So, when I lived in Sacramento, I had to move from my apartment because the guy upstairs would be pounding on the floor at, like, 2:00 in the morning, totally interrupting my trombone practice… Ba-dump-bump
My wife, puppy, and I just returned to southern California from having helped our youngest daughter move in for her fourth year of university in central Oregon.
My lovely wife and I had a long and lovely chat about a number of things, including the structure of the book.
Say, when you were a kid, do you remember telling your parents what you wanted to be when you grew up? Ballerina, heart surgeon, astronaut, CPA…
When I got out of school, my dad asked me what I was going to do.
School didn’t end well for me. I was too much of a knucklehead to link the coursework I was taking in radio and television with getting a job. Internships? You mean actually work during the summer? No thank you, buddy. Not for me!
Idiot.
So, when I got out of college, I could have, and often was, correctly and completely considered to be Count Clueless.
My dad asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, “you know, I think I’d like to get into acting.”
My mom said “That’s my boy!” and offered a firm handshake and a round of applause.
My dad said “Acting. Huh. You should get a day job, and once you have a day job, don’t quit your day job.”
Anyway, in downtown Salem, Oregon, at the corner of Liberty and State on Saturday evening, my daughter, lovely wife, puppy, and I sat down on the sidewalk patio of a very pleasant little place.
We brought the puppy along on this extended road trip because we have three dogs. The other guys are so old and doddery that the puppy, being 75% chow hound, would gobble down all of the food we left out before they even knew we’d left.
Anyway, across the street from us on this busy downtown street corner on a warm and sultry Saturday night, cooled by the gentle breeze wafting in off the Willamette River, and where you have to speak loudly because yahoos in their jacked-up pickup trucks roar down State Street trying to impress girls, or guys, but ultimately only themselves, stood this maybe 14 year-old girl.
She quietly switched on her battery-powered amplified and plugged in a pale-blue electric guitar that was nearly as tall as she, set a microphone in her portable mike stand, and proceeded to belt out her version of a seemingly endless set of tunes.
The glorious chords from her guitar echoed up and down the canyon of building fronts and off the sides of the passing pickup trucks and deep down inside our eardrums with equal indifference. And then she began to sing…
“Buuuuuuusted flat in Baton…………… Rouge, as ragged……….as……….my jeans,” she worked her own stylized way through Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee (or, as Martin Mull called it, You and Bobby McGoo), in a brave contralto that was full of oomph and intensity but totally off key, and with a timing that would challenge even the most avant garde jazz musician.
She. Was. Awful. And she had a huuuuuuge repertoire of songs, some current, some classics, some her own, that were nearly indistinguishable from one another.
Seated about ten feet away, in one of those little beach kind of folding chairs that are super low to the ground but have a nice little canvas backrest, sat what we finally figured out had to be her mom, watching this 14-year-old girl’s performance intently and applauding after every dragged out, whiny tune.
The restaurant’s service was slow, and the wall o’ sound was agonizing, but there was something kinda cool about it.
This kid told her parents “I don’t want to be an astronaut or a CPA. I wanna be a blues singer.”
Instead of Dad patently saying “you’ll make better tips as a waitress,” or maybe he did, Mom said “let’s try it!”
Because you think something you created is pretty good is not reason enough to put it on the street corner to sell. This is my fear about my work. Well, maybe benignly selling it is okay, but trying it out on the rest of the world without their permission might be a stretch.
Still, though, her parents supported her in fulfilling her dream. Good luck with that.
Anyway, that’s not the point of this post, not by a long shot.
My wife, who has forgiven me and allowed me out of the dog house (much to the relief of the dogs), told me a number of amazingly helpful things about the book, and about my writing itself.
For example, she pointed out that this friendly, folksy style in which I write was, well, friendly and folksy, and had an appeal that I should be exploiting by writing articles in. It. I think I got lost in the sub-clauses, there. All those commas…
To the book, which is far and away the best thing I’ve written, she said it’s a great book until about page 70 (of 135), at which it loses its thread a little and becomes more like a movie script than a novel.
And, she said, you’re telling the wrong story.
See, the book is about a grimoire, a book of magical spells, which is created by a 10th century prince for the purpose of wooing a 10th century princess. Sadly, he dies before he can give it to her, but his spirit takes up residence inside the grimoire. It takes a thousand years, but the prince, still trapped inside the book, maneuvers and manipulates 5 men, (a sawdust manikin, a lovesick seventeen-year high-school junior, and three sorcerers desperately seeking to own the book), into creating a sawdust manikin of the princess, so that he can profess his love to her. It’s a tricky and adventurous path, but he eventually succeeds. Sadly, things go awry once the job is done.
That sounds fun, doesn’t it? Yeah! It’s just not the story I wrote.
My story is about the sawdust manikin and the high-schooler trying to outwit and escape the three sorcerers. When the five ultimately do meet, the prince, hidden in the book (surprise, surprise), connives them into creating a sawdust the manikin princess. Just in writing it down, it seems kind of disjointed.
You’re a writer. You can see the difference, yes? I couldn’t when I was writing it. I had teased around the idea of having the prince recreate the princess for a long time, and ultimately decided to bite the bull by the tail and put it in.
And that, my friend, that turned out to be the point of the story.
My wife said that this was the good story I should write.
So, here I sit, like that kid boldly and badly belting out blues tunes to an indifferent world, actively telling the wrong tale.
Maybe I shouldna fired my wife as my editor…
