Making Lemons

Here's another writing prompt, a rare example of me writing in the present tense.

The prompt: Write some dialogue of two characters arguing about something trivial, but they're really arguing about something unspoken.



First Day

"Ooh, is that candy?" I ask Tessie as I pass her desk.

"No, scorpions," she says shortly, not looking up from her computer.

"May I have some?" I ask.

Tessie nods slightly as she attacks her keyboard.

"Do you always set out candy?" I ask. It's my first day, after all, and a candy dish can say a lot about a company's culture.

I'm having a hard time understanding Marden Inc.'s culture: People seem silent and standoffish, yet there was a Happy Hour every Thursday and an office lunch the third Tuesday of the month. Do they save all their chit-chat for those times?

Apparently so, since Tessie has not yet answered my question about the candy. Should I ask it again? Should I take a piece and slink away? Should I take the smallest piece? As the newest employee maybe I should take the smallest piece. Oh wait, they're all the same size. Okay then. I carefully dip my hand into the bowl (taking care to touch only one — it wouldn't do to look choosy).

"I knew you'd take the lemon one," Tessie says, still tapping away.

 "Why?"

"Because it's the one I wanted."

I hold it out. "You can have it."

A long sigh. "No, apparently I was not meant to have it. You were meant to have it."

"Maybe the others are just as good," I say.

A malevolent look. "We'll never know. I will only accept a lemon one. No that this matters to anyone. I made it perfectly clear to people that I wanted the lemon one and they chose to disregard that and so here I am, stuck with my old blueberry candy, while you get the lemon one." Another malevolent look.

I was confused. Were we talking about candy?

Apology Poem

Here's another prompt that asked me to write an apology poem, like William Carlos Williams' famous poem about the plums.

This Is Just To Say  

by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

So here's mine:

Late

I know the golden minutes

of my son’s education 

must be cherished

And 10 minutes

past the bell 

is unacceptable.

But surely the 

school board doesn’t want

mommies at work without pants.

Writing Headaches

This memoir writing is hard. I'm not even sure what I'm writing even makes any sense. I'm trying to unravel our decision to move to San Francisco in 2007, but that year is so fraught with emotion. I'm trying to write about the day I truly understood what we were trying to do, that it wasn't just about selling the house for a good price, but about changing our lives. I'm trying to write about why we wanted to change our lives and what we were missing in Michigan that we hoped to find in San Francisco.

But it's hard. I don't think we really understood what we wanted, and didn't want to see the obstacles. I thought that if we just worked hard and made to-do lists and found a way to clean the dining room's Roman blinds, everything would be fine. But it didn't work out that way.

So now I have a splitting headache and I'm pretty angry at myself for being so blind and shortsighted. We weren't living the life we wanted in Michigan, we were living the life we thought we should want. And even when we decided to sell the house and leave, we still acted the way we thought we should act; I ended up trying to sell the house the way its former owner sold it to us in 2003. But it wasn't 2003 and I wasn't a Mad Professor with an EverQuest addiction. It was 2007 and nobody was going to buy a 50-year old Sears home at a premium price, even if I did polish all those $5 brass cabinet knobs that the Mad Professor had installed.

When I look back at that summer, what I remember best is the fear — thick and tangled with shame and loneliness. I don't really want to revisit those feelings and I'd like to think that I'm in a better place now. But am I really? Have I really grown, or am I the same self-absorbed, magical-thinking person, just with a better apartment and a fatter bank account?

The chapter I'm writing opened with me sitting on the redwood deck of our Michigan house, with soft breezes blowing the spring leaves and the big camouflage draperies our neighbors hung on their trees. (Our neighbor didn't like people looking at her when she sat in her garden.) It was quite idyllic. Now I sit in my sunny apartment in our pretty San Francisco neighborhood and I can see the Bay through the narrow crack between two houses across the street. Have I changed at all? Have I learned anything?

I guess the only way to find out is to write this memoir. Let's hope the answer is yes.

Happy Fred, Bitter Fred

A glacial erratic in a New Jersey park.

February's issue of The Writer magazine included 40 writing prompts. I've never used prompts before as a way to encourage daily writing, but these prompts were so interesting and imaginative I decided to try it. I'll be posting excerpts from my prompts as I write them.

Here's the first prompt: Describe an event from a character's point of view. Then write about the event again from a different emotional point of view.

So I wrote a short piece about Happy Fred, thrilled to be leaving his dead-end museum job. Then I wrote about Bitter Fred.

The Bitter Fred

“I’m quitting my job,” I told Melanie as we stood in line at the buffet, raising my voice slightly to be heard over the pompous chatter around us.

Melanie glanced around, but she had nothing to worry about – the Green Harbor Geology Museum’s biggest donors didn’t care what a lowly museum fundraiser had to say. They couldn’t even be bothered to listen to the museum’s director during the award presentation – they just chattered on and on, ignoring the activity onstage. Those people heard nobody but themselves.

“How can you?” Melanie asked. “What will the museum do without you? You raised $439,000 with your last campaign!”

“And what did that get me?” I asked. “I called and emailed people for months, begging, pleading, wheedling, listening to on-hold music and lies from secretaries. And what did the director say when I presented him with the total — $439,237? He asked, ‘What, you couldn’t reach an even 450?’”

“What will you do?” Melanie asked, sounding nervous, as well she might. With me gone, she’d be the one tapped to run my campaigns with no extra pay until they found a replacement. Knowing the Green Harbor Geology Museum management, that would be months.

“I have my rock band,” I said, sprinkling cheese on the Conchiglie. “Now that we have a drummer, I can book some gigs. Those contacts I’ve cultivated for the museum will benefit me now.”

“What will you live on?”

“I have savings,” I said airily, walking over to a free table. Melanie followed, looking a bit pale.

“Really?” she asked. She knew what I was paid, and it wasn’t much.

I knew she suspected that $439,237 wasn't the real total I raised, that some of the humiliating groveling would benefit me, not the museum. My conscience didn’t trouble me – why should I respect the wishes of those self-indulgent, careless donors? They didn’t care about geology, they just wanted to brag and sound smart.

I took a big swallow of red wine and scanned the room, a room full of fools. “Come see us sometime. We’re the Glacial Erratics and my talent and connections will help us hit the big time.”

Melanie looked at me levelly. “I don’t know what your scheme is, but it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re self-absorbed and careless. That name proves it.”

“The Glacial Erratics? The name suits me perfectly. It suits our band, which differs greatly from its native environment,” I said.

“Oh Fred,” she sighed. “It’s always the surface with you. You never dig deeper. And what is the Latin root for erratic?”

“No idea,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes.

“It comes from the verb erro: to go astray. To err.”

##

Memoirs Old and New

It was a beautiful little house, with cheery green shutters and a perky, pointy, red-shingled roof and little blue trains painted on the windowsills in Benny’s room. It was a beautiful little house.

And I hated it.

Here we have the first three sentences of my memoir. Yes, that memoir, the one I've been threatening to write for three years now. The tentative title is "Too Small to Succeed" and it's about how the Killer Robot Family changed their lives and barely avoided bankruptcy as the country slid into recession. 

I don't know much about writing a memoir, but I've read a few, and some of them I actually liked. My memoir covers one year, from March 2007 to March 2008. I'm still amazed we got through that year; we were definitely walking a tightrope without a net. We had both good luck and bad — the bad luck was always expensive. Heck, even the good luck was expensive. What am I saying: We live in San Francisco — everything is expensive. 

As I see it, memoirs generally fall into four categories: My Time Living Abroad ("Eat, Pray, Love"), My Famous Life (Meredith Baxter's "Untied"), My Kicky Concept ("Julie and Julia") and My Horrific, Traumatic Childhood ("Angela's Ashes"). The recession has bred a fifth category: My Financial Train Wreck. I'm trying not to read any of them, despite the advice in writers' magazines, since I'll probably get discouraged. The one I did glance at ("Made for You and Me") promised commentary on the loss of our small towns, homelessness, joblessness and the increasing economic divisions between Americans. My memoir makes no such promises, although I can guarantee a few meltdowns in the "Julie and Julia" style. Anyway, I find browsing memoirs kind of a depressing experience as I find myself looking at the book jackets of "Unwanted" and "A Child Called 'It'".


Nothing like trashing the genre you're writing in, I always say. My two favorite memoirs are nearly 50 years old: long and rambling, with a wry, funny voice. One is "Minding Our Own Business" by Charlotte Paul, which is the story of a husband and wife who chucked their comfortable lives in Chicago and moved to Washington state to run their own newspaper.

To say their decision to move was impetuous is a drastic understatement. Charlotte and Ed gave themselves two months to quit Ed's job, sell the farm, find a newspaper on the West Coast, buy it, move across the country and start making a profit. They took shocking risks. The whole journey was harrowing. The work hours were insane. The debt was enormous. The entire book gave me a heart attack. Ed himself had a heart attack in Chapter 8. Compared to them, Mr. Killer Robot and I are hopelessly conventional. Perhaps journalists just shouldn't marry each other.

The second one is "The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald about her adventures as a young wife on a chicken farm in Washington state.  I liked how she described making breakfast in the cabin on her enemy, Stove. (Yes, she called her stove "Stove" the way Holly Golightly called her cat "Cat. I guess a person gets lonely on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula.)

"I cleaned Stove's suit and polished the metal handles, poured in half a can of kerosene, and Stove began balefully to burn a little," she wrote.

MacDonald personified everything, like Mountain, with its shawl of pine trees and little Town, spurned by her railroad suitor. She liked to write in her chicken logs regarding chicks' cause of death; "Egg-cema and Suicide." Chicks, I'm told, are really dumb.

What I ought to do, actually, is find some good Great Depression memoirs. Or maybe just read "Grapes of Wrath." Last year I read Benny the Little House books, and one of them, "The Shores of Silver Lake," resembled their situation. Pa had to travel to South Dakota first and the rest followed on the train. Then they lived in a tent, spent the winter house-sitting, and then built a shanty on their claim.

So obviously memoirs have a long and proud tradition and I am glad to be joining it. Maybe I'll open Chapter 3 with my struggles with my own enemy, Blender.

Setting Goals

Writing is all about setting goals, we're told. Set specific, reasonable goals with quantitative results. I've set such goals before — I've written down "Revise first 10 chapters of Killer Robot manuscript by midnight, June 12" or "send Video Game play to three theater companies by noon, Aug. 12, without going cross-eyed from reading the picky submission guidelines" or "Get up at 5:30 a.m. to write three days a week without killing anyone." These are laudable goals, of course, and I've dutifully created spreadsheets, started treadmill journals and checked off whiteboard to-do lists.

All these goals failed, of course — some rather spectacularly — with blown deadlines, abandoned journals and undignified displays of temper when I couldn't find any Snapple at 5:32 a.m. But even writers need structure, and I can't just sit at my desk every day and mutter dementedly. Well, I could (and often do) but then I should write something too.

So I'm rushing in the opposite direction, with a single, vague goal with only three words: "Write Every Day." Now that doesn't mean I'm actually sitting at my desk writing (insert merry laugh here), because frankly I seem to diddle away a shocking amount of time. For example, today Mr. Killer Robot and Killer Robot Kid went off to Little League baseball practice, which meant prime writing time for me on a Sunday morning. So I spent two hours at my desk. But of course I wasn't writing; I was putting new ink in my printer, setting up my iTunes, setting up my new speakers, finding the perfect spot for my fan, rearranging my bulletin board, and looking for a half-remembered blog post about dips. When my guys arrived home, my desk and bedroom were neat and tidy but my nerves were a mess, because, of course, I'd written nothing.

Then Mr. Killer Robot and I spent a frustrating afternoon trying to arrange his 401(k) contributions, a process that greatly resembled a typical writing session (lots of squinting and muttered cursing, but few tangible results). Then he and the Kid went out again, and now here I am, at my desk writing, but not really writing, just writing about not writing.

I think I'm paralyzed by my newfound freedom. As of Feb. 6, I've reduced my work hours to devote more time to my family and my writing. The family part is working out great: the house is cleaner, the meals are better, I chaperoned an ice-skating field trip and designed a scarecow costume, and Mr. Killer Robot, who is also a journalist, has been on the front page of our newspaper four out of the last five issues. So this is definitely working out personally. But for the writing? Not so much. I did manage to write a short play about a little chess pawn, which was so weird and incoherent, I immediately printed it out and filed it and haven't looked at it yet.

You see, I have six writing projects whirling around in my head, each demanding its time. The last time I felt like this was at my newspaper job last fall, when I was juggling four special publications in various stages of completion. In one five-day period, I was taking one publication to press, making calls on a second one, assigning stories for a third and attending a judging for a fourth.

Fiction projects, however, are different. It doesn't seem to make sense to juggle multiple projects at once, so I'll have to pick one, power it through, then work on the next one. But which do I pick? The short play I just finished, the short story idea? the memoir? the full-length play? Or the novel?

I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that I'm not going to fret much about publication this year. I'm not going to read much about publication either, since it's too depressing. According to the writing mags, I'm more likely to be killed by a meteor in the shape of Elvis' head than to actually get anything published. So I'll just concentrate on finishing 3-6 of these writing projects this year, just churning them out, powering through carpal tunnel and writers' block, and worry about publication in 2013.

And to do that, all I need to do is follow a single goal:

WRITE EVERY DAY.

White King's Pawn

I just finished writing my first new play since I left Michigan in 2007. The need to write another play must have been growing in me for some time, since it took only a few days into my reduced work schedule to churn it out.

I've been working on the play for some time, organizing and preparing my thoughts, writing outlines, setting up a Scrivener template for it. Then today I sat down and started a new Scrivener document and just started writing it. Four hours later — with only a short break — I finished it. It's 17 pages long.

I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's worth working further on. I don't know if it will ever be worth submitting. But it's been growing in me since December and it just burst out somehow.

It's a play about a chess game, called "White Queen's Pawn." I got the idea when I started taking chess up again in December. I bought a book at a used bookstore called "Chess Basics" and started working through the lessons on my son Benny's new chessboard. Then I bought another book called "Great Short Games of the Chess Masters" and started working through those.

I am definitely not a natural at chess. Most of the time I don't understand the games I'm acting out. But there's something satisfying about re-enacting a chess game played in Ostend in 1906 or Vienna in 1872 or Riga in 1937.

I was particularly struck by the second game in the book, which introduced a game played in Kaschau in 1893. In this game, the White King's Pawn advanced across the entire chessboard and was a key actor in the amazing finish. The game was so dramatic I played it several times, then showed it to Benny, who nodded politely and went back to his Madden Playstation game.

I couldn't stop thinking about the game, however, and found myself wondering what it would be like to see this game from the little pawn's point of view, the same little pawn who miraculously made it across the board through so many perils and was present at the dramatic finish. I played the game once more and took notes as if I were the pawn: who I was threatening, who was threatening me, what pieces were around me, who was protecting me, who I was protecting.

But it wasn't until I sat down today that I felt ready to actually do it. I approached the script in a very systematic way, letting the natural drama of the game be my plot. Suddenly the characters appeared: the brave little pawn, the brooding king, the sweet queen, the pious bishop and glory-seeking knight, the cunning enemy pawns. The little pawn was like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, advancing bravely into the dark forest following her own brick road to fulfill her wish. I tried to create a narrative trajectory that began a naive little pawn starting her first game and ending ... well ending in a very different place.

I don't know what I'm trying to say with this play -- I've put it away and I can't bear to look at it right now -- but I think the script talks about courage and persistence and ultimately, forgiveness. The Bishop, who started out as a smug strawman for the other pieces to make fun of, turned out to be a vital figure, providing some moral heft to the play.

Perhaps, in the end, this play was about choice: both the chess players and the pieces. For in this play, the chess pieces can influence the game, there's a special, invisible connection between the player and the pieces. A piece can force the player to move impulsively before the player has a chance to think it through, or it can refuse to move, forcing the player to change his or her mind and find another way, possibly to the ruin of all.

For each step the Pawn takes, she must decide to take it. Sometimes she moves from a dangerous square to a protected one. But sometimes she must leave a protected square and forge ahead all alone. At one point she moves from a safe square to a very dangerous one, but she chooses to do it for the good of her comrades, to find that the square was safe after all.

Pawns, by their very definition, are not supposed to have a choice. Their purpose is to be used and sacrificed. But in my play, the pawn has turned the tables and her choices determined the fate of the game.