Moulthrop Blog

"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 Lawrence Avenue. Perfect room for a writer. If I’d known I was a writer then. I didn’t know. But I was a wordsmith, and I had my Royal Portable to prove it.

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 Europe. I would definitely remember typing on the freighter during that three-week voyage to Le Havre, would probably have sat ostentatiously at the mess table during the typhoon, strapped myself in, and typed. Something. And there definitely was no typewriter at boarding school, nor during the summer travels to Scandanavia and England and France, nor during the winter term in the rented apartment. There was a piano there, and that, I strongly remember, was enough. Several Mozart sonatas still come at me with steam heat and the strong smell of dead, wet, brown leaves.

I can remember trying to type on Grandma Jennie’s even older Royal in the dining room at 1112 Pacific Avenue in Alameda. Solid square oak table; the Morris chair with the lion’s head arms and the orange knitted cushion covers waiting for sitting and reading, the light from the bay window filtered through white mesh curtains. Slow hunt, definite peck, move on to the next letter.

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 Fresno for that awful Christmas. And I had taken my typewriter because … because … I was going to write letters to friends? probably that. I am 12 years old, no more. A chunky kid with black rimmed glasses covering an intense stare. Hair combed. Nails scrubbed. Dragging that “portable” typewriter case down the aisle of the train, smiling to myself, hefting the doors between the cars, and then, finally in the club car, setting up my portable typewriter, the paper rolled in, margins engaged, little bell to signal the end of each line at the ready. The dining car steward comes. “I’ll have a Coke, please,” I said. Tap tap tap, type type type. Completely oblivious, as I am now, to whatever spectacle I am creating, this twelve year old intense child typing on the train.

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 Oakland for the San Francisco Writers Conference. I am almost convinced that it will be fun. But you want real fun? You want real excitement? Picture my face as, sitting with an early cup of coffee, not wanting to read, thinking about this piece, and about how I want to tell myself/you/the world about my relationship to my Royal Portable, and there, underneath the table, is an electric outlet – four prongs. Not always so accessible in an airline terminal. I am excited, I am smiling, I am eager. Because, now, I can plug in, save the batteries for the plane, and do some actual, real, tangible writing in the kind of place – food court, coffee shop, airline terminal – I’ve always loved. People passing, life there, but beyond the barrier of thought, and definitely far from the brain-hand connection that places words on the screen almost as fast as they drop into consciousness.

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 Richmond, California. A scary place for a chubby, brainy only child nurtured in suburban elementary schools. I hadn’t yet looked around me, only come to class, put my hand up as always, took down assignments, went home and did my homework. This one was to write about Julius Caesar.

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 Washington, DC, where I was working toward an MA in Theatre, living in a rooming house, and beginning the approach to begin to think about beginning to write my master’s thesis. Short story writing seemed a good way to not think about the thesis. How about a story about a boy who lives in an upstairs bedroom (true) with his mother (Mrs. Maurer was a pseudo-mother who ran a very clean boarding house) who couldn’t get out of bed and get his life started (true enough, four days out of seven). I remember the title (F as in Funny, R as in Rancid) and not much more.

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 12^th 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 Catholic U.

“Why are you showing me this, Mr. Moulthrop?” I remember him asking.

“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. 030807