Elizabeth
Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
Maureen,
This is beautiful and full of tantalizing and intriguing bits of story and characters. This feels like an overview, almost more like part of the proposal than a piece of the book itself. It begins at the last good-bye, goes back to the last rites, then back further to hearing from her and then back further to the last time before that, 27 years earlier, they’d seen her, then forward to the meeting in March, then to the airplane journey after the last good-bye and to the news of her death, then hops forward a month, a year, four years—and arrives at some of the meaning of the story, the theme. Gorgeous writing there, by the way.
But yes, this feels like you are finding your way into the story as story, and finding the themes that will drive which episodes you pick, which characters you develop. It strikes me that you are in the expansion stage (see Kenneth Atchity’s wonderful book A Writer’s Time). Everything fascinating might be included. In the end, it will not. The book will have to have a focus and a structure, and when you are writing from life, life is always richer and more chaotic and less linear and more tangential than story, so you have to carve story and character out of life and human beings. It strikes me that this is what you are in the process of doing in this piece. This could be a whole book, this sequence of events. It certainly could be a whole 20 page story. I’m not sure it’s a stand-alone 2 page piece, but it’s rich with hints of the magnificent material you have at hand and the ability you have to wield words.
Warmly,
ElizabethSusan,
I love how specific her quarrel is with Hugh—the chicken! And yet it’s connected for her to their vows, their whole marriage and its agreements. I love how personal her relationship is with her god, in this church. I am so happy to have that little, trouble-making aside: ”—she didn’t think she was wrong—“ . . . She seems to be grappling with action v faith.
Is she leaving the church with any expectations?
There is a hint of a whole arc in here—from complaining to a different kind of prayer. What triggers her understanding that she had just vented, not truly prayed? Might this arc be drawn out a little more, or complete in a different scene? It’s a good turn that could possibly be used to better advantage.
As always, lovely writing, complex character, high stakes.
Warmly,
ElizabethMelanie,
I just love this child narrator’s mind, the places each scene arrives in terms of her interiority, and the gorgeous ways you use exterior aspects of the scene and action to embody those insights and to build to them. Really lovely and moving.
I had a few questions about the fighting, the parents, and then notes about making some of the verbs stronger. Others are already powerful. The only other question I have is about build—how do these pieces build on each other? Could there be a clearer, deeper sense of causality? One experience leading to another action. The insight moments are so strong in part because of their precision and poetry, but also because they grow out of the scene—they are caused by what’s happening. That is exciting and wonderful. Now I want that kind of relationship to grow between and among the pieces of the story that you have here. Each is like a gorgeous scrap of material, but they do not yet seem stitched together into a quilt. Another way of saying this may be that I do not have much of a question between the pieces, pulling me forward, except the deep troubling sense of something being wrong and the child being a little stuck. Maybe it’s her lack of a desire and plan, her lack of agency as a protagonist. Have you read Housekeeping? I haven’t read it for a long time, but I think you’d love it. It’s a highly acclaimed, award-winning book that I think suffers a little from the same child-narrator problem—but obviously without negative consequence for the author or the many readers who adore it.
Warmly,
ElizabethJoyce, This is a beautiful poem. What happens here is that you give yourself permission to create a scene that is not quite a scene that happened, but that gives us a true embodiment of your mother, in Ohio, with her cigarette. The dialog is the way you are conveying the abstracted insights that above you simply give us. Now I don’t think that will work as dialog in the memoir because it’s too « on the nose. » It says what they really think and feel (and remember), rather than what they say to each other. But it could be worked in as interior thought, at least for the character Joyce. Funny that the poem should be a scene—just what the earlier part needs. As you’ll see from my notes, you have wonderful insights here and comparisons, but they need scene and story. I mention in one of my comments that when you talk, you always use scene and story. Then you can include the insights, the musings, the comparisons and—best—the realizations. But ground them in time and place. I hope my notes throughout give you ideas and encouragement for creating a wonderful scene—or many, and for incorporating the beauty of the concrete images and direct dialog from your poem into the memoir.
And then think of doing a book of poetry as its own book—not as part of this one.
Warmly,
ElizabethLiz,
I love this elevator pitch! There may be room in a longer verion to introduce the moms, especially mom with an arc. But anyway, this is lots of fun–character, problem, promised solution. Great!
I made some more notes on the Petitations blog–my second pass. The main things are
1) to introduce Petitations as a term and as a practice more deliberately.
2) To think about how you are offeing tips without promoting Petitations, especially in #9, where you seem to be refering to specific products.
3) Here and there, the voice could be more casual and chatty, and a few examples are always enlivening.But bascially, I think you are on the right track and have a solid submission!
Warmly,
ElizabethBree,
Somehow this became more and more hilarious and ironic—and then suddenly it turned serious as he died and the final joke fell flat for me . . . It also moved really quickly at the very end. The pace throughout was speedy but real-time, detailed and clear. Suddenly in one sentence she watches him die and then we have a sort of punny closing sentence. I’m not sure the ending serves the success of what you’ve been able to do achieve in the scene up to those final three sentences.
You could just end with “’Now you’ll know what a hairball feels like,’ she said and held fast.” This sort of intimates what’s going to come without whisking us through it at break-neck speed . . .
There was also one beat change where I wanted to see/ experience the external trigger that made her approach him in a completely different way. What changed?
As always, I love your outrageous humor and vivid characters and actions.
Warmly,
ElizabethLee,
You’ve got a great character here, and you’ve got me, your reader, worried—just as I should be. I love that the optimism at the end is most worrying of all. We just know she’s wrong . . .
My comments mainly center on making sure that “she” isn’t the subject of all your sentences. I gave you some examples of how to play with this—and you can do more. You could also play with verbs in a few spots.
Overall, this is moving along wonderfully. Your details engage me and often worry me—I am in suspense. I especially like how her situation with her parents prevents her from getting their help. It makes me squirm!
Warmly,
ElizabethJanet,
I know you are exactly in the 600 word bound, but I want a tiny peak more here, some glance at all that glittering optimism . . . some feeling about the shelf . . .
But anyway, I love this. It’s an essay with a plot. Desire, obstacles, eventual success—and then that dogged question of the revision.
All I really have to say is, I’d take more. I’d take a dramatization of the big turn—of Sarah’s showing up, despite our narrator’s having heroically resisted pushing her. I’d take more of the feelings abut the revision at the end, as stated. And perhaps there is a lesson to learn, a parallel to draw between the balance required to parent a near-adult and the balance require to revise a nearly-completed manuscript??
Warmly,
ElizabethLeila,
I know it’s not fair to give you a 600 word limit and then want more, but there it is. You start with the original idea of a logo for the working mother, followed by a humorous description of the breast pump. Then we have your luck as compared to the average American working mother, and a few examples of difficult or frustrating situations. Then we return to your supposedly good situation and find that it was painful. We return briefly to the humorous tone, the suggestion of a manifesto. Yes! Yes! But where is it? Is this not the prelude to the manifesto? The feelings you describe about pumping begin to dig into the deeper truths about this topic. The idea of a manifesto points to still more than might be said, or shouted from the roof-top (perhaps through the small cone of a breast pump?). As someone familiar with the topic, I wanted these deeper, more personal and more original notes drawn out further. In your wonderful, honest, articulate, funny voice . . .
Markets: Check out http://www.newpages.com/
And of course:
From time to time I teach a submission workshop where we research markets, write query letters and actually submit. This has launched some juicy publishing careers. I’ll look at scheduling one for the fall . . . and I think asking people for specific markets, for what they read and love, is always a great idea.
Warmly,
ElizabethMaureen,
These are gripping stories and I love the photo! The frame story with Aunt Barbara was a little confusing to me. And of course, I wanted more detail. The most vivid moments to me are:
1) The grandfather receiving the postcard and crying.
2) 2) The feng shui expert looking at the tombstones and making his assessment.
These are moments in scene, moments of revelation and response.It’s true that you can’t put everything into scene, but I think at some point you have to decide what the main scenes are and what you need by way of summary to move between them, and you need to keep the reader in the world of the story. Like you, I am fascinated by the ways I learn the stories, the ways they get told, the tangents that come to feel very much like part of the meaning. And at the same time, the reader wants to be guided through an unfolding story, not dazzled by leaping narrative acrobatics. (I speak here to myself even more than to you, for you have a wonderfully measured, lovely and clear prose.)
How important is Aunt Barbara to these stories other than that she is your source? Show us not the journey up the mountain (except where it is part of the story); instead show us the view from the top . . . the story itself, as you do marvelously in the moment with the grandfather and the moment with the geomancer.
I hope this helps! And I love what you are doing, here and in Story Boot Camp. Keep sitting down and keeping your hand moving. More will be revealed.
Warmly,
ElizabethLeila,
First, have no fear about writing about these popular topics. You have a great, very specific perspective and a wonderfully honest and funny voice. This final paragraph seems to me to introduce three key juxtapositions (teachers v. people, moment v. momentum and text v. subtext) that I would love to hear more about from you before we wrap up. Maybe you raise the question here of what the expectations of enlightened teachers are in a Buddhist sense? Is there something to learn about teaching from this as well as about parenting? I adore this essay and laughed and sighed my way through it, but I think there’s a step further to go, and with what you’ve done so far, I’ll follow you much further!
Warmly,
ElizabethDear Janet,
Wow. Well, I have to say, I was waiting for this. There were a couple of clues that made me question the owner of this narrative voice. I see now that you were taking us on the journey that we—or at least the media—has gone through over the past months.
I wonder if, because it’s so familiar a trajectory, you may need to exaggerate the voice or spin the unfolding of the facts even more than you have here. An example of a strong line that could provide a model for moving in this direction is: “Proud of yourself for discovering and spreading the word that Atticus Finch is just another hate-filled Southern cracker?”
This essay does, indeed, provide an accurate rendition of the strange trajectory of response to this unusual situation, but I am not certain what you, the author, want to say about this response and its turns, other than to note them. Am I misreading this or missing something?
Please feel free to discuss further in the forums—
Warmly,
ElizabethMaureen—The ending offers an interesting twist on the mother-daughter theme here—the narrator’s mother had her own blindnesses and rebellions, her own different standards about what was acceptable, what too painful. I love the irony of that.
I am not sure what’s going on with the crossed off paragraphs, but in the future, please only give us what we are meant to read.
I think you move the revision in the right direction, especially opening right in scene. But then at the moment of highest conflict, you slide back into summary, right when we most want to be in vivid scene.
Also, keep the scene whole and don’t move to the future until the scene ends with the throwing away of the T-shirt. Then see if there is a concrete moment that can take us into the future, into the asking of questions. Maybe you can make use of those tea cups in scene before the story comes out?
This is the challenging thing about memoir. You are starting with so many various facts and bits of memory and shaping them into a story. This is a story about mothers and daughters and memory/ history—how they negotiate the differences between their memoires and histories. Right? You have two pairs of mother-and-daughter, each dealing with how things do or do not carry memory/ history.
Now stay close to these characters in the scenes with your lovely writing and details, and don’t shy away from the confrontations.
Warmly,
Elizabeth
P.S. The verb shifts didn’t bother me, they worked fine, but I didn’t want to shift into summary, whatever tense it was in. This is not to say you can comment and bring in the current-day narrator’s thoughts, of course, but it tended instead to jump to summation . . . and it’s too good for me to want to move forward that way through the material. I am also assuming you are not cutting all the crossed-out passages . . .Melanie,
As always, you create a vivid physical world with the detail and the effective emotion of that detail. There is always a lot at stake in these interactions and I think that’s in part because you capture the child’s perspective so well, and her need to read the details to make guesses at what’s going on, but not knowing which details actually matter.
At times I can feel frustrated to be so locked into the child’s perspective, perhaps because she is often a passive observer. She is seeing rather than analyzing, perhaps incapable yet of analyzing or really understanding, and this leaves her without her own agenda, except to understand.
Why does she stay on the landing? I would like to dig into her intentions more when she does take action, there and in tugging on the father’s pants. The protagonist generally, at some point, comes up with a plan. Does she have a plan? Do her actions amount to an attempt to impact the situation? What does she want?
It’s also interesting that in this whole story she has no direct interaction with the mother, though the mother is there . . .
These are my thoughts as a reader. I hope they are helpful. There is much lovely writing here and definite tension.
Warmly,
Elizabeth
