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Sometimes There Are No Words

I had to run to Office Depot over my lunch break today to pick up some supplies. Push pins, masking tape, index cards–typical things I use in project planning. It was a routine visit to a routine store but this time something very strange happened and I still don’t have any words. I still don’t know what I should have said, and I feel bad for saying nothing at all.

After gathering the things I needed from the various corners of the store, I approached the register where a very sweet older lady greeted me with a smile.

“Nice weather we’re having. Glad summer’s finally here,” she said.

“Oh yeah, me too, I’ve been getting a lot of good bike rides in lately.”

She paused her scanning for a second, then continued and looked up at me.

“You know, you sound just like one of my friends. His name’s Michael. He passed away recently.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He was thirty two or thirty three. Somewhere in there.”

I’m always sad when I hear that someone my age has died. I waited for her to continue, wondering what could have happened to her friend. Death at such a young age is usually fast and unexpected.

“He killed himself. Suicide. I wish I’d had just one more chance to talk to him before he did it. He was always so depressed. I wanted to tell him that there are other women in the world, that it’s not worth it.”

At this point I had no idea what to say. I swiped my card and she handed me my receipt. She snapped out of her malaise and, with a smile, said “Thanks for coming by! Have a nice day!”

I didn’t even say goodbye.

Sometimes there are no words.

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Happy Birthday

My first child was born in Japan. Getting a copy of her birth certificate will always be a tortuous wild goose chase where the geese have been cross-bred with piranhas and are packing laser rifles. They say you always remember the big milestones in your life with a distinct clarity, and aside from my twenty-first birthday, that’s proven true. The birth of my first child was the most terrifying experience in the history of all my experiences. The terror has only grown with time.

Whenever I tell people this, they smile and nod with that knowing “Yeah, pal, it’s terrifying for all of us that first time around” smarmy look. But looking back at everything that happened, it was objectively horrifying and not simply my emotions getting the best of me.

Before

Before

My wife decided early on to go to a midwifery in Japan. I will forever refer to it as the “spawning vats.” It was this two-story building hidden in a back alley that exuded all the welcoming feelings of a rugged youth hostel crossed with a Soviet-era elementary school. Lots of little spartan rooms with cold tile floors where new mothers would stay with their new babies for a week after birth to ease everybody’s transition into their new roles in life.

The place was run by an ancient obstetrician and associated with a hospital and this was supposed to allay my fears about how dangerous this sounded. Once we had to go to a class that I *think* was supposed to teach us how to not kill the baby. I’d barely been in Japan a few months and my language skills weren’t all that up-to-snuff so I only caught about one in every fifty words the doctor said. Mostly it looked like an inscrutable puppet show to me. I remember it being very hot, and falling asleep once, and my wife jabbing me in the chest with her elbow because I’d been snoring. You know, maybe I deserved the ensuing terror.

The day I got “the call”, I hopped on my bicycle and sped off to the midwifery in this sleepy little neighborhood well north of Tokyo. It was the fastest way to get there as no trains ran close by, calling a taxi would take too long, and we had no car. I got several texts that morning from my wife after “the call” but the one I will always remember simply said “Ouch.”

When I arrived the nurses hurried me into my wife’s room where she was to stay for the week and there was a complete lack of wife in the room. Just me and the bed and the clock. They instructed me to wait, shut the door, and shuffled off with no indication of when they’d be back. I hadn’t gotten a text in a good hour or two at this point. I’m not sure how long I was in that room, but after the minutes faded into half-hours and the half-hours faded into hours and the shadows from the sunlight streaming through the window had moved across at least two floor tiles, the nurses came to retrieve me with a simple “It’s time.”

They took me to a bench in a white hallway lit with a flickering fluorescent light that cast a sickly green glow on everything. Beside that bench was a door and from the other side of the door came the screaming. Not just any screaming. I could pick out at least two distinct voices screaming. Possibly three. My heart went into overdrive as I tried to figure out why so many people were screaming, and why nobody was letting me go in there. One of the voices had to be my wife, but what of the others? Had something gone terribly wrong and the nurses were screaming about how awful it all was? Were there, in fact, eldritch horrors in there screaming with the voices of the damned? I sat there helpless under the lights.

Soon enough they let me into the room and I hesitated for a second. I wasn’t sure I wanted to face whatever was on the other side, but then my wife could be in trouble so I convinced my feet to move. It was a scene directly out of a horror movie. First there were curtains everywhere making what looked like a rather large room feel very claustrophobic. The screams came from behind these other curtains. Another woman had decided to give birth at the exact same time as my wife and the staff were making-do as well as they could.

Second, the room was dark. I mean very dark. The doctor’s theory was that the baby should ease into the world without bright lights, and slowly ramp up the light level as she got accustomed to her new surroundings. Funny, nobody ever thought about a slow ramp for the sound level. A part of the ceiling overhead was unfinished and there were pipes and wires and tubes and all sorts of things you see in a creepy abandoned warehouse hanging up there. And in front of me, behind a curtain, was my wife all splayed out on some chair-like device, gripping onto a bar as if trying not to be snatched away by some awful creature, screaming and giving me a very, very angry look.

And to top it all off, the doctor was standing at the “business end” with a camcorder aimed directly at the action.

What. The. Hell.

We have that cassette tape. For seven years I’ve managed to come up with excuses as to why we don’t need a VCR. Because I know, as soon as we acquire one, my wife will pop that cassette in and I will hear the unholy cries of the damned once more.

After

After

In the end my daughter came out all nice and healthy and they handed her to me and I was terrified that I’d drop her on the tile floor but somehow I survived the encounter. Honestly everything after they gave my daughter back to my wife is a blur. I spent the next week making that bicycle ride 2-3 times a day to visit, always bringing a requested snack from the local grocery store, having fun videotaping this crazy new creature that was my daughter.

But as objectively terrifying as it all was, it was So. Worth. It.

Happy Birthday, Emily. May I live long enough to embarrass you with this and many more stories at your wedding.

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A Brief Update

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Just busy. Busy going to a writing conference. Busy finishing up edits. Busy going for long bicycle rides in the beautiful weather we’ve had lately. I’ll be back soon enough now that the Dreaded Querying Process is beginning, but for now, I leave you with this. If you ever needed a motivational pep talk to get started on any endeavor, be it creative or business or maniacal evil, here’s your pep talk.

More interesting update to follow when I’ve got this query and synopsis writing behind me. And yes, I know, I promised to write about endings. I kept holding off because I didn’t quite have the ending of my own novel where it needed to be. But now I do. Next time, I promise!

If you want a sneak peek just imagine I’m saying something about “themes” and “circling back to the beginning” here while waving my hands around.

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Eureka

I’ve never blogged about the art of writing. I’ve talked about self-publishing and about progress on my own current novel, but never about the craft itself. I never felt like I had much to add to the conversation. I’m just this guy who’s sole publishing accomplishment is some bad junior high poetry, and I’ve got a ways to go before publishing a novel. But I’m going to share this revelation, if for no other reason than I learn a lot about myself when I talk through things.

In preparing the WIP for the terrifying querying and pitching process, I had a legion (read: 4) of early readers. Their feedback was invaluable, but all three of them aligned on one thing that worried me. They all fell in love with one half of my book, and felt disconnected from the other half.

See, I’ve written a split narrative. One half of the novel is the diary of a twenty-something Japanese girl. That’s the half people connected with. The other half is a thirty-something American guy told in third person. That’s the half people didn’t connect with all that well. But wait, I’m a thirty-something American who’s lived in Japan! How were people connecting with a wholly-fabricated Japanese girl better than the guy who was channeling my very existence and experiences?

I mulled and fretted and eventually ignored this and tried to clean up the American half as best I could, but it didn’t sing true. I wasn’t connecting with it either, and that’s when I knew I had to do something drastic. While I was in Japan earlier this month, I started reading A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway. There’s a scene in the first third of the book where the narrator experiences a shelling during the war. And that’s when I realized what was wrong with half of my novel.

My 3rd person half of the narrative was too far removed from the feelings and experiences of the character it focused on. He saw things happen, and that’s about it. He didn’t experience them. When I wrote the first person half, the girl naturally talked about how she felt, what she thought, how the experiences changed her and why she did what she did. When I wrote the American half, however, all that got left out. Maybe because I felt it so strongly within me, I read a lot of that feeling into the words on the page, not realizing that none of the words on the page really conveyed any feeling at all.

I didn’t want to switch out of a 3rd person POV, but I wanted to really capture that essence and so, with Hemingway firmly in the back of my mind, I set out to rewrite my first chapter–without referring back to the earlier draft. Went in blind, with a blank Word doc. The difference, to me at least, was (cliche alert) night and day.

Here’s the same “sequence”, before and after.

Before:

Chris squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for the cold, infinite void that never came. The tugboat tumbled past inches from his face. He smelled the oil and grease from its engines as it rolled by. Water sprayed up into his face, tickling his cheeks. A few pieces of debris found their way into his mouth and he spat them out, the taste wet and earthy, the sensation like chewing on dirty cardboard. Grit stuck between his teeth and he continued to spit, unable to get rid of it all. A mouthful of sand.

After:

The water reached his neck and his chest felt tight and he knew his heart was giving out and all he wanted was for the madness to stop. Breathing was hard and water pushed at his mouth and the currents pulled at his legs and his shoulders stretched and twisted and he screamed because the scream gave him strength to hold on as the world fell apart. He choked and spit and the smell of musty basements filled his nose.

The first one reads very mechanically to me. “This happened. Then that. Then something else.” There’s no feeling, no real urgency, too much telling and not enough showing. The second one captures that chaos of the moment better, the feelings, the fears, and something about those run-on sentences (please forgive me, Mrs. Boozer) helps convey the sense of urgency.

So now to go through and rewrite half my book. Hey, at least it’s not the whole thing, right?

How about the rest of you? What were some of your big “eureka!” moments where it all started to click and you found your way out of whatever hole you were in with your writing?