So I got out my little literary whisk broom and started sifting through my research, hoping a skeleton of my memoir would emerge. And by golly, it has.
It's like a little misshapen skeleton in the back of a dusty museum . There's a title written on a crooked placard, some themes molded into a bony skull, and a vertebrae of 12 chapters clumsily strung together with chicken wire.
I know the final product will in no way resemble this outline. Annie Dillard said it best: "Original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen." Often, Dillard says, in revision you must throw out the best-written part, the part that was supposed to be the whole point: " the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin."
So now I have a title, a theme, an outline and a 600-word beginning. They make up a rickety little scaffold that will hopefully support me while I build something better.
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Tentative title
"A Hill of Beans"
Tentative subtitle (just to make
Fog City Writer crazy):
How three little people changed their lives and teetered close to bankruptcy as the country slid into recession.
Theme:
People can change their lives if they’re willing to take risks and pay the emotional, financial and professional costs.
PROLOGUE: Sneaking Out of the House.
CHAPTER 1: This House Won’t Sell.
CHAP. 2: Facing Reality.
CHAP 3: The Final Push.
CHAP 4: Welcome to San Francisco.
CHAP 5: The Lucky Streak.
CHAP 6: Devastated.
CHAP 7: The Great Pretender.
CHAP 8: The Bleak Christmas of 2007.
CHAP 9: The Short Sale.
CHAP 10: Goodbye Big Foot.
EPILOGUE: The View from Ashbury Heights.
