by checklist or by rote. As a reader, I love the work and the POV of your pieces, and I worry about the tension between the parents and also about these strangers the child gets left with, and I also wonder what it’s all adding up to. That is sort of part of the contract of the storyteller, yes? To engage in the moment and also to have it amount (in the sense of mount, of climb, of build) to something more than the sum of its parts . . . So when all these gorgeous beads are together, is there a string pulling through them? I don’t know yet. I suspect so. I mentioned Housekeeping because it struck me in that way, loosely strung. I read it a long time ago when I was young. It might strike me very differently now. And certainly it is a well regarded book. (I am not sure if it’s beloved, but I think it is.)
Hope this helps!
Warmly,
ElizabethDear Joyce,
This is lovely. The imagined scene is one of your most sensate and vivid! Give yourself permission to do this in all your scenes. Memoir is always that combination of exact truth and imagination.
I just want one sentence that brings us back to the physical world of Joyce alone in France without Judy in that spring before we get the last sentence. Or even in the last sentence: Am I, her twin, staring alone out the window (or whatever—your better image), who has been so beloved . . . etc.
I particularly love that the desire to bring her there and to be in nature has to do with that return to childhood, to the early idyll. A circle. And I know you create that powerfully in the book, so this is a wonderful bookend to it.
The only other thing I wonder is if, imagistically, you might bring Judy’s art or just the image and gesture of it, the wrapping, the layers, into your final or penultimate image, or throughout this piece. You talk so beautifully about the light and colors—what about letting the weaving, colored yarn infiltrate this final writing? Play with that? Layer it in here? Since the book is about that, in significant part, how does it play into the memories? How does it thread from beginning to end? You can also play with a future looking paragraph or two about what will happen. Maybe try starting with, I did not know, XYZ would happen . . .
This is a gorgeous and powerful ending, into which you can weave whatever else you need to weave to feel that your work of art is complete!
Warmly,
ElizabethLiz,
I love the idea of having a pet as an anchor. I think you’ve brought some of an earlier chapter into this one as dialog. I miss the moment of discovery, though. I assume that’s still elsewhere in the book.
Go look at the kinds of physical beats and transitions you find in other similar books to yours. Right now you are getting the rhythm right—introducing beat changes through physical detail, but the details are still a little generic—she paused, I looked, she looked. Find some examples you can model. (This is the kind of thing we do in craft class, which is why I think it would be great for you, and a way you learn from quickly.)
I find myself eager to find out how this is going to go for Cathy and Carson. I love Cathy’s resistance. Conflict! Play that out even more—and I look forward to seeing what happens.
Warmly,
ElizabethLee,
This is great. I love Lamarr, and am so happy she has an ally.
About the journal: Is this something the police would suggest? It seems—even to me as a writing teacher—so passive in the face of two incidents of hate-based violence! It might be worthwhile to do some research, talk to some cops. Maybe you have.
The tone veers between traditional noir—almost a parody of the detective fiction voice—and a more modern urban story. The juxtaposition may be exactly what’s great about it, but at times I was a little jarred by the noir notes.
In general, I think you can slow down the scene. I wanted more of a picture of Lamarr earlier and wanted him not to have to tell her he’s black and gay. I’m guessing she knows that and he knows she knows, etc. What do they do before the police come? This seems an opportunity. You’ve got high stakes, so you can really give us these scenes in detail. And while I want more scene detail, I’m not worried about the plot moving too quickly–it’s great to get this kind of build in a murder mystery!
Warmly,
ElizabethBree,
This is amazing. First, the man with the never-experienced seizures, and his development of the narrator’s terror in them. Wonderful material. As ever, your voice is humorous and engaging. I’d love more scene as he warns her. I wasn’t clear for a time if she’d ever experienced one of these seizures or not.
And then at the end we get this information about the narrator’s mother! This is powerful. I wonder if you could really open it up. If you do more in scene, more will be available to you. You start with a beautiful sense of place (and a hint about the mental institution). What if you kept us with the narrator, arriving at work one of her days and hearing about the latest terrible seizure, spending the day in terror of another, and reflecting on his general pattern of describing them, but also showing it. Then perhaps after you’ve established both the specific and the general, bring in the fact of the mother. Again, is there a scene? Does the narrator ever walk by her mother’s room? Or does she avoid it? Let us in on a specific day. (It’s okay to create one out of the general pattern and out of the fragments of memory.) And then I think you keep going from here, because there is something so powerful in waiting for the mother’s death and waiting for the grand mal seizure. Neither is curable, but neither has actually occurred – yet. So this is a story about waiting, the experience of waiting. Write more, Bree. This is powerful material.
Warmly,
ElizabethJanet,
I love this adventure. I want more! I love the stakes set up by the “fragile miracle” of Sarah’s conversion to liking the narrator. I love the stakes of the narrator’s nervousness about the tour and dislike of overly organized experience. “A feral elder!” Great phrase. The voice and scenes are so engaging.
I guess if you were going to keep developing this, I might want to know more about this character’s flaw/ need—what her arc might entail, what she needs to learn. Of course, none of this would be explicit, but right now my biggest hooks are the delicate relationship with her teenager and the risk she’s taking in doing a tour. That’s plenty—but I am looking to see how she changes, how the meaning of the piece rises up out of these experiences and these stakes. That’s a good place to have me, as a reader. So keep writing!
Warmly,
ElizabethLeilia,
I love your trademark humor and honesty here stretching to a new topic, though one comfortably situated within your growing essay collection.
You state the major turn of this piece outright in your second paragraph: “I starved myself and exercised excessively until my unhealthy relationship with my body got turned on its head by pregnancy and motherhood in my early 30s.”
Consider setting up the unhealthy relationship at the start and then letting us take the journey with you. Let us worry as you gain the 50 lbs and your body changes. Let us rejoice as you find new meanings and solutions and foci. And let us arrive at “okay with that assessment” as a real transformation.
I think that will make this strong piece tremendously powerful. If we go on the journey with you, we will be transformed ourselves. I think you could submit it somewhere–NY Times has a lot of great “life” columns–if it has that arc built in experientially. I’ve made more specific notes about this in the margins. Lovely, honest piece.
Warmly,
Elizabeth
