Smoke and Mirrors 2
A Zoom conversation about writing craft and subject matter on Saturday July 22, 3-4pm EST.
Dear readers and writers,
You are invited to join a Zoom gathering to talk about writing craft and the content of stack posts you might like to know more about. This is the second gathering Richard and I have hosted, and we hope this interaction is something you enjoy. If you are a writer, please send ahead a question about craft you’d like to open up. If you are a reader, please feel free to comment on the subjects of the posts and perhaps what makes a piece of writing feminist. Anything that comes to mind.
This is a benefit for PAID subscribers. If you would like to begin a paid subscription, here’s a link to join. Yesterday the stack passed the 5000-subscriber milestone. To celebrate, I’m offering a discount of 25% off monthly and annual subscriptions. You can join for as little as $3.75 to attend the Zoom gathering. If you would like to attend, please RSVPat: lauriestone@substack.com, and I will send you a Zoom link.
Some craft ideas, to give you a sense of what we might talk about. How to write a scene that does all the work of summary and analysis. Summary and analysis detract from the dramatic potential of anything you write in any genre, including criticism and certainly memoir. We’ll can talk about the tendency to tell the reader a thing you’ve learned or have extracted from memory, alone, and why the reader won’t actually care. We’ll talk about an approach to scenes that leaves the reader free to discover what the reader feels and thinks.
Other ideas. Layering narrative with what the narrator reports and what the narrator makes of the thing reported. Moving between time frames. Think about what Stanley Kubrick accomplishes in the jump cut between a prehuman ape creature, tossing into the air a femur bone he’s just used as a murder weapon, and the next shot, a space ship floating in the cosmos. With jump cuts in writing, the reader fills in a ton of stuff you don’t need to explain. Ways to create an emotional response in the reader? Basically, stay out of the reader’s way with any needs the narrator has. How to write a sentence that’s a baby story all by itself? Richard just chimed in with: “Too late, now,” Laurie said, stepping over the body.
For fun and maybe to get your juices going, here are two short pieces that came from writing sessions with Richard, where we each write for 25 minutes or so, and then read the pieces to each other. One I wrote a few years back. The other one was written yesterday after our new gravel driveway was finished.
Happy Sunday and huge thanks,
Laurie
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Back then
I would have had sex with you and it would have been good. I would have thought it was good because I was into the look of you and I thought what was good between us had also made you happy. I would have slipped beside you at a party. I would have thought from the way we were talking I had nothing to fear. Fear wasn’t that much a part of things. I would have rested my head in the crook of your arm and thought I should relax. After you got up from the bed, you might have given me a small thought as you were getting dressed, or hailing a cab, or lighting a smoke. I would never see you again, and I would remember you for the rest of my life. I would remember you because of the space between what had happened to me and what had happened to you. I would remember you because it would flash on me for a moment I had been so wrong it was funny. I cannot fully express how happy it makes me to tell you this can never again happen.
I wanted a gravel driveway
A man from a garden place on Warren Street came to our house I don’t know what prompted me to invite him. As soon as he got out of his truck, I knew it was a mistake. How do we know these things from the way a person closes a door and looks around?
The one thing he told us we liked was the name of brothers who do driveways. John came over that day. He had a depressed, get me out of this tightness about him that didn’t put me off. The business the brothers have made into a colossal success was started by their father. They had inherited Downton Abbey, for all intents and purposes.
Yesterday John calls and says they have a cancelation and he can finish our driveway. The Downton Abbey reference came from the unconscious. I was thinking about things you inherit that become a refrigerator you have to lug around from one stage of life to the next one. The gravel drive we have now is the gravel drive of Downtown Abbey. It’s the neatly raked road you pull up to in a sports car you are shortly going to die in, as you turn a corner and crash into a tree. It’s the gravel driveway where the horse and carriage pull up, crunching along, and out pops the orphan come to live god knows where with god knows which hateful and surprising secret relative.
It’s a good thing we’d gone to the quarry the day before. We drove past the dump, and there was this enormous site, where rock is dug, ground into different sized pieces, and poured into mountains of blue gray dreams. We enter an office in hell where everyone likes each other and give off a ray of hope. Richard’s dreams are to solve the problems as quickly as my dreams produce them. One of the guys is behind a desk. I say, “Something tells me you would know a thing or two about rocks.” He says, “My mother used to say I had rocks in my head.” I say, “Rocks are beautiful. I can’t get enough of them.”
From the moment we hatched the plan of swapping out the asphalt for gravel, not one person said, “What a good idea.” Except Bill, and with Bill you never know if he means what he says or he wants you to love him because being loved makes life less troubling. Everyone else said, plowing gravel this, and snow plow that, and it gets in the grass this, and good luck with that, idiot, in that smirky I know better but it’s your funeral so go ahead with your folly if you have to, way.
Now, a blue-gray lake ripples past the windows. Last night I drove over it for the first time, and I walked on it, hearing the music of the crunch. I thought never mind the trouble it costs, and by trouble I mean the trouble Richard feels has been added to his load, owing to my idleness. He sees his role as the caretaker, a rung below Mellors the gamekeeper. Whatever bother the gravel driveway costs in maintenance, and there is some compared with asphalt that sits there, asking for nothing, whatever it takes melts in the face of this beauty.
We chose a mixture of quarter inch and half inch pieces, and the facets catch light. John and his crew are artists of the driveway. Richard overheard them talking about Scorsese movies. “‘Raging Bull’ and ‘Mean Streets’,” he said, “guy movies.” I was happy they were talking about movies. Richard said something else we think about often, “You never know what is going on inside another person.”
"Good luck with that, idiot" :-D
Here is a little try, in preparation for our Saturday Zoom:
I once met a guy at a bar on Bethany Home Road near 16th Street, a couple of blocks from my house. I had been pulling weeds most of the morning, a futile endeavour as you well know if you have ever lived in the Arizona desert for any long periods of time.
I don’t call them weeds, but most people do.
I found an empty chair and sat down. Next to it was this guy, who seemed to be deep in thought. He seemed to be staring at infinity, some infinity right beside the stream of bubbles emanating from the bottom of his beer glass.
I ordered my beer and it seemed as if it was then that he noticed my presence. Not because he turned his head, or because he muttered some low key “hi!” or any of those things. I think he noticed my arrival only because it seemed like his focus shifted slightly to the left of the bubbles, towards some other infinity that he found somewhere in there, mixed in with all those tiny little bubbles.
The beer tasted good: hoppie, strong and cold. Good beer, to witness by the three exclamation points at the end of my somewhat loud “Ah!!!”.
“Yes, it is good beer.” he said, still focused on the infinity of the moment. “But I often wonder if we are born with an innate taste for good beer. I don’t know if we are or not, but I lean towards thinking that we are not; I lean towards thinking that nothing is innate in humans.”
“Who gives a shit!” — I thought to myself, but said nothing. The beer was good and I was already thinking about the orgasms that my new girlfriend was going to have courtesy of yours truly.
Anyway, pulling weeds, or as I prefer to say, cutting back the natives, is indeed a futile endeavour. Everybody knows that natives own the land, and that possession is ninety percent of the law, and that the roots of these wondrous and beautiful plants are having perpetual intercourse with the soil, as the next rains will see to their fertility.
Speaking of rain and things, I need to go home and take a shower; I like being clean when making love.