The Great Write Way
A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.
instant oatmeal:
What about this instead? Is it enough when put in the context of the essay, or do I need more to convey not only that I wonder, but that I don't take their happiness for granted in the way I used to?
It has been a year since Michael died, and New Year’s is approaching. Very soon, I will open my desk drawer for the familiar ritual of sorting and remembering and adding two-cent stamps; even the postage rates remind me how much time has passed since I thought I knew them. But this year as I look at each envelope, puffed full of predictions and crumpled twenty dollar bills and revelations I can only imagine, I will wonder in a way I never used to.
About who they were and who they became. About who filled their future with stories and who never wrote a word.
That's stupendous, Kristin. I like it. Gives it a sense of urgency, of being there. I like the postage rates bit.
Thanks P-C. I'm much happier with it. I'm still tweaking, obviously, but I think that's much closer to where I need to be.
Oh crap! Speaking of where I need to be, I have a hair appointment in fifteen minutes, and I'm still in my jammies!
Hair appointment? Don't you have school today?
Apart from that, now that you have read the essay, did you think the title worked? I know it was long (one of the alternatives I had considered was the one you mentioned, "Questions A Teacher Can't Answer"), but the models all seemed quit long to me, too. Also, I was hoping the irony would surface, but that might be too subtle. Your earlier post had said it would depend on the actual essay.
You know, I was so floored by the essay, I forgot. I think both ways work, now that I've read it.
What about this instead? Is it enough when put in the context of the essay, or do I need more to convey not only that I wonder, but that I don't take their happiness for granted in the way I used to?
I'm gonna put them side by side and answer as I think.
v 1:
In the years that have passed since that winter day, I have had to move beyond my guilt and my fear. I resisted the temptation to give up the assignment, to play it safe. Instead, new students have filled my memory and heart, and new letters have swollen the drawer—puffed full of predictions and crumpled twenty dollar bills and revelations I can only imagine. I have finally reclaimed much of the joy of January as I sort through the envelopes, remembering and hoping. But from then on, every year as I have sent out these letters to students I once almost knew, I have wondered.
v 2:
It has been a year since Michael died, and New Year’s is approaching. Very soon, I will open my desk drawer for the familiar ritual of sorting and remembering and adding two-cent stamps—even the postage rates remind me how much time has passed since I knew them. But this year as I look at each envelope, puffed full of predictions and crumpled twenty dollar bills and revelations I can only imagine, I will wonder in a way I never used to.
About who they were and who they became. About who filled their future with stories and who never wrote a word.
I think the second one is much better. Does it reflect all of your truth that you want to get across? That--your truth--is what is so effective (for me) where the whole essay (last paragraph aside) is concerned.
Thanks P-C. I'm much happier with it. I'm still tweaking, obviously, but I think that's much closer to where I need to be.
If you decide to tweak it, just remember to stay naked, and oddly I don't mean that as innuendo. That's what so powerful about the whole rest of the piece. It's naked because
- You admit his name was only vaguely familiar
- You tell us he was an underachiever, rather than beatifying him
- You show the lump in your throat you must have felt when you remember the letter, without ever telling
- You admit to the 'not my job' feeling, and the temptation to mail it, anonymously
It's a fantastically honest piece, and that's where and why it is important, and touching.
t delurk
Hello writers! I stumbled across this LJ community, and I thought people in here might find it handy. It's basically a forum for asking questions exactly like Susan's above.
t /delurk
I think this is pretty good so far, but also, if I write it this way, it might not have dramatic tension and stuff, i.e. Something Happens to Somebody. I had considered kind of a "Psych!" ending where the customer ends up being the woman the husband is doing, but that's kind of Rod Serling, huh? Maybe I should move it from just the one day...
Saturday Morning Cut
By Erika Jahneke
Cheryl’s life only makes sense when she cuts hair. Something doesn’t fit or is uneven, she can train it back or trim it, squirt it with water or product, something. You can’t exactly pull life back with a banana clip. Even the smell, which every associate stylist she’s ever had complains about, is one of her favorite things.Burned hair, perm solution, color with its sinus-opening ammonia...if she could snort it she would, because when she’s here, she makes things happen. She knows exactly how long a dye job lasts. Not like, say, a marriage. She picked up Pete’s wandering eye before he could admit to it himself...they’ve always been in a weird kind of synch. She thought it would save them, back when she was still scarred from coming from a house where bowls of potatoes get flung at the wall in fits of parental rage. but it’s hard to read your own husband’s mind and not find yourself.
She has trouble adjusting to change; sometimes cast changes to her favorite television series throw her off balance . But she manages...that’s what she does, manage, starting from age ten, scrubbing those damn cold, congealing spuds off the wall. Somebody had to do it, but sometimes she wonders when her name got to be Somebody.”That was then, this is now,” she reminds herself for the millionth time, sweeping the floor like she was cursing it.
It’s not hard to get stuck in the past in this salon...salon being a gross overstatement. This is an old-school beauty shop, not one of those sybaritic temples to Paul Mitchell promising coconut-scented hairgasms. This place is still half Cheryl’s mom’s fifties modish pink Formica. Cheryl swore she’d never work in here, but she forgot to tell herself what she would do instead, so here she is, gamely attempting to resurrect the beehive for what one of her few college classes would’ve called her aging “client base.” She sighs, just thinking of all the museum -quality styles she’s done in the last few years, since the neighborhood changed and the young, cute locals felt more comfortable in salones aestheticas,and her “ladies” weren’t nimble enough for white flight.She can see the sigh over her head in a balloon like in her kids’ comic books. She could do a lot of things; she goes to conventions, tries to keep up, admires short spiky styles, new colors. It’s all wasted. Her clients want the hair from when their mental clocks stopped, the last time they felt they understood, which around here taps out at about 1964 or something....the Goldwater years.”Like, wow, what a bummer, man. A total bad scene.” she says and laughs at herself. I could take the job at the mortuary, she thinks, the work’s the same...just ...quiet. The clients don’t tip, though.
When she first started here, she used to do her own hair, sometimes a platinum that made her feel famous, but lately anything new she brings home makes Pete say “Why do you have to act like some fucking *kid,* Cheryl?”
Because I’m not fucking dead, Pete. “I thought you’d like it.” Given that that girl you stare at is only about nineteen. She’s not that pretty, though. Her pores are huge and her makeup is too dark for her complexion. But she is a lot younger, probably doesn’t squint when she reads, if she reads.Cheryl wonders if she should refit the place, make it more modern, or if she did the wrong thing in fighting the city when they wanted to run the freeway through here. Mid afternoon is slow on weekends...the older ladies get started early and frantic moms looking to get kids haircuts prefer not to go downtown for them, in favor of a chain salon with a million chairs and toys in the waiting area.
So she is surprised to (continued...)
( continues...) find a woman she’s never seen before, leaning on crutches and looking in her window.” Hi,” Cheryl says, trying to look and not look both.
“ I thought you were closed.”
“Well, you know, it’s...practically.” She couldn’t defend this place to this woman.
“I guess I caught one break then,” the customer says, indicating the whole scene, her in her crutches and blue jeans(Blue jeans! On a physically challenged person...she’d never thought about it, although they are close enough in age that they both remember the jeans-as-uniform stage. The woman’s speech is precise enough that “caught a break” sounds funny, but Cheryl doesn’t know whether to laugh or not. She doesn’t want her customer to think she thinks needing help with walking is funny, because to Cheryl it is serious as mushroom clouds.
Her life would completely come apart if she couldn’t literally put one foot in front of the other. Her kids would become savages and her husband would do more than make lovesick faces at the Nancy Spungeon wanna-be next door.
“So, what are we doing today?” She makes an extra effort to be pleasant, because what could be sadder than dragging your broken body into this dump? Maybe that she would rather be here than at home...that’s probably close.
The customer, Lynda, has great hair, long, brown, and wavy. It’s really gorgeous, but its attractions weren’t obvious since Lynda came in with it tied back severely. Cheryl braces for a list of dos and don’ts like she gets from her time-warped patrons, many of whom pine for the days of aerosol hairspray and fingerwaves. Cheryl suspects that if there is a Hairdresser’s Hall of Fame she’ll be in it for being the last living practitioner to affect fingerwaves, like being the last buggy-whip salesman. She braces for the ruler(in case Cheryl forgets how long an inch is) or the photo of some star, either from now or Hollywood’s Golden Age, and wondering what she does with a water bottle that could ever justify such insane faith. She takes a deep breath and rearranges the stuff in her station as her new client makes her way to the chair and sits.”
I was thinking of a haircut, but I’m not sure what I want.”
“Okay...” This is as close as Cheryl gets to the therapeutic pause, even though she had vague thoughts of social work at twenty. She’s a veteran though, and knows this isn’t the all-clear it would sound like from the street. Plenty of women with hair this long and gorgeous freak out when it comes to cutting it. She needs to give it a minute, even though she’s got plans. She’s just itching to place newly-sharpened scissors on hair this nice...it’s almost like she would pay Lynda. Almost.
She has to wait, though, until... she watches Lynda looking at herself in the mirror and then “I’ll leave it up to you.” The customer has given the signal. It’s too easy, though. She doesn’t have years of trust to fall back on with this one, as in the handful of other such occasions.
“You sure? Because I have books...photos, you know. Like a hair lineup.” Cheryl tries to bypass the depressing image of herself blowing the dust off those same books, featuring shorthaired models trying to look exotic. And the even more depressing thought that that’s the only blowing she feels like doing these days.
“That’s okay...you’re the artist.” At first, Cheryl wants to laugh. She feels more like some guy hired to color in water on the Sistine Chapel. Then, she is touched by the trust. To go into a stylist she’s never met, and just on some gut...something(Not even a Woodstock Nation secret handshake...the Beatles or Dylan not having been suggested remotely) trust her to cut her incomparable hair...Lynda is a brave woman. You can’t let down a woman like that.(Cheryl is picky about her own cuts, on those occasions when she can restrain herself from going after her own hair with nail clippers, but what else can an artist do?)
“Ok...I’ll make you a Twentieth Century Fox.” Cheryl says, and is rewarded when her client smiles. Guess she wasn’t (continued...)
( continues...) the only one jealous she missed it when the Lizard King picked Phoenix to drop trou.
“God gets most of the credit though. You have good bones, under all that.” Bones....even though it’s the last thing she wants, Cheryl’s eyes are drawn to the crutches against the wall. She picks up the spray bottle instead of asking, and says “If you don’t have good bones, there are limits to what somebody like me can do for you.”
The silence gets a little long and Cheryl spritzes Lynda’s hair for a minute then says “I...didn’t mean anything. By the bone thing...I just mean you have a nice structure in your face.” Cheryl has to hand it to Lynda.
She handles that first snip like a champ, a real tough cookie, although she’s probably been through enough that Hair Trauma doesn’t even rate. No Jo March “My one beauty!” theatrics here, though she has known people to cry in her chair...mostly process victims, women who skipped a step doing their own color and feared facing life with orange, or green, hair.It was always good, bringing them back, even as she cursed their do it yourself spirit. Hair is a very personal thing.
“Yeah... I understand.”If she had gone to high school with Cheryl, she might’ve said “No sweat.” If they had been girlfriends and eavesdropped on “Soul Train” together, she might have said “Ain’t no thing.” Her attitude is more like the last, despite her careful diction.
Cheryl wonders what this woman did in high school, what it was like...with, whatever.” I had polio. One of the last cases in the state.” Lynda said, as if she could read the stylist’s mind. Maybe it should be the other way around, since Cheryl is messing around on Lynda’s head, but it isn’t.
Reeling from all the stuff.
OK, first off, Kristin, I'm with Cindy in wanting the final paragraph to be concise and unsentimental. And I've got no strong feelings about the title, which means that, in my head, it's probably fine. My friend Ellen Sussman - she wrote a very good weepy novel called On A Night Like This) - had a My Turn piece published. It was gut-wrenching, talking about when she was gang-raped, beaten and left to die, and how she deals with it in her writing and in talking to Sophy and Gillian about it (her daughters). This sounds like a perfect piece for them; I was thinking about submitting a piece myself, but not for awhile yet. Also, I couldn't find their submission guidelines anywhere. Can you link?
erika, this one's really coming together. Some minor stuff:
Something doesn’t fit or is uneven, she can train it back or trim it, squirt it with water or product, something.
This stopped me, because the phrasing sounds like a positive statement: Something doesn't fit. I know it's purely stylistic, but I really think you need to open that sentence with a conjunction or an adverb or something to qualify it: If something doesn't fit or When something doesn't fit. The first half of that sentence is a cause, the second half is a resulting action. Right now, it reads like two separate statements, so I got thrown.
This floored me:
It’s not hard to get stuck in the past in this salon...salon being a gross overstatement. This is an old-school beauty shop, not one of those sybaritic temples to Paul Mitchell promising coconut-scented hairgasms.
This:
She can see the sigh over her head in a balloon like in her kids’ comic books.
Needs a bit of restructuring. Maybe something like "She can see the sigh, in a balloon over her head, like something in one of her kids' comic books." Also, I'd break the paragraph after "books".
Because I’m not fucking dead, Pete.
I'd italicise that, since it's a response in her head, and it ought to be visually broken out from the narrative.
As much as I love "her husband would do more than make lovesick faces at the Nancy Spungeon wanna-be next door.", I'm not sure how many of your readers would know she was Sid Vicious' girlfriend.
I'd suggest a slight rephrase here, to make it flow: "Then, she is touched by the trust." Simply "She's touched by Lynda's trust", to take away the sense of a clock ticking.
And one more thing - when she's commenting on Lynda's good bones, and she says "under all that", I somehow saw Cousin It, face entirely obscured by hair.
(and since I hate the name Lynda, with that spelling, because that was Nicky's miserable life-ruining wife's real name, I feel all noble for not letting it get in my way...)
