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"After The Ball" It’s over.
Finished. I’ve re-worked the ending, and written “End of Chapter
Eighteen; End of SAFETY ZONES.” Makes you feel good, right? Wow! Climbed
that mountain, subdued that tiger, terrific … what a terrific … what a … you mean, that’s it? That
little two second feeling of wonder? That was all? What about …?? How about a band, a fanfare, a few trumpets? How about someone bringing you a really
nice dinner?? Or a muse, someone really nice and sweet, walks in the door and says, “You know, I can tell just by looking
at this manuscript, this is the best thing that anyone’s ever written any time in all the history of the world. This is really something. I can tell. I’ve seen a lot of words, and these words are really a-double-fucking-o-k-a-y. Let’s just sit here, you close your eyes, and listen to me while I read this
deathless, fearless, wondrous prose aloud. Here we go. “Chapter One. I am born …” Oh, wait, that’s that other guy. Here we go. “I
suppose you’re going to want to hear all that David Copperfield crap … “ Ooops! Oh, here we are, “Safety
Zones. Chapter One.” See? Even when you try to rope the muse into
some kind of celebration, some kind of welcome into the Village of Literature (thank you Fay Weldon), a little ribbon cutting
ceremony for just putting all those words into sentences, paragraphs, chapters. A
little acknowledgment that you are now, at least, a cobblestone on the path of Truth By Fiction. Even then, there’s always someone else there first, someone better, or at least someone with a different
perspective. The shelves are full of them. I know.
It’s post-partum depression. I’ve heard that before. Experienced it a little after the play closed.
It’s an apt metaphor, I think, a help in thinking about what it’s like to carry all those words around
some theme or other for such an extended period of time, through messy draft after messy draft, until what you finally have
is something that resembles, in some way, something human, something created by some other person chained to words. Other people, in fact, whose books grace the shelves of major and minor bookstores. It’s good company
to keep. Rah! I told someone the other day that I wouldn’t,
couldn’t write another novel, at least not for a while. That plays, as
difficult as they are, were actually easier. So, that’s where I’m
headed. Over to the theatre (as if that/they were any less difficult than anyone
else around). I know they aren’t.
But since I can’t stop writing, I might as well put the words over there, for the moment, where whatever you
have to say, you’d better get it said in two acts, no fooling around, no sidetrips off the path. Straight, direct. Oh, and artifice is welcome, if that’s where you’re headed. I’m not sure where I’m headed at
the moment. Except to the Writers Room, where the quiet cubby’s beckon,
and, when you look up, there are always at least a dozen people writing, while another dozen wander into the kitchen or go
to the phone to discuss deals with their agents. Still and all, it’s writing.
And we’re lucky. We’re writers. 032207
“Qwertyuiop” I love my typewriter. I should put that in the past tense, say “loved,” I mean, who uses a typewriter any more. Mine sits, sad to say, in the basement, in its gray case, solid, forlorn, behind the storage room door, waiting. I say hello every now and then, not every time I’m in the basement – those are cold chores, storage, retrieval, always connected in some way with memory, mostly memories we don’t want to think about any more. It would be silly of me to open the door, pat the gray case, say something silly (“It’s all right, old friend; I still love you.”) quietly, in case Russell or Pam are listening through the basement door. So I do it in my head. Hey, I say. Thanks.
I remember the ink stain on the inside of the green lid. Must have been
graduate school, a time for ink pens, a jar that spilled up in that top floor attic room on
It was a gift from my mother. Must have been from her alone, after the
divorce, because I have no memory of a typewriter back in the junior high day of writing about Caesar. And I know there was no typewriter with me in
I can remember trying to type on Grandma Jennie’s even older Royal in the dining room at My first real memory
of using my very own Royal is on the train – the Southern Pacific Lark, from San Francisco, bound for – Fresno?
To visit some cousins? Fifty years later the picture comes to me from a movie
of someone else’s life – how else to sustain the embarrassment it causes, the rush of stinging cheeks, the huge
desire to look away. We were, I suppose, traveling coach, Mom and I, going to
I am now, on my computer, typing in the Jet Blue terminal at JFK, early on a Sunday morning, ready to board my flight
to That intense child on the train has morphed — so cliché, so true; time is no time — into a gray-haired, gray bearded, cap-wearing writing dude, sitting in an airport, staring intensely at a computer screen, very sure that what’s here is, for the moment, much more important than what’s out there. 032007
“Quoth The Raven . . .” I absolutely remember the first time
I wrote a piece of dialogue. I don’t remember calling it “dialogue”
or “conversation.” But, like sex later on, I knew what it was, and
I knew how to do it. I knew there were those double quotation marks to start.
(How confusing was it when, in my twenties, I was in Nigeria in the Peace Corps with access to all those books printed in
the UK, where they use single quotation marks at the beginning of a conversation, and double quotes for something quoted within
the conversation. I’ve never researched the reasons for the difference,
but always supposed the single quotes had something to do with rationing ink during the war, or, perhaps, the British way
of being rational about certain aspects of grammar).
After the double quotation marks came the words that were spoken. Magic. I could see someone in my imagination, I could hear them speak, I would put down the
double quotes, then the words that had been spoken, or were being spoken as I wrote them, or might be spoken if I had to force
it a little. And then a comma. Then
the opposing double quotes. And then the words he said, or she said. Or he said haltingly.
Or she said coyly.
Or, in the case of my first written quote: he said, menacingly.
Seventh grade. Public junior high school in
I don’t remember the exact words, but I do remember it was raining in my Forum, dark gray stone steps, light
gray columns. The senators all wore white togas (I was precocious, but had been
raised on mostly black and white films; I thought all drama inhabited shades of gray). And so, after four paragraphs of description,
when Caesar turned to Brutus, he uttered the – to me – straightforward and superbly dramatic phrase, “That
Cassius over there, he’s trouble,” I debated for a good five minutes between “he said” and “Caesar
said,” finally opting for the latter. A good ten minutes later, the phrase
read “Caesar said, menacingly.”
That first sip of Writer Nectar, that first heady wine of creativity – I thought this, I wrote it down, there
it is, you can read it, too – must have scared me silly. It took me 15 years of strong avoidance before I found the
courage to begin to think about how to string together sentences to tell a story.
Graduate school, Catholic University of America in
I worked that story. Oh, did I polish that sucker. And, I remind you strongly, this in the day of the portable typewriter, mine a Royal that still lives in
its gray Samsonite case, green inside, a gray machine with green keys, a margin release key, and a lever to change the long
striped ribbon from red to black and back again. A gift from my parents for my 12th birthday. If they didn’t know, they certainly intuited.
My Frankie story, as I came to call it, survived the polish, and I somehow found the balls to show it to a couple of
people, including Leo Brady, one of my professors at
“Why are you showing me this,
“I don’t know,” I said, probably blushing and looking above his head at a statue of Jesus bleeding
on the cross, a fixture of every classroom at that school. “I guess I want
to know what you think of it, whether you think I’m a, you know, a writer.”
Finally, the awful word, said aloud, out in the open, to someone whose opinion mattered.
“Um,” he said, and put the story in his bag. A week later
he handed the story back to me, no marks, no indication of whether it had been read or not.
“You’re a writer,” he said.
It was as if I’d passed some incredibly difficult examination, and now, emotional certification in hand, was
able to proceed.
But, of course, I didn’t. I wrote, of course. Letters, mostly (back in the days before e-mail, we wrote letters to each other; we saved them, sometimes;
gave them back to each other, sometimes.) And a journal, sporadically. And the thesis, finally. And then poetry, sort of. And then memos and reports, lots of.
But not until my 40s did the impulse to write crash into the need to write, intersecting with first, the thought that
I had no stories to tell, then, suddenly with one incident suddenly colliding with another, and, magically, found time away
from work and family, on a train, commuting, along with many other commuters. Only
while they were reading and writing reports, I was writing.
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