The Yes Girl and Her First Love

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XI

A Working Title, a Slayer Concert, and Links Between Unlikely Events

When I worked on the first iteration of my manuscript, I wrote essays about my love life in a linear fashion because it didn’t dawn on me to do otherwise. I wasn’t explicitly connecting the stories, so it made the most sense not to write about my short marriage, then tell the story of my first love, then, say, sprinkle in my grief over never having children. I aimed for clarity; a linear structure seemed like the logical way to keep the reader from getting lost. I’d participated in enough writing workshops to know it’s not unusual for even the most discerning reader to become befuddled. When a nonfiction writer tells her story, she may forget strangers know nothing about her before they start reading. She can’t assume readers will understand her background, desires, and characters from her life unless she fills in the gaps—at strategic times: When did this happen? Where? Who is this person? Why is this situation important? How did we get here? A writer wants to complicate the story in as much as she wants the reader to turn pages to find out what happens next, but puzzling the reader for the sake of puzzling the reader is a surefire way to ensure she won’t finish the book.

I wanted the ideal reader I couldn’t envision yet to understand my trajectory from wholesome teenager who couldn’t determine if her first kiss was a real kiss to a forty-something single woman who can’t remember how many men she’s kissed. So, after writing an essay about high school, I wrote an essay about my first boyfriend, whom I began dating three weeks before graduation and stayed with until I was twenty-two. I called the essay “First Love, First Everything.”

Choosing a Working Title

Around the time I was working on this essay, I thought of the manuscript’s working title. It had only been a few years since my midthirties roommate bequeathed me a theme song and sang it often and unprompted while wandering through the house: “I’m just a girl who can’t say no!” He said he’d buy a Take-a-Number ticket dispenser to mount next to my bedroom door. My favorite word at the time was “yes.”

Many books have “girl” in the title—despite social media flak—but I couldn’t find any named Yes Girl. That’s it! I thought when I came up with it. My manuscript would be named Yes Girl for the next seven years, until mentor number three combed through my latest query letter and the first chapter of my revised memoir and said she read the title as Yes, Girrrlll, which had never occurred to me. She suggested I either rename the manuscript or add “The” to the title: The Yes Girl. Problem solved. She did believe, however, the title no longer matched the content unless I did another massive overhaul, so I renamed my memoir with the help of my oldest friend. (We’ll get to that later, along with how often I’ve brainstormed subtitles only to discard them.)

Two Stories a Decade Apart

The essay “First Love, First Everything” is fourteen pages, double-spaced, starting on page twelve of the collection, but in the current version of my memoir, boyfriend number one’s story is woven together with my two-year stretch as a high school English teacher, in which I compare “Jake’s” personality to my students, providing an opportunity to reflect on how young we were when Jake and I got together—like the students who now sat in front of me in my classroom ten years later. I make connections between experiences that aren’t readily obvious but nonetheless make sense, which makes the material nonlinear and more interesting. The chapter starts on page twenty-six, and I condense four years with Jake into half as many pages as the original piece.

The idea to connect the two sets of scenes a decade apart came to me while working with mentor number two three years after I wrote the essay. It’s a prime example of how valuable it can be to embrace the process and give it time. In hindsight, I would not have been content publishing the first version, despite a few funny moments I later removed. Reading it now, I view the cut material as needless, and much of it is not my story to tell in the first place. In fact, I wonder what the hell I was thinking explaining the parts of his story that have nothing to do with me; it’s not his book!

Chaperoning a Boy to a Metal Concert

In the essay, I describe our first date. On the way into school before 8:00 a.m. in spring 1991, when he put his arm around me and asked, “Wanna drive me to a Slayer concert?” I said, “Sure!” despite only liking the opening band on a four-band bill. Jake didn’t have a license yet. I had a car. He needed my wheels. That this is the origin of my complicated adult love life is apropos. It’s too spot-on to work in fiction.

I picked him up in my 1980 green Volvo in a pink shirt and white jacket, “instead of the customary black I’d been wearing since ninth grade. We went to Taco Bell in Costa Mesa and gorged on Taco Supremes before heading to the Pacific Amphitheatre. The line at the show wrapped around the fairgrounds. No one was wearing pink.”

I talk about waiting in line outside the venue during Alice in Chains’ entire set because concert security was tight. “I heard the faint sound of Layne Staley’s voice through the trees. I never had a chance to see him perform again before he died eleven years later. I wish we’d skipped Taco Bell.”

I talk about “long-haired metal heads with too many tattoos” and “inappropriate pat-downs” and “metal detectors.” I talk about the greasy-haired boy, no older than eleven, who bounced on his orange plastic seat behind us during the show, shaking his fists in the air, screaming, “I’m so stoned!” I write too much minutia about the beginning of that four-year relationship, despite sharing my uneasy, timid reaction to being in an environment that wasn’t my scene, revealing the personality of my eighteen-year-old self. The content begs to be pared. I eventually shrink the concert to two short paragraphs before moving on.

Avoiding Spoilers and Omitting What’s Not Mine to Tell

In both versions, I focus heavily on ditching my virginity because it was . . . tricky. Here’s the part of the series where avoiding spoilers becomes an issue. I’ve been considering how to explore the process of writing a memoir without giving it all away. Let’s say when I was eighteen, anatomical limitations prohibited certain activities. In the essay, I get sidetracked explaining said constraints by sharing a humorous conversation with a high school friend who didn’t have the same problem I did. This conversation isn’t essential for the reader to understand what happens next when my new boyfriend and I attempt to have sex for the first time.

In the memoir I extract three full pages from the middle because, although as a newbie book writer I am compelled to clarify how Jake came to be the teenager he came to be—and how that affected our bond—writing about his relationship with his mom, intimate information about his childhood, and the ways in which he manifested trauma has ethical implications waffling between fuzzy and blatant. In any case, it doesn’t matter what he experienced before he met me; it only matters what happened between us that’s within his control.

Multiple Breakups and No Regrets

In the essay, I write more than one breakup scene because we broke up more than one time, once on a landline when I was in Northern California on vacation with my mom for my twenty-first birthday. The only breakup that counts, though, is the definitive one, and after he’s no longer my boyfriend, the paragraph about what he did with his life next is unwarranted too. Like I said, it’s my book, not his. (Taking the scissors to the last couple paragraphs of an essay usually works out.)

In the memoir, I skip speculation about why “he transformed from worrying about my loyalty to being indifferent for no discernible reason” because, to this day, I have no idea why he did a “180-degree flip,” nor do I care anymore. I spent the summer when I was twenty at a community pool with my best friend, her boyfriend, and his friends. I write, “Where the hell was Jake?” He wasn’t there, but what’s more significant is having no regrets about dragging out a relationship that should have ended much earlier because a first love is impossible to let go of—until it isn’t. What’s important is how wildly in love I was and how innocent and pure it was. What’s real is how unbroken and hopeful I still was when we parted ways. What’s vital is how fortunate I am to have memories of young love because old love is different—much better in many ways—but different. I have regrets, but this isn’t one of them.

Slain Darlings

In the revision process, I axed a few details I still find amusing. Here they are without context:

1. When I was in the new-love stage of lying on the floor with a stomachache and the inability to think about anything else besides him, my seven-year-old sister asked my mom, “What’s wrong with Chelsey?”

2. “The way I was hearing it, she could hold her vagina up to her ear and hear the ocean.”

3. “Like 9½ Weeks, the whole world was our giant fridge of cut fruit.”

The First Essay of the First(ish) Draft of a Collection

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part X

When I sat down to write a book, writing an essay collection was a logical choice, and starting with romantic missteps in high school seemed like the best place to start.

In January 2014, with a few essays written and workshopped—and one of them published in an anthology—I finally realized I was capable of writing a nonfiction book about my tragic—and hilarious—love life, the topic I was drawn to almost exclusively. Up until then, however, I had no particular plan for these lengthy, nonchronological essays about dumb boys and my broken heart. At forty years old, it had been eighteen years since I had written in a journal, “I just want to be a writer,” and now I was able to say aloud, “I’m a writer,” without adding an undermining caveat. My assuredness wasn’t high, but it was improving because of people like Shawna Kenney, whom I wrote about in the last entry.

When my self-confidence was in the basement in 2008, after standing in a long line waiting for David Sedaris to sign When You Are Engulfed in Flames, I said, “I’m a writer too, but I’m not as good as you.”

“You’re probably as good a writer as I was when I was thirty-five,” he said when he found out how old I was. I doubted this was true, but it was thoughtful of him to say. He drew a turtle in my book while fifty-plus more people waited to talk to him.

While doodling, he asked if I was a Pisces.

“Gemini,” I said. “My sister is a Pisces.”

“Close enough,” he said.

Where to Start

When I finally sat down to write a book, it made sense I would write an essay collection because I had already been compiling standalone nonfiction pieces, and that was still my go-to genre when choosing other people’s books to read, like Sedaris’s.

I heard from published author acquaintances, “Essay collections are hard to sell,” and “the memoir market is saturated,” but someone was publishing them because I read them all the time! I wasn’t deterred. (I was naïve about publishing.)

But where to begin. When I thought about starting at the beginning-beginning—in my childhood—I thought about how stable and uneventful it was. A book about my first fifteen years would be boring! I didn’t have a tumultuous upbringing—quite the opposite. My parents loved me, took care of me, had a sister, in part, for me, and although we had nowhere near the money of so many others in our upscale geographic area, we only ever had “first-world problems.” I wasn’t abused; no one in my family was an alcoholic—although, some of us have a penchant for falling in love with alcoholics; my parents were still married and didn’t fight; my sister and I got along well; and I had a substantial group of supportive friends. I was fortunate and grateful. The only “real” problem I had was anxiety. (There’s a whole book about that I have yet to write.)

“Sweet Seventeen, Barely Been Kissed”

External conflicts arose when I reached an age when romance was a factor—or should have been—so I decided to start there, writing what would be the first chapter in my essay collection: “Sweet Seventeen, Barely Been Kissed.”

Here’s the beginning of that essay:

“When I was eighteen, I named my nonexistent children with my sixteen-year-old first boyfriend Jake. We would have one boy and one girl: James and Tiffany. I didn’t envision a white picket fence, but the kids were a given, and I thought we’d always be together, starting with the night before my eighteenth birthday, the first time I stuck my hand down his shorts. We were sitting on the lifeguard tower closest to the Newport Beach pier on a breezy June evening right before I graduated from high school.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It won’t bite.’

I was in love.”

(Note: I changed the names of the characters in my true stories from day one and have ever since, not including immediate family members.)

In that first essay, I describe previous opportunities for first kisses that never happened, sort of happened, and happened but maybe didn’t count. (I confirmed years later a major high school crush does count my first kiss with him, so that’s a plus. I promise I’ll explain.)

I start with an eighth-grade graduation party in which seemingly everyone from my class—except the one boy I wish was there—is crammed into my friend’s attic bedroom playing a kissing game:

“. . . when the deflating balloon they were batting around the room landed on me at the party, I said, ‘I’m not playing. I just want to watch.’ The response I got was, ‘You have to play if you’re going to watch. If not, you have to leave.’ It was a dilemma. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t want my first kiss to be part of a stupid party game. I also didn’t want to tell them I’d never kissed anyone before.

They arbitrarily demanded I kiss Mark, a boy who’d been in my class since kindergarten. I’d never been into him. He had a giant fuzzy mole on his cheek. Since then, I have kissed more questionable men, but I was picky at fourteen. Thankfully my cute brunette friend from second grade squealed, ‘I’ll do it!’ She threw herself at him. They slobbered on each other. I watched, relieved and disgusted, holding the balloon.

I wouldn’t have another opportunity to make out with anyone else through the better part of high school because I was clueless about male advances and an off-putting chickenshit who was attracted to petrified boys. It proved torturous to be loyal to so few crushes throughout my teen years.”

High Expectations

I wanted my first kiss to be special. I wanted it to mean something. I had built it up in my head since elementary school. I had been the go-between for my junior high school friends, relaying messages back and forth from hormonal girls to their would-be boyfriends, unwittingly getting them together, then watching as they made out next to their lockers, but I was never the protagonist in this narrative. I was the innocent sidekick. Maybe I’d been a hopeless romantic and too selective, or maybe I was scared and never noticed when boys liked me—nor understood why anyone would, for some ridiculous reason—oblivious to flirting until college, always attracted to the “safe” boys who wouldn’t make a move or the “wrong” dudes who ignored me. Maybe I came out of the womb destined to have trouble with romantic love; maybe it was learned; maybe both played a role, but the main reason I was drawn to writing a book about love (and lust) was because I was trying to understand why I found myself single at forty with no children, when that’s the opposite of what I’d always wanted, assuming I’d have what my parents have without being proactive, not understanding it was a choice and that I have agency.

Technically my first kiss was with a good friend when I was sixteen. It was a quick peck while sitting around with other friends on a regular Friday night watching TV or making cookies, only so they could say, “See, now you’ve kissed someone.”

That Time I Blew My First Real Kiss

From the essay:

“My second first kiss was with a boy named Chase. It’s iffy to count my second first kiss though. I was seventeen. I had never been on a real date before, probably because I’d been wearing my friend Dean’s letterman jacket to school because I was cold, thereby warding off any possible suitors. Later, at my ten-year reunion, a male classmate asked, ‘Didn’t you date Dean in high school?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We were just friends.’

‘Then why were you always wearing his letterman jacket?’

Oh fuck.

When Chase finally called after my junior year to ask me out, I said yes. He was a year younger and had recently gotten his license. I had been pining over him for almost two years, like I’d done with a different blond boy in junior high. We’d only acknowledged our mutual adolescent attraction once. When I was in tenth grade, we met and sat next to each other in biology. One day I lent him my Catching Up with Depeche Mode cassette tape. The ’80s version of texting, I inserted a note into the plastic cover that said, ‘I like you.’ It came back with a one-word response: ‘Likewise.’ Like was underlined. I had to check my dictionary to determine what ‘likewise’ meant. I was giddy, but neither of us mentioned it again the entire school year, until he wrote something vague in my yearbook: ‘I’m really sorry that I didn’t. I guess I wasn’t ready.’

Didn’t what exactly?

On our courageous night out to the movie theater more than a year later, I put my hair in a ponytail, threw on my black Doc Marten boots, a white Erasure T-shirt, and faded skinny jeans, and paced my driveway. I watched his white compact car roll down my street soon after a rare phone call. He stopped midway down the block, turned on his overhead light, stared into the rearview mirror, and rapidly combed his short blond hair. He didn’t know I was watching him primp. I chuckled. He wore jeans and a button-up shirt and smelled shower fresh.

We saw Presumed Innocent. I don’t remember the film because my mind was focused on the boy radiating heat two inches from me. I held my breath, waiting for him to make a move on my skinny ass. Chase, not Harrison Ford. Neither of them did.

Chase dropped me off at my house afterward, where his clutch went out. He was embarrassed. I said he could use our landline to call his mom. It was 1990 after all. Their phone conversation went something like this:

‘Hey, mom, we got back from the movies, but my car broke down.’

Pause.

‘No, it’s okay. I can get a ride home.’

Pause.

‘No, please, really, it’s okay. She can give me a ride home.’

Pause.

‘Geez, mom. It’s okay. Fine. Bye.’

He turned to me, exasperated.

‘She’s coming to pick me up.’

So much for my first real kiss, I thought. I’d been nervous about this moment all night. I was somewhat relieved but still bummed. There’s no way he’ll try to kiss me now, is there? I thought.

When his mom arrived, she politely waited in the car, but she left it running, adding to the anxiety of a quick, unromantic goodbye to accompany our transient, tense evening. We stood within her line of vision. I anticipated a hug. His face moved in. I wasn’t prepared and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I closed my eyes and pushed out my puckered lips. His tongue hit my closed mouth and then immediately disappeared. I opened my eyes. He was scurrying away.

‘Bye,’ he called over his shoulder. I’d blown it. I hadn’t opened my mouth. He had licked my face. His breath smelled good. I was in heaven.”

Where Is This Collection Headed?

The rest of the essay covers the one time I went to Chase’s house, and while we watched MTV, I lay sprawled on his bed, and he stood leaning against his desk chair—far away from me. Next I go to the prom with Dean, which is a disaster that ends our friendship. Then I detail how I met Jake in typing class, and why I was attracted to someone so cocky—the opposite of Chase. The essay is 3,155 words, but the meaning of the piece—aside from showing how inexperienced I was in high school—comes at the end:

“I don’t recognize that innocent girl anymore: a girl who sidestepped a first kiss in eighth grade, found comfort in a boy licking her face, and daydreamed about the one guy who would love her fully and make babies with her. She’s a wholesome version of me cloaked in a tiny burgundy velvet prom dress. She has yet to be rejected or make faulty decisions, and while this hopeful teenager has been obscured, she and I still have one desire in common: We both want lasting romantic love, even if the definition has changed. The picture of love no longer needs to include wedding bells and a baby. It calls for experienced partners who’ve already loved and lost before. It involves passion, friendship, and commonalities. Perhaps it even includes older children who already have a mother. The best part, however, is the dream still necessitates a first kiss.”

I still like that paragraph, and the essay showcases my voice and humor, but it’s missing depth. One paragraph at the end doesn’t quite cover how the essay should speak to the other ones yet to come. Where am I going with this collection? Why am I writing it? For whom am I writing it? Why is it universal?

Writing the Book I Had to Write, So I Could Start Over

In 2014, during a six-month period, I write an entire first draft—editing as I go because that’s how I roll—attempting to answer these and other questions in 79,000 words; trying to recall the long-ago details of my life; struggling to sift through what’s important and what’s not; and not understanding that much of what will appear in later drafts hasn’t even occurred yet. I tweak the book for the next year and a half and initially call it done.

If I had known how much longer it would take to write and revise an alternate version; write and revise a nonfiction book proposal; research and query agents; and submit to independent presses, I may have given up before I started, but thank goodness I didn’t. (And you shouldn’t either!)

Next: more from that first(ish) draft of my essay collection—the book I had to write so I could start over and write a different book later.

A Tribute to Mentors

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part IX

The missing workshop feedback, what I found in my parents’ garage, and my first true writing advisor.

Remember at the beginning of this series when I said I saved everything related to my writing for the last fifteen years? I lied. The only drawback of an in-person workshop is when the feedback is handwritten on hardcopy pages, the stack gets large, and when you move as often as I have, and you eventually publish the essay you revised in that 2013 UCLA Extension personal essay class—the “dead ex-student essay” from blog #8—you feed the pages into the shredder because you don’t think you need them anymore.

My Garage Stash

I hunted for the notes from my UCLA instructor and classmates in that ten-year-old workshop in my parents’ garage in the dusty plastic tubs with my childhood memorabilia, photo albums, and cases of CDs—yes, I saved those. Here’s what I found instead: two sets of small Sculpey clay hands and feet molded onto gnarled wire hangers my grandmother used to build unique, standing sculptures of Santa Claus at Christmastime. My cousin and I retrieved the creepy extremities—the last remnants of Granny’s unfinished art—hanging in “the cold room” in my grandparents’ empty house after the four-day estate sale before the house sold. They were the only items that didn’t sell. It’s no shock why.

Granny’s Unfinished Art

In my parents’ garage, I also found a stack of yellowing papers from the 1990s when I worked on my teaching credential at CSULB, where I wrote bad fiction about the same boyfriends who now appear in my memoir manuscript and one-page, single-spaced essays. The professor who assigned the “one-pagers” was a ruthless grader. Receiving a ten out of ten on one of his papers was next to impossible, and I did it more than once—total bragging rights! (Do you know hard it is to write an entire academic paper on one page? That’s where I learned to edit!) I didn’t think of him as a “mentor” because he was grouchy, arrogant, and uppity about who deserved the title of “professor.” (He did.) Students either loved him or hated him. I loved him, but he didn’t change my life.

An Accepted Essay That Was Never Published

I didn’t find the helpful feedback from my UCLA Extension workshop cohorts in the garage, but I found the essay I wrote about my instructor—and now close friend—on my laptop. It was accepted for publication in 2014 but was never published. (R.I.P. Literary Mothers.) So, with a few minor edits, I am posting that essay here since it never made it to its intended online destination.

The piece is an homage to mentors, the compassionate, miraculous people who lift you up when you don’t believe your writing is up to snuff; whose words encourage you to keep going; who are the reason you decide, “Yes, I can write a book”; who—when you’re nearly forty years old and walk into class with a heavy backpack and a heavy heart—accept your first essay for publication in an anthology; invite you on a California book tour to promote the anthology; summon you to at-home workshops, where you write most of the essays that become the first draft of your manuscript; and tell the backstage bouncer at a punk show you’re an “official photographer” so he’ll let you into the Descendents’ trailer to babysit Milo’s kids while she interviews the band. These are the people who change your life.

It’s been said often before because it’s true: Writers must find their people. I hope you find your version of Shawna Kenney.

Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco

Before getting to the meat of “how I wrote a memoir” in blog #10—when I actually start writing a book—here’s what I wrote about Shawna nine years ago:

“My Superstar”

March 2014

My 2013 New Year’s resolution was to start writing again. I was almost forty. I’d taken a number of online classes before, but I hadn’t written a word in two years. My latest workshop had deflated me. There I felt judged on my character more than my work. I was labeled based on one essay about one incident. The responses drove me into hiding.

I’m not good enough. This is as far as I’m going to get, I thought.

But when I’m not writing, I suffer.

So, after a two-year ego-healing break, I decided to try again. This time I wouldn’t hide behind the internet. I wanted face-to-face interaction with other writers.

I found Shawna Kenney’s UCLA Extension Writing the Personal Essay course on the university’s website. When I read her bio, I thought, “She’s my people.” It wasn’t the success of her memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix or the “award-winning” accolade in her title; nor was it the numerous literary publishing credits that reeled me in. It was the way she presented her approach to teaching. I knew she would be positive, practical, and nurturing.

I wasn’t wrong. In her ten-week class, I handed out the same essay that incited the negativity that caused me to quit writing in the first place. I wasn’t giving up on it. It’s a story of forbidden sex, desperation, and death. It is not a flattering portrait of me, but it’s true and doesn’t represent all that I am. I knew it was a story I needed to tell.

Dispersing twenty hardcopies, I was terrified. My hands shook. But Shawna had already created a safe space for her students to be themselves and put forth their best work without judgment. I had hope.

At this point, I didn’t call myself a “writer,” only “someone who writes—sometimes.” My first in-person workshop changed that. Shawna and my fellow writing students spent an hour discussing the merits of my work, providing constructive observations that would help me make the piece better. After that, I was eager to submit more material.

I anticipated Shawna’s feedback. She wrote, “You have such a natural writing voice,” and, “You make yourself vulnerable on the page.” She called my first workshop essay “a post-modern romantic tragedy.” Words like “publish this!” and “I could see something like this in The Believer” sustained me.

She asked the right questions: “What does this narrator want more than anything?” and she never questioned my ability to succeed in the future: “I look forward to reading another adventure in dating written in this voice!”

It’s Not Dead Fest 2015, San Bernadino

After previous writing classes, I’d have the best intentions; then I’d stop writing when I wasn’t held accountable because of a debilitating fear of failure. I’m still afraid, but I move through the fear as a result of the bravery I see in Shawna.

In 2013 and beyond, I continued to “ride the Shawna train,” I joked, and took two more of her ten-week workshops, as well as an online writing prompt class. In fall 2013 I submitted an essay to Shawna for a Seal Press anthology she was editing: Book Lovers. She accepted it. I never would have written the essay if she hadn’t asked me, “Are you going to submit something for my book?” It was a particularly difficult essay to write and the first one I published in print.

Because of Shawna’s insight and guidance, I learned to call myself a writer without wincing. I tell strangers I meet, “I’m writing an essay collection,” because I am. It’s an arduous task I always thought unattainable; now I have 105,000 new words because she gave me the freedom to write them.

She also arranged for public readings. I’ve now read in public six times, three times to promote my story in her anthology. I was afraid for people to read my work before I met her. Now I love to hear people’s reactions live when I’m in front of a microphone. I have a newfound confidence I couldn’t have imagined.

As a writer pre-Shawna, I was paralyzed by perfectionism. My editing background made it impossible for me to get words on a page, always worried about the finished product. I now follow her example and know I can fix the words as long as there are words to fix.

I’m “doing the work,” she says. “It’s just a draft,” she tells us.

Her carefree attitude is matched by her intelligence and her own ability to craft. “There’s a reason she’s the teacher,” one of my classmate’s said after reading Shawna’s anthology introduction.

Shawna published a piece in xoJane’s “Unpopular Opinion,” an essay she called very unpopular on Twitter. Of the hundreds of comments posted under the piece, many were downright cruel. Instead of discouraging me from publishing, this only gave me more resolve.

I’ll never please everyone, I thought. If Shawna can have the courage to take this verbal backlash, so can I.

She calls us her “supah stahhhhs” and her “lovelies.” At the end of a long weekend in San Francisco, after two terrific readings and Q&As, we hugged on the street and cried, and she said I was “the female Davy Rothbart.” I’ll take it.

I know now that if I don’t ever publish the book I’ve been writing in my head for forty-one years—the same one that’s now forming on paper—it will be because I choose not to, not because I can’t. Because of Shawna, I’m tackling my passion with “all [my] Chelsey vigor.” She’s my superstar, my editor, and friend. Today I thank her on the page.

Northern California Book Lovers Tour

Feedback as an Act of Compassion

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VIII

What’s the effect on a writer when an instructor’s critique goes beyond the page?

It’s 2011, and I’ve signed up for another online writing workshop with one of the same instructors I worked with at Gotham Writers Workshop. Only this time the platform is her own setup. For the past three years since I ended my last “real” relationship, I’ve racked up dubious experiences with men who aren’t right for me, and my self-esteem is plummeting, but these romantic blunders make for excellent storytelling—if told properly. As I make poor decision after poor decision in a loop of desperation, I stockpile material for personal essays, my future manuscript, and sessions with a therapist.

One such example is the five-and-a-half-page, single-spaced essay I submit for critique about a year-long off-and-on fling that isn’t quite over yet. I spend four paragraphs setting up the scenario with backstory before I get to how I met this dude who is, in his own words, “in no place to be anyone’s boyfriend right now.” (Pro tip: If someone says that to you, believe him.)

“Shortcut Origin Stories”

In the fifth paragraph, I set the scene for how we meet and describe his appearance, including the hat he’s wearing to cover his premature receding hairline. It’s my ex-boyfriend’s birthday party, and we’re in a sweaty, crowded Irish pub in Newport Beach. (Remember the guy from the Del Taco drive-through? Yeah, that ex-boyfriend.) My ex plays matchmaker and gives his childhood best bud’s little brother my phone number in June. We don’t get coffee until August.

None of this is important. Girl meets boy. They talk in a bar. There’s a spark. Girl’s ex-boyfriend gives boy her phone number. They make plans to get coffee two months later. So what? Many encounters start like this. What makes this one unique? (“Shortcut origin stories,” my 2017 book coach says.)

It gets slightly more interesting in September when the twenty-eight-year-old first kisses me in his mom’s driveway as we look at the stars through the constellation app on his phone, pointed up to the sky, spinning in circles. Cute, right? But again, so what?

Next I spend a few paragraphs recounting an exhausting trip to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios with the bouncy young man and his peppy haunted-house-enthusiast friends, where our age disparity is glaring. (In 2010, I’m thirty-seven.) I write, “The highlight of the night was when we sat on a tram wearing 3-D glasses watching dinosaurs. Resting.” At 2:00 a.m., when we say goodbye in the parking lot, I think this isn’t going to happen. (Second pro tip: If your gut tells you this, listen to it.)

The Beginning Is Not the Beginning

I get why I include the trip to Universal Studios: to show the gap in our energy levels. However, I can venture even further into the timeline of our courtship before I write the first scene. There’s no such thing as “the beginning.” There’s only the point where you decide a piece of writing should start, and I agree with the instructor of this workshop when she says the essay should commence toward the end of the second page: “The first time we had sex was two days after he buried his father. I was an escape.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

The setting of our “love nest” for the next few months is inside a plywood haunted house in his mom’s driveway—a building as temporary as our relationship, which I state explicitly.

The instructor’s feedback is cogent: “Take out any lines in which you explain things. You note the haunted house is a metaphor, and your intimacy is as makeshift as the structure. Trust your readers to understand this. Let the metaphor reveal itself.”

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

In the first and second drafts, I employ the “kitchen sink” method, including every detail I can conjure about what went down with this young man: helping him tear down the haunted house after Halloween; sitting on the couch watching TV with his mom’s dog wedged between us; helping him move to his own apartment; helping him clean his own apartment; attending concerts; visiting his sister’s hoarder house; Taco Tuesdays with his friends, who ask, “Are you guys together?” and not knowing how to respond; discussing the future or lack thereof without actually talking about what we’re doing. I slowly peal back the layers, learning about him piecemeal, sensing he’s hiding something. (Hint: He is.)

But why do I invest so much energy in this dead-end, flimsy partnership? When I write the first draft, I don’t have the answer.

In the nine-and-a-half-page, single-spaced revision, I attempt to address my teacher’s question: “What is this relationship about for you?”

I write, “I was scared of my age, scared of not finding reciprocated love before the ticking clock stopped. I was jealous of all the time he had to figure out his shit. I thought being with someone younger would keep me young for a little while longer.”

It goes deeper, but I’m too close to it to see it—and I don’t know all the facts yet. I don’t recognize his self-absorption; I don’t know he’s also dating men; I don’t realize I, too, am emotionally unavailable. It’s impossible to finish an essay if the events haven’t fully unfolded, and the writer has yet to grasp the import of what she’s trying to convey.

“You remain far too unexamined,” my instructor notes, and she’s not wrong.

I include all the conversations I remember, not only the significant ones—like the time we discuss how many children he wants, and he says four while I look at my watch, and he tells me, “You’re fucked.”

“Use dialogue to reveal character,” my teacher says, and she’s not wrong.

Whittle It Down

After workshopping this piece again a few years later once I have some distance, my fairy godmentor from UCLA Extension—whom you’ll meet in the next entry—says I can put the lengthy essay in the “done pile,” but the version I ultimately publish is fewer than eight-hundred words. I cut most of the scenes, whittling down the meaning of the relationship into its essentials, focusing on the plywood haunted house and an analysis of myself, rather than the minutia of a pseudo-boyfriend whom I eventually cut off abruptly. (Is it still “ghosting” if the person you ghost already dumped you?)

I call myself “the queen of involvement with kings of mixed messages” and write, “Deep down I knew this wasn’t love because love is easier.”

“Mock Intimacy in a Fake House” appears in the original essay collection I eventually compile. As I transform the book into a memoir, however, the superfluous essay falls away. The relevant takeaway is not the casual relationship I have between thirty-seven and thirty-eight but my state of mind when it ends: the realization I am no closer to finding a healthy adult partnership and will never have children if I continue to waste time on trivial matches.

Ninety-Nine Emails Don’t Make an Essay

If you rightfully believe a year-long pursuit of a man with narcissistic tendencies nine years my junior who is ambivalent about all women is an unproductive and demoralizing exercise in seeking intimacy while chipping away at one of the last baby-making years I have left, wait until you get a load of this. The second essay I submit for workshop in 2011 is about an even younger male with whom an unlikely connection leads to pointless pining and an unhealthy obsession. That this twenty-five-year-old, long-haired, larger-than-life bartender/roadie and self-diagnosed “failed musician” happens to be one of my former students is (somewhat) beside the point. The crux is I’m thirty-five in 2008 when I run into him at his restaurant when I am at my peak post-relationship-trauma hotness, having cried myself into a size four. I have not fully processed the years with my recent fiancé and former husband. I am free, emotionally beatdown, and eager for any dalliance without a future. Enter a depressed, vodka-swilling, wily sweetheart who is hellbent on self-destruction: my midthirties kryptonite.

In “It’s Still Me,” I curate an ample chunk of the ninety-nine emails he and I volley back and forth for the next few weeks after reconnecting—a flirty, humorous dance that leads to one memorable in-person get-together. In the original draft, I incorporate too many emails, unable to decide which ones to toss. In later versions, while I cut some, I don’t edit out enough before I get to the face-to-face main event—even in the published essay eventually nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In the original, the emails constitute almost six pages double-spaced. So what if the emails are amusing? What propels the action forward?

What My Instructor Gets Right

“This is probably my favorite of everything I’ve seen from you,” my instructor says, but “the emails are too much,” and she’s not wrong.

Her next comment is one I will hear again and again in future workshops from fellow writers and teachers alike: “I want much more about you.” Sure, I write scenes about our magical night together when he says, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” our subsequent correspondence via Facebook messenger, and the months in which I observe on social media from afar as the young man’s life descends into chaos. But what of it? What does this needless preoccupation say about my mental state, and why, again, do I devote so much emotional energy toward someone who contributes nothing in return?

The 2011 draft is fourteen double-spaced pages, and like “Mock Intimacy in a Fake House,” it encompasses the entirety of our brief liaison, including everything we wrote and said to each other, a tour of his tattoos on his friend’s couch, a trip to the grocery store for condoms, a postcoital conversation in what I later determined wasn’t even his bed, descriptions of the videos he posted to Facebook, and online conversations with his friends after he dies.

Both essays initially have similar problems: I do a decent job of writing scenes, but I don’t make decisions about what scenes are crucial, nor do I scrutinize the reasons for my actions and what my choices mean in the grand scheme.

Nothing takes the place of time to gain insight. An essay often takes years of revision before it achieves its proper weightiness, and in both cases, that’s what happens.

Feedback as a Personal Attack

Up to this point, I agree with the instructor’s comments. I am on board with her prudent advice, but her remarks and tone take an upsetting turn. After suggesting I read “The Fourth State of Matter” by Joanne Beard (cool!), she launches into a critique beyond what’s on the page:

“WHY? Why on earth did you get so hung up on someone ten years younger who went on the road all the time?”

The undeveloped—but true—motive for my behavior stipulated in the essay doesn’t sit well with her: something about people-pleasing and wanting to “fix” unavailable men—you know, garden-variety codependent shit.

“I don’t buy it,” she writes.

Say what?

She says she’s the “queen” of comparable conduct and lumps me into a generic category based on her own childhood experiences. (I read her memoir; our backgrounds are entirely different.) She calls me “honey” in a condescending manner and says I “avoid real intimacy,” which is fair, but then she says, “He didn’t care about you.” Even if that’s accurate, why is it necessary to state it while evaluating a person’s writing? What effect does that have on a vulnerable writer who already feels enough shame and lack of self-confidence as it is?

She scrutinizes my character, rather than my work, ending with this: “I hope you’re not feeling too psychoanalyzed, but this is what happens in memoir writing!”

Is it?

I Quit

My reaction to being the target of a borderline tirade from the person I trust with an extremely personal story is defensiveness, anger, and despair. Not only am I not eager to revise the essay, I quit altogether. I don’t write anything for the next two years.

When I recently located the email with the instructor’s twelve-year-old feedback—after having forgiven her long ago—I wonder if I overreacted. Maybe her comments weren’t as harsh as I remember. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the brutal truth. Maybe I was too sensitive. Then I read them again.

Even today, her email is jarring.

Editing as an Act of Empathy

As a developmental editor of other writers’ memoir manuscripts now, I am cognizant of providing constructive feedback while considering the real, fragile human on the other side of the computer screen. An editor’s job isn’t to analyze a person’s choices outside of the story. It’s a judgment-free zone. Editing is an act of empathy. There are plenty of ways to kindly nudge a writer toward self-discovery. Ask pertinent questions, for instance. Contemptuous condemnations aren’t warranted.

Fortunately, in 2013, when I’m pushing forty, I seek a gentle mentor who nurtures me like a delicate plant in need of watering. In her UCLA Extension personal essay class on campus, I hand out “It’s Still Me” to twenty new strangers, my hands shaking, terrified of judgment, only to be met with support, constructive criticism about my writing, and encouragement to revise, publish, and reimagine the piece for my future memoir. Thankfully, the essay that temporarily ends my writing career is the catalyst for my pursuit to complete an entire book.

Crossroads and Structure: A Dreadful Haircut, a Trip to the Mall, and a Life-Changing Decision

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VII

Write it now. Organize it later.

Whenever anyone asks me, “When did you start writing your book?” I always cite January 2014. But that’s only when I started writing my manuscript in earnest—an essay collection at the time. If the short pieces I wrote for a Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir II class in late 2008 are any indication, I really started writing my book then; I just didn’t realize I was writing a book. Portions of two assignments in particular provided the basis for one of the chapters that would end up in my memoir manuscript—organized differently, written differently, and in nowhere near their current form. Yet, writing them was an integral precursor to writing a lengthier, better connected, more sophisticated work.

One of the pieces starts with a scene I tried so hard to incorporate beyond what I turned into my workshop instructor. It was a turning point. However, I relegated it to the “reject” file because it functions in exactly the same way as another scene that did end up in the manuscript.

The Haircut from Hell

In spring 2008, while planning my second wedding, I had an appointment with my fifth hairdresser in a year-and-a-half near Atlanta. My longtime stylist was in Orange County, California, and I couldn’t seem to find one in Georgia who didn’t screw up my hair while charging exorbitant rates. Highlights were either nonexistent within a few weeks, or my hair was bleached until it was canary yellow. There was no in-between. The stylist I visited while planning my wedding was my first repeat appointment since I’d moved there. She’d done a passable job on my hair the first time. The second time, however, she was having an off day, and that’s being kind.

“Are you growing your hair out for the wedding?” she asked.

“Yes. I just need a trim,” I said.

She stood between me and the mirror cutting layers, which she later called “blending.” Only, these weren’t “layers,” and I didn’t need them because my hair is extremely thin. When she was finished, and I saw myself in the mirror, I was shocked into silence. She had completely hacked off one side of my hair.

“This debacle cost me my resolve to make Georgia my home.”

I called my fiancé to pick me up and said, “I’m done.” I wasn’t only done with my appointment; I was done in a much more final way. I cried all the way home while he tried to reassure me it wasn’t “that bad.” Only, it was worse than I initially thought.

“When I got home and brushed it out, it was as uneven as if she’d cut it with pruning shears. I wasn’t a shrub in the backyard. I was a person supposed to be married in eight weeks.”

It took a year for my hair to grow out again. While this was a devastating, defining moment, it wasn’t necessary to include it in the book because I wrote about another crucial moment when I was considering whether or not to call off my wedding and move back to California. I didn’t need two. What came next in the disjointed 2008 piece, though, did make it into the book in an adjusted form.

Finding the Structure

One of the main differences between that early essay and what appears in my memoir now is the way in which the Georgia story is organized. In my earlier work, only months after the incident occurred, I was still trying to figure out what the story was. I wrote the salon scene and then a wedding planning scene that occurred before the inept stylist chopped off my hair. The order doesn’t make sense. I wrote them out of chronological order because I didn’t consciously choose what should come first; I wrote what came next in my brain as I was putting words on the page.

Portions of my current manuscript are nonchronological, but I made organizational decisions with forethought and a purpose after multiple drafts—with help from an astute editor who advised, in some cases, figuring out what elements don’t go together and deciding why they do.

In the manuscript, the wedding planning follows the proposal, and the revelatory alternative to the salon catastrophe follows the wedding planning—because that’s the order in which they transpired. There is no need to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

In the fifteen-year-old version, after an argument resulted in my fiancé telling me to “do what you want. It’s your wedding,” I include a paragraph about the first time I visited him “when we were merely clandestine pen pals,” which is a head-scratcher. I don’t incorporate any noticeable transition or reasonable page break between beats that would signify why they appear in that order.

I return to wedding planning after a flashback consisting of a list of cities and romantic encounters we had during our honeymoon phase when we were in a long-distance relationship, both of which make it into the manuscript, but, again, in a more logical sequence and with new surrounding material that delves deeper into what was really going on—the “what does this all mean?” part.

A Trip to the Mall with My Would-Be Stepdaughter

The second, related piece from my Memoir II workshop details a trip to the mall with my fiancé’s seven-year-old daughter, where I bought her hot chocolate, a giant pretzel, and a furry yellow stuffed duck because I felt guilty I was about to leave her, which she didn’t know yet.

I was reminded of how much I was not her mom, however, when she didn’t thank me for the treats, instead asking me to buy her Crocs too. I reminded her, “Your mom buys your shoes, sweetie.” Then she begged while I kept saying no.

After likening myself to a “hip aunt you only see on holidays,” I transition into a description of the moms who perpetually sit in the driveway across the street from my fiancé’s house while their children stumble around in the grass, toys strewn about: “a suburban housewife nightmare.”

I return to the mall scene before we inform the children I’m leaving: another odd organizational tactic. Dropping the news on my fiancé’s ten-year-old son crushes him “like a tin can.” Then we’re back in the mall, where I tell his sister we have to leave so we can make it to his Little League game. The scenes are all over the place.

Facing the Big Questions

Here’s what’s missing from that first attempt at writing the story, aside from a conscientious structure: What do I really want? Approaching thirty-five, is being a stepmom in Georgia enough? Do I want to be part of the “housewife nightmare” across the street (read: Am I jealous?), or is being only a “real” mom not enough either? If I leave this readymade family, is it worth it if I never have another family of my own again?

These are questions I grapple with in the manuscript, in addition to fleshing out and tightening the scenes from 2008—in a much more cogent arrangement. If I hadn’t jotted the details of my experiences as a pseudo-Southern stepmom in the same year in which they occurred, however, I would not have remembered the specifics when, in 2014, I sat down to “write a book.”

Write the material while still emotionally invested, and edit it when there’s temporal and sentimental distance—when the gut-level impact wanes.

One Last Online Writing Workshop Before I Quit

After three creative writing workshops—one through UCI Extension and two through Gotham Writers Workshop—I noodled with a few essays on my own, including one I worked on for seven years that I never quite figured out, nor tried to publish. Not having instructor-imposed deadlines proved to be a detriment to my writing in my late thirties, as I did not accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to when no one was awaiting pages. A stifling fear of failure hindered my progress—hooray, anxiety!—which is why, in spring 2011, I signed up for another online memoir writing workshop, following my previous instructor to her new venture with her then husband. The feedback I received on two long essays I wrote during that class would send me into a tailspin that led to a two-year break from writing anything. That’s next time.

Learning to Expand Before Learning to Cut

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VI

I doubled the length of an early workshop piece before chiseling it for my manuscript.

For the first assignment in my Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir I class in 2008, I wrote about colliding with a new romantic prospect in Las Vegas—a destination I neither chose nor particularly like. Our chance meeting was significant and instantaneous at the worst possible time in the worst possible place under the worst possible circumstances. My first—but nowhere near my last—attempt at writing this story filled just over one page single-spaced and skipped key information that would have provided the reader with the full picture. I chose to revise the assignment to turn in for week ten. The revision was more than twice as long and filled in major gaps, but it didn’t provide pertinent elements that now appear in my memoir manuscript across multiple chapters. What happened in Vegas only makes up 762 carefully whittled words in my memoir. I couldn’t have written the final version without these first two pieces.

Deliver on That Great First Line

“I fell in love with a stranger three months before my wedding,” I start. The instructor responded, “There’s no one alive who could read that first sentence and not want to keep reading.” The piece as-is, however, doesn’t deliver.

The second paragraph describes the setting and my physical state when I stumble into a post-tradeshow meet-and-greet—the place where small talk with industry colleagues over drinks ensues when one’s feet throb and brain no longer works after standing behind a registration desk all day. I mention my blue button-up shirt and beige work pants. I carry a backpack because my purse handle broke. “I needed a shower, a thorough teeth brushing, shoes with proper soles, and hairspray.”

I understand why I depict my disheveled state: I was in no shape to experience that zing of initial magnetism with a new person. However, like Maria Semple would explain years later during a Hugo House lecture series, I should start the scene as far into the story as possible, dropping the reader into the action already in progress. A description of my outfit and my exhaustion isn’t a solid hook.

What Happens in Vegas

In the next paragraph, I introduce my “impeccably dressed future,” suggesting there is a future with this attractive stranger, giving away too much too soon. The reader wants to begin the journey with the author, gaining knowledge of important milestones as they occur in real time, not necessarily from the all-knowing narrator’s perspective who has the advantage of hindsight. Make the reader wonder what will happen next: “This nonsense in Vegas couldn’t possibly work out. Could it?”

The conversation in a conference room that could have been in any convention center in any state in any country centers around another colleague congratulating me on my upcoming nuptials. I note the wedding plans are a “brakeless train,” complete with an accent color for my curated gift registry and an “ivory gown that hung patiently in the closet.”

The alluring man says, “I got married the first time when I was twenty,” as I twist my confining engagement ring in circles. I include internal dialogue—he’s tall and his voice is deep—and later share a conversation we had about his children as we sat on a velvet couch at a rooftop dance club. I end the piece abruptly, repeating the mantra I’m getting married. I’m getting married. I’m getting married, leaving the reader to speculate about the outcome of this auspicious meeting.

Don’t write a first sentence like that one, then leave the reader hanging.

What Happens in Vegas Expanded

Based on the instructor’s feedback, I write more about Vegas. Back on the couch in the VIP section of that rooftop dance club, my new romantic interest shares details about his ex-wife that fall squarely in the not my story to tell category. In my future manuscript, I carefully determine what to leave in and what to nix. At this early stage, though, I don’t worry about it—and rightly so. No one reads what isn’t published. Ultimately, however, the story isn’t about his ex-wife, so scrap the minutiae about someone else’s former marriage.

In the week-ten revision of my workshop piece, I write, “I couldn’t remember the last time I felt this connected to someone.” Then I toss the reader out of the Vegas club: “Scratch that. I remembered exactly. It was eight years prior. I never thought I’d find this again.” The guy from eight years ago isn’t relevant here. Pulling the reader out of a crucial scene without a seamless transition is irksome. Put the reader back onto that swanky couch in the dark club, where the music thumps, and I get myself deeper into trouble.

A group of us return to the same club the last night of the trade show, where inappropriate conversation with my new friend gets more intense. After a few drinks, he asks me to kiss him. We stand outside on the roof overlooking the Vegas Strip. At first, I balk but relent after determining our colleagues aren’t paying attention.

Reading this version now, I am struck by something he suggests. After a brief, magical kiss, he says, “Do you know what you need before you get married?” I cut that question and the jarring statement that came after it while I was working on my manuscript. Then I revised and revised and revised the story again. Eventually, I forgot the startling dialogue I removed altogether. I not only rewrote the story on the page but in my consciousness—like parts of it never happened.

What Happens in Vegas Expunged

In the decade to come, I cut an elevator scene. I cut him following me to my hotel room where I shut the door on him. I cut a mutual colleague asking, “What’s wrong?” on the rooftop after I ran to the bathroom on the verge of tears and returned to the group, thinking, “I’m marrying the wrong person.” I cut “I loved this man I barely knew” because, in hindsight, “love” was a stretch. (I didn’t know him!) I cut the apologetic phone call I received on Monday at work. I removed the email I sent him to apologize for cutting our phone conversation short because my coworker was in the room, and I deleted this: “From then on, the correspondence never stopped.”

But here, for this class, I share everything I remember about Vegas while it’s fresh in my memory and emotions are still raw. To be able to carve, sculpt, and smooth a giant lump of clay, the giant lump of clay must exist in the first place. Get it all down first; excise it later.

It would take another decade, when I was no longer attached to the story, to properly weave all of it together with the one involving my fiancé—when I had the benefit of perspective, more experience, and awareness about why I chose to overlap those two relationships. These intertwined stories no longer feel like my own, as if they happened to someone else. In some ways, they did because I am no longer the same person I was eighteen years ago.

Extensive editing may be the reason so many people wonder about the “therapeutic” nature of writing. While writing is not therapy, the act of creating art out of pain is a restorative exercise if performed with the intent and endurance that comes with a desire to improve one’s craft. There are no shortcuts. There is only time, practice, and the altered person one becomes.

What the Teacher Said

When I submitted the expanded revision of my Vegas story, the instructor wrote, “This revision is GREAT. It’s the same material, but it feels like now you have so much more control of it. Your voice is recognizably the same one from week one, but now you’re the boss of it. You’re funny, and sometimes you’re even cute, but it’s not the main point. You get to things much more quickly. There’s nothing here that’s extraneous. Everything is doing a job. I can’t think of the last time I got to see in week ten a revision version of a piece I saw in week one, and it’s great to see such clear evidence of progress. You should be really pleased with yourself: the work you’ve done, the elements of the course, they’re utterly visible . . . you’re now able to strip down to the real stuff, the good stuff, the necessary stuff. And that’s huge!”

Choosing Chapter One

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part V

What Does a Writer Do When Two Talented Authors Provide Contrasting Feedback?

In spring 2008, I ended an engagement a month before my second wedding and flew home to California from Georgia with the tags still on my bridal dress. I was single, despondent, relieved, and ready to write again. At thirty-five, I was about to make a slew of dubious decisions that would become material for my future memoir manuscript, but I had plenty to write about already when I signed up for a Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir I class.

During the second week of that online workshop, I wrote a one-and-a-half-page single-spaced draft of a somewhat sketchy incident that occurred on New Year’s Eve when I was eleven when three boys talked me into playing what they coined Strip Trivial Pursuit. I would again write this same story as a seven-and-a-half-page double-spaced first chapter for my memoir in 2021. I rewrote it after receiving feedback from an author who is recognized as an expert on traditional publishing. At the beginning of 2021, I quit querying agents after ninety-six of them either passed or didn’t respond. (One said “maybe” until her father died.) I hired the author to read my first chapter and query letter to provide feedback about why I wasn’t gaining traction. The first chapter she read was about a much sketchier night in 2000 when I crashed a wedding and didn’t return home until 11:00 a.m. the next day. In 2017, a different well-respected, oft-published author suggested that chapter should go first.

Author Two’s Reaction

In 2021, I made the wedding crasher story chapter two because Author Two felt “adrift” after reading it.

“As a reader, we feel we are being told a funny but kind of disturbing story, but we don’t understand why,” she wrote. “Your memoir needs to be framed in some way, and in that framing, the reader understands how they are supposed to hear your story.

“If your memoir is framed as a single-girl survival story, then we understand we are witnessing someone who has not yet established boundaries around and for her sexuality. She’s still exploring it, but we know—because the back of the book (or query letter) tells us so—she [will] reach a point where she changes her behavior and starts living her life for herself first.”

I wrote in the margin, “Yes! This!” because that’s what my memoir tries to do.

She felt “uncomfortable while reading the material.” She wondered, “I’m not sure what to do with the information I’m being given—SOS!” She said “gatekeepers (editors and agents)” may have the same reaction.

She provided two examples that worked well, one a memoir and one a novel: “Both of these books introduce us to female narrators who are a hot, hot mess, but we are meeting them on the page because the back of the book has promised they are going to get out of the hot mess by doing X for Y.”

But What If Making the Reader Uncomfortable Is the Point?

In 2017, after reading the essay collection I would soon convert into a memoir under his guidance, Author One said this about the main character from the night I crashed that wedding—who, at the time, appeared on page seventy-six: “All right, Motherfucker. You’re going to start my book.

“Make readers curious about the next chapter. It should be fucking serrated,” he said.

In contrast to what Author Two would later say, Author One advised, “Play up moral ambiguity. Use the reader’s curiosity against her. Don’t offer easy answers. Push up the juicy morsel to the front without context. Why is Chelsey putting herself in this situation?”

The astute reader should trust the author will explain everything in due time.

“At weddings, everyone is happy,” he said. “Yet, I have never been to a wedding where someone doesn’t do something shameful. Make readers curious about chapter two.”

Tearing apart chronological, standalone pieces, reorganizing them, ditching some, cutting others, adding new material, and sewing everything back together in nonchronological order was exhilarating. An avid reader of his books, I trusted his advice and did the best I could to adhere to it. If he thought the night I crashed a wedding should go first, it should go first.

And yet . . .

The Old Version of a New Chapter

In 2008, I got right to the point in the first sentence of the New Year’s Eve story: “My lifelong trouble with boys started when I reluctantly agreed to play Strip Trivial Pursuit with three of them when I was eleven . . .”

On December 31, 1984, our parents left us alone while they went to a party down the street with my infant sister because they trusted us. I knew two of the three boys well—and still do; the older one was thirteen. We had never given them any reason to believe we’d get in trouble while they were gone. The boys were resolved to change that.

In the early version, much like with the drive-through debacle, I provide descriptive details and show what happened, but I do not offer insight about what this all means from the vantage point of a mature adult who feels protective of her younger self. I do, however, notice my voice taking shape, as the embarrassing similes and clunky adjectives of the prior pieces recede—sometimes.

That night, the younger brother—my same age—thought it was a swell plan to unscrew Christmas lights from their neighbors’ homes. In the 2008 version, I participate: “He amassed them, and we slung them into the street, enjoying the crisp popping sound as they hit the pavement. The quiet suburban road was swiftly blanketed in crunchy holiday glass . . .”

In the 2021 version, I am an innocent, dismayed bystander: “I watched from a vigilant distance as he littered red and green glass across the asphalt, gleeful over the satisfying sonic pop when the bulbs hit the ground.”

Did I participate, or did I watch? I no longer remember which version is correct, which makes me wonder how much of my memoir is flawed.

We do the best we can with what our brains tell us is the truth.

Next, the three boys and I traipsed through a rushing creek bed to a different neighborhood with armloads of toilet paper to decorate cars. I briefly mention the new black leather flats I ruined walking through dirty water, exaggerating about my how “my mother would kill me” for wrecking my pristine shoes.

Back at the boys’ house, they busted out the Trivial Pursuit board game and announced each time a player missed a question, an item of clothing would come off. I was a skinny child who hadn’t hit puberty yet, wearing only jeans, underwear, and a flimsy blouse. I remember saying, “I’m eleven! Why would you want to see me naked anyway?” They pressured me into playing because I was the only girl in the room and kindly grabbed one of their parent’s windbreakers from the closet, which I threw on and zipped up. I tried to think of ways to get out of playing because I had zero plans to take off my clothes. When I didn’t know the answer to the first trivia question, I unzipped the jacket, and halfway down it got stuck. I had my out. Once the youngest boy was running around the house in his underwear, the game ended.

That’s when they started drinking. “Wanna do shots?” one of them asked.

I politely declined and “planted myself in the corner of the pillow-top couch and turned on MTV. I stayed put until my parents returned after midnight . . .

“It made me nervous” to watch the boys get intoxicated. “I was homesick and sleepy. When the boys beat pots and pans to ring in 1985, I was silent, a meek child not ready for the mysterious world of grownup parties.”

In the early version, that’s where the story ends.

A Revision Thirteen Years Later

On the advice of Author Two, I wrote two new paragraphs to start my manuscript to provide the framework for how the reader should approach my memoir:

“When I was a child, I not only envisioned being a doting mom and wife in a similar enviable family to the one I grew up in; I expected it to drop out of the clouds and smack me in the face—in the right order, at the right time, in the right place . . .” I describe myself as a “compliant, rule-following child” who “worried [herself] sick over grades . . .” I write, “I never wanted to disappoint anyone then, much like I never wanted to inconvenience men in the future,” and “I was a fierce people pleaser,” but I also had firmer limits as a child than as a young adult, which is why I held my ground when I felt uneasy on New Year’s Eve.

The stakes ratchet up in one paragraph from early in the evening playing Crossbows and Catapults on the tile in the entryway of the house, to stealing Christmas lights, to toilet-papering cars and ruining my shoes in the murky creek bed. I attach significance to the dirty, wet shoes in the next paragraph to provide context:

“I feared my parents’ frustration, despite how few times they’d ever been angry with me . . .” These shoes were one of my first pairs of “adult” shoes. I recall the “fluorescent pink ‘clown shoes’” kids at school made fun of, adding, “My giant feet didn’t match the rest of my stick figure body. . .”

When the boys set up the Trivial Pursuit game on the kitchen table, my writing slows down, and I expand on the original:

“I was more annoyed than angry in a situation that could have been very scary under different circumstances with less cool people.” As the zipper got stuck on the fabric, “. . . I envisioned my parents cutting me out of the jacket when they returned after midnight and taking money out of my allowance to pay for a replacement. I was flooded with relief while trying to extract myself from the garment . . . I would now live in this magical, protective windbreaker safe from the whims of wild boys forever . . .”

When the boys climb the cabinets in the kitchen to pull alcohol out of the cupboards, I retreat to the couch to make “myself so small and quiet as to almost be invisible—something I’d do as a theoretical gesture over and over again in the coming decades, so as not to make waves and take up space with my overwhelming, intense emotions.”

I explain my parents will return to scoop me safely into the car and take me home to our sanctuary, the house “we’d lived in since 1978, the same house I’m sitting in now writing this in 2021.”

I spend more than a page using a repetitive tactic to provide morsels of what’s to come in the rest of the memoir: “Don’t tell that eleven-year-old girl . . .” all the traumatizing experiences she will live through. “Don’t tell her love isn’t always enough. Don’t tell her . . .” this. “Don’t tell her . . .” that. Instead, “Tell her . . .” this. “Tell her . . .” that. I give advice to my younger self I wish I’d known before making so many mistakes. That eleven-year-old girl was in some ways stronger than the thirtysomething woman I would become. I had an easier time saying “no” then than I did between eighteen and forty.

While this section is perceptive, I give too much away too soon—something Author One would have advised against, which jives with the comments of an independent publisher in a September 2022 rejection email.

So, Which Author Was Right?

They both were. Every reader brings unique experiences, tastes, and preferences to a book. That’s why not everyone is a writer’s ideal reader, and once a book is in the world, the reader is as much a part of the meaning of the text as the author.

How did I decide which chapter should go first?

The Tiebreaker

The project director for a coveted independent press recently sent me a personalized rejection when the judge for their nonfiction book contest didn’t choose my manuscript. I was elated. Personalized feedback in a rejection? From the publisher himself? That never happens!

Here’s an excerpt of what he said:

“Your writing is wonderful here. It's fun, shocking, the life is interesting, the development strong. Our concern was the opening, which failed to grab the reader. It was too verbose, and it wasn't a good example of what is, in the rest of the book, swift and clean narration. Bring that same technique that's in the rest of the book up front and strong.”

He liked my manuscript—all except for the New Year’s Eve chapter, written as an afterthought based on Author Two’s fresh take.

So, I cut it. The tale of an eleven-year-old girl who worms her way out of drinking and shedding her clothes landed in the “reject” folder on my hard drive, and the twenty-seven-year-old woman who crashed a wedding and instigated scandalous behavior at an afterparty returned to its rightful place as the first chapter, as Author One suggested.

The reader will receive the answers she craves, but not all at once from the outset.

Drive-Through Debacle with Lucky Thirteen

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part IV

An Anecdote, Not an Essay

Before we say goodbye to my creative writing workshop in 2007, let’s discuss one more piece from the ten I wrote during the quarter. In Part III, we looked at a story involving my relationship with my college boyfriend. For the final lesson, I wrote about the man I would date immediately after him while I was still grieving lost love—a rebound that would last longer than the relationship from which I was rebounding. Lesson 10 is called “Drive-Through Debacle.” With my third boyfriend, I had many debacles from which to choose between 1997 and 1999. This one involves an undignified late-night, post-dance-club Del Taco run.

I begin the short essay with a slew of examples to explain why my third boyfriend’s nickname was Lucky Thirteen before setting the scene outside the fast-food joint: He had broken his nose seven times; he had a titanium cheekbone as a result of a jet ski accident; he once puked across the dashboard of my car when he mixed booze with antibiotics; he skewered both of his truck’s front tires in the desert driving over a pile of firewood full of nails; he totaled that same Ford F-150 driving to Big Bear Mountain on black ice when he failed to put on chains while I was in the passenger seat.

When the Tone Doesn't Match the Content

The tone of this piece is comedic and lighthearted, despite the material suggesting a more troubling set of circumstances. I write:

“Akin to a twisted game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, in my twenties I had the inexplicable habit of walking into a crowded room, spinning in circles blindly with a pointed finger, halting on the most overtly maniacal guy in the room and saying, ‘There’s my next boyfriend!’”

This is an exaggeration, as I could still count on one hand how many boys I’d dated up until then, and my writing is somewhat flippant, but I see certain improvements in this piece compared to the first ones I wrote at the beginning of the quarter. This incident has a beginning, middle, and end, while earlier pieces were less structured and cohesive.

Rookie Writing Mistakes

In the next paragraph, I call myself the “DD,” not the “designated driver” but the “designated dumbass.” During the night in question, twenty-three-year-old Lucky Thirteen had had too much to drink, and the minimal alcohol I had consumed had worn off—a consistent theme in my dating life. All this to say I was driving. Then I make two rookie writing mistakes: I pull the reader out of the story to write a paragraph suggesting cops looking to fill DUI quotas should park at the outlet of the Del Taco drive-through late on Saturday nights because they could hand them out like “Halloween candy.” Funny but unnecessary. Next I give away the ending of the story, thus killing the buildup to the shocking conflict and scant resolution I have yet to get into:

“In this case, however, it wasn’t a DUI they’d be after: It was public nudity and crude acts against impressionable minors.”

The reader’s interest may be piqued, but now she knows exactly where this is headed—and way too soon. Plus, the carefree, funny tone of the essay suddenly seems inappropriate in relation to the content.

Here’s what happened after I ordered our burritos before we made it to the window to pick them up: The car behind us was teeming with teenagers, most of whom were probably too young to drive. One of them ran to the front of my blue Acura Integra, pulled his shorts halfway down his butt, and hopped onto the hood. He smacked his behind three times, then pulled his pants up and ran back to his friend’s car. Their windows were rolled down, so I could hear them screaming and laughing. It reminded me of the innocent nights I had in high school renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster. His antics were harmless. I laughed until my boyfriend said, “Watch this!”

When I illustrate the teenage boy and his prank, I do what I did best at thirty-four: I over-describe and lob contrived similes. The boy “skipped . . . like a spry, devious Robin Goodfellow” and slapped his “Johnson & Johnson, powder-fresh Gerber baby butt.” This is practice. It’s an early draft. I’m new. It’s a long process. I’ll get there. So, I will cut myself a break, even while I wince.

What should have happened next: I grabbed our bag of burritos and drove us back to Lucky Thirteen’s parents’ spacious house, where we had a whole wing of the property to ourselves, if you don’t count his bedridden, silent great aunt with dementia who resided in the bedroom next to his.

What actually happened: Lucky Thirteen jumped out of my car, silencing the children behind us, pulled his pants down in their headlights, and bent over head to knees, yelling, “You like that! You like that! Welcome to The Patch, Motherfucker!”

The Patch was “a tender moniker bestowed upon the forest growing between the two now-spread cheeks [his] saintly mother gave him.” Translation: He exposed the entire hairy crack of his skinny ass to children. My fear had been he would yell at them; this was worse. They screamed, not in the way they’d screamed before, but in horror.

I gripped the steering wheel and hung my head out of sight, “saying the prayer of the mortified agnostic.”

My reaction was both apt and passive. I write, “I was livid,” instead of showing my lividness, but I do add important dialogue I recreated from memory:

“I gave him the ‘you-could-have-gotten-arrested’ lecture.

‘Oh, come on. That was hilarious!’ he said.

‘No, it wasn’t. You totally disturbed those kids!’

‘Whatever. They started it.’

‘They have probably never seen a grown man naked before, especially not one so hairy,’ I said.”

When I reread this piece recently, I wrote in the margin, “This isn’t funny. This is assault.”

I remember not talking much to my boyfriend on the drive home, but I didn’t get out of the car to check on the traumatized kids when I had the chance, and now I wish I had. I was ashamed, but I don’t express so. I had an opportunity in this essay to dig deeper to find the meaning behind this event, rather than relaying a surface-level anecdote as if reenacting it at a party for laughs. The truth was I was in pain because of prior rejection, so I chose a partner for whom I knew I wouldn’t fall in love—someone emotionally “safe” to blunt the agony of true loss, and I put up with his appalling behavior because, when he was sober, he was kind, fun, and generous. But I don’t share that here, and I barely scratch the surface with regard to the effect he had on the poor teenagers in that beat-up car behind us. I write:

“They high-tailed it the long way through the parking lot. . . ,” and I was “left wondering how much harm that misguided episode really caused the modest bunch who were just out for a good time.”

But What Does This Story Mean?

It’s a start, but I want more from this ending. What makes this an essay, rather than a yarn? I might suggest to my younger self tying this incident in with others of a similar ilk to show a pattern both in how I deal with my relationship to Lucky Thirteen and the greater significance of our tentative bond. What separates this piece from a stronger one are its implications. What does this all mean? Can I attach more weight to this scene?

I leave the reader with a “perfect fanny imprint on the hood of my car” the “little boy” left, and then I continue to date the offending man because I’m afraid to be alone with my thoughts and emotions and because he does nice things for me sometimes, like teach me how to snowboard. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough.

What the Teacher Said

My instructor said this about Lesson 10:

“Your writing is so lively and fun, Chelsey.” She is confused about whether this is an essay or a short story. She says, “. . . show how it changed you. . .” if it’s a short story. “In a story, I think it’s best when the narrator has shifted in her understanding so she’s no longer the same person.” I would argue that’s sound advice for an essay as well.

Her last comment is one that stuck with me: “I’m sure if you keep writing, and I can’t see you not writing, I’ll be seeing your name all over the place!”

She saw something in my early work I didn’t see yet. It was one of many boosts to come that kept me going and introduced me to the importance of writing mentors.

Write What You Have to Write

Lucky Thirteen eventually made a noteworthy guest appearance in my memoir manuscript, but the Del Taco incident did not. Reviewing the ten pieces I wrote for this long-ago writing workshop, I notice I was immediately drawn to nonfiction, most specifically stories about my romantic encounters. I knew I had to write about them, even if I didn’t fully understand why yet. It’s true what authors say: Write about the thing you are obsessed with—the thing that tugs at you and won’t stop tugging.

I would follow this preoccupation and see it through, but not yet. When this class ended, I was excited to continue writing on my own without deadlines, but I didn’t. I stopped. I temporarily quit because I had massive imposter syndrome. I didn’t write again until I signed up for Memoir I through Gotham Writers Workshop in 2008, when I was now single, back in California, making more questionable romantic decisions that would appear in my upcoming work.

A Theme Takes Shape

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part III

Early Snippets from College Heartbreak Become Integral to Future Work

My UCI Extension Creative Writing workshop in 2007 provided early practice for my nonexistent memoir, but it would be another seven years before I would say, “I’m writing a book.” At this stage, I didn’t believe I was capable, nor did I know what kind of book I wanted to write. But a decade after my college boyfriend broke up with me, I was still trying to piece together why, which is why I was compelled to write a vignette about him for Lesson 7 during this online class, a few details of which were later expanded into scenes and included in my manuscript; a few details of which I had forgotten until rereading them recently; and a few details I discarded when I later crafted my experiences into a cohesive whole. In this early piece, the first sentence isn’t true:

“He liked it when I was mad.” No, he didn’t. When I wrote that, I was trying to find a way into a complicated story I didn’t fully comprehend, and I was speculating about his thoughts and emotions, which were still unclear. In 2017, when I was working with an editor, he’d say something to this effect: “It doesn’t matter why he did the things he did; it only matters he did them.” This realization would have an enduring influence on my writing.

For several years, however, I would focus on the men with whom I have interacted more than I’d analyze myself, and I would always get the same workshop note: “We want to hear more about you.” Lesson 7 was no exception, but I find a few sections of that short piece striking, not because of the exact words I wrote, but how they’d become important to my later work:

For instance, “by the time his sunken skeleton stepped off the plane at LAX after a semester in Amsterdam, the red haze had become a permanent fixture in his glassy eyes. His hollow self had officially taken over.”

The Seeds That Grow

Putting aside revision at the line level, those two sentences became a seed that would grow into a published essay and more than one scene in my manuscript. I would eventually write the LAX scene, and I would write about the young, naïve woman who didn’t anticipate soon being crushed and how that would affect her future romantic decisions.

I see now how, as a burgeoning nonfiction writer, I played with snippets of ideas and segments of a larger narrative I had yet to form, like here:

“The thief could never undo removing my heart from its flimsy chain in the parking lot at Diedrich Coffee, turning it into confetti on the asphalt . . .”

This sentence screams to be fleshed out. What happened in the parking lot? What did we say to each other? What led to this very public, very unexpected breakup? How did it affect me in the grand scheme? I didn’t write the coffeehouse breakup scene for another decade, after I’d written an essay collection and was now turning those separate essays into a memoir. Why did it take so long? It doesn’t matter; the process takes as long as it takes, and it can’t be forced, which is why I think many authors’ first traditionally published books are better than their second ones. They often don’t have a deadline yet.

Forgotten Dialogue

Then there is the forgotten dialogue that takes me aback and makes me wonder if I should tweak my manuscript again. (I am determined to call it until I have another editor, but I’ve said that before.) After my college love and I were no longer together, he briefly dated his teaching assistant, an older graduate student, and she dumped him a few months into their courtship. For some reason, he felt compelled to tell me about it while it was happening:

“Remember what it was like when we were first together? That’s how it is with her.”

I recently wrote, “Oh god!” in the margin when I rediscovered this, one of the most painful things anyone has ever said to me. I had totally blocked it. One of the reasons writing a memoir is so difficult is because of our faulty memories. I often wonder how much of my past my brain has erased or stored in some inaccessible place. (So much!) I also wonder what I misremember. (So much!) I recently found an old piece I wrote about talking to a psychic at a Halloween party, a scene I included in the last chapter of my manuscript after rewriting the ending at least five times. I would have sworn when I walked into the room, the psychic said, “Do you always think this much?” but that’s now how it went down. (In this case, I did update my manuscript to reflect the more accurate version.)

In many instances, I’m grateful when I have the wherewithal to record dialogue immediately after it occurs, even if I have no idea when or if I will ever use it. That I am predisposed to do so facilitated writing more complete scenes when I was ready to write a memoir, but happening upon lines like the cruel one above, I speculate about the propensity of a memoirist to torture herself. I could have gone the rest of my life without remembering him comparing what I thought was unique and magical with a fling he had after me.

Jotting It Down in Real Time

The positive flipside of writing everything down in real time—an act I did when my life was more turbulent—is sometimes I find gems like what was scrawled on the communal whiteboard of my ex-boyfriend’s apartment in dry erase marker before cell phones the day I dropped off the mail that was forwarded to my house when he was overseas:

“Your mom wants to know where her real son is because she found you in a basket on the doorstep.”

I took solace knowing his mom was on my side, and that landline message still appears in my manuscript. What I cut post-Lesson 7, however, was the last phone call she and I ever had soon after that terrible night at the coffeehouse. We were both crying when she said, “I wish you would have stayed together. I really thought you’d get married.” While an important phone call, it didn’t fit into the manuscript. Determining what to include and what to leave out in a memoir is key—and not easy. I was unable to cram all the important events of my life into one book, nor should I have. Writing a memoir is like writing fiction in terms of structure and a narrative arc, and I was nowhere near that stage the first time I tried to write this story.

Sequence of Events and Alternate Endings

Whenever I read a memoir that follows the “then this happened, then this happened, then this happened” format without showing the deeper significance of these events and why they are strung together in this specific sequence, I want to throw it against a wall because the writer failed to make choices. Writing a memoir often requires asking, “Who cares?” I’m still not sure if I made all the right decisions about what to include in my manuscript, but I at least made them thoughtfully.

The effect of the breakup with my college boyfriend was profound, and I express so in the final paragraph of this assignment by sharing an event that happened five years later, a scene I considered expanding but never did, as it didn’t add anything new on an emotional subtext level that wasn’t already articulated in my eventual manuscript. I ultimately wrote a sufficient ending to this story; I didn’t need another one.

The alternate ending went like this: My ex was living with a new girlfriend in San Francisco, and one night my roommate and I had dinner with him in the early 2000s when we were on a road trip. He appeared content and healthy, didn’t stay long, and reopened the giant wound in my chest just by walking through the door of the restaurant:

“A few hours later, I gasped silent sobs in the bottom bunk of a woodsy Sausalito hostel, trying not to wake the woman snoring in the bed next to me. ‘Nothing will ever be okay again,’ I thought.”

Despite how untrue and bleak that thought was, in the moment I believed it. The one night I ever stayed in a hostel, I never slept. Lying in that uncomfortable bed, my roommate above me on the top bunk, I didn’t think I’d ever get over my second boyfriend. I did, of course, and in November this year I finally received the elusive closure I never expected and wrote about it for Brevity.

What the Teacher Said

My UCI Extension instructor said this about Lesson 7: “At the start of the piece you say . . . you’re angry, but the piece doesn’t feel angry, nor do I read of angry outbursts, so I’m wondering about that. Some of the metaphors and similes contrast each other, so you could probably just eliminate a few.”

I added those “angry outbursts” later and, thankfully, eliminated so many needless metaphors and similes. While this piece is a microcosm of what’s to come, a theme is already taking shape. I was working toward finding the voice that would tell this story in a more extensive, introspective way only time affords.

The Fall

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part II

A Critique of My First Workshop Essay

Welcome to How I Wrote a Memoir. If you haven’t read Part I, it’s here. Here’s Part II:

Imagine a thirty-four-year-old transplant sitting at her soon-to-be fiancé’s oak desk in a suburban home north of Atlanta, Georgia, across the street from the cul-de-sac moms who lounge in lawn chairs in the driveway chatting, while their husbands work and their toddlers tumble in the grass. In 2007, I imagine I was invisible to the neighborhood Southern ladies because I was a childless, unmarried Californian with a job. It didn’t take much to determine we had nothing in common. I waved to them, but I was never invited into their unspoken club. I was starving for authentic companionship, so I signed up for an online creative writing class through UC Irvine Extension, where I had previously spent three glorious years on campus. I needed to find my people again.

A Writer Who Doesn't Write

I didn’t have a plan for my writing. I only knew it was well past time to explore it. When I was twenty-two, I wrote in my journal, “I just want to be a writer.” Twelve years later I still wasn’t writing, a result of an incapacitating fear of failure. My cruel inner voice berated me with no supporting evidence to back up its claims: You will never be good enough. What will people think of you? Why even try?

Name That Pesky Inner Editor

Many years later, during a Hugo House class in Seattle on Mindful Writing, Anna Vodicka asked us to name our negative inner voices and tell them, “I’m not listening to you.” I named mine after my nightmare sixth-grade teacher who launched heavy objects across the room when she was angry and cussed at our parents under her breath loud enough for us to hear. During Anna’s class, I thought, “I’m not listening to you, Miss Salter.”

Back in 2007, I needed an outside party to provide deadlines before I would sit in a chair, stare at the blank page, and type words, and since I’d always been a dutiful student, what better way to write than to have a bona fide writing teacher with a published craft book anticipate reading my work for ten straight weeks?

Poor Choices, Good Material

I gravitated immediately to nonfiction because I’m not creative enough to write fiction, imaginary Miss Salter lied. Plus, before moving to Georgia, I’d ended a six-month marriage to a man I’d lived with for more than three years who struggled with drug addiction—the only person I’d ever cheated on, incidentally with the man whose desk I was currently using. After a stable, somewhat uneventful childhood, I had material because of poor adult relationship choices. Hallelujah!

Skydiving

My first short essay in that creative writing class describes jumping out of an airplane. It was a hot, dry August day near Lake Perris, California, two days after my wedding in 2005. The piece is called “The Fall” because it attempted to work on two levels: taking a literal leap from 13,000 feet and a metaphorical leap into an ill-advised, permanent commitment with someone I was unsure was a match, both of us bluffing the day we said, “I do.” It was a groovy idea but a poorly executed essay—both a missed opportunity and necessary practice.

In the first paragraph, I write skydiving occurred before we had sex on our honeymoon, a clue I’d made a tremendous mistake. Then I describe the plane:

“The small plane that carried us into the air was painted like a gray and blue shark, with jagged teeth marking the nose of the aircraft. The rickety jet looked as if it had been taped together with duct tape—twice. It rattled with the sound of loose bolts crashing against metal, and it flew like a bird with a clipped wing, dipping and swaying toward earth.”

Woefully Wordy

Was it a shark or a bird? Why “twice”? “It rattled” suffices. All planes carry people “into the air.” Someone get this poor girl an editor! Reading this wordy paragraph, I want to shake my younger shoulders and scream, “You’re trying too hard!” As my future book coach later said, “Pick the right image; render it correctly; move on.”

Cut the fluff.

The crux of this essay shouldn’t lie with what the plane looks like anyway. We only need to know it’s well-worn and possibly unsafe, so now I might write, “The small, rickety gray plane, with a nose painted with shark teeth, swayed as we gained elevation.”

I go on to describe the stickers slapped on the inside walls of the plane and call the jump experts taking us on this dangerous adventure “daredevil punks” and “crazy hooligans.” (Pick one and cut “crazy.”) I explain how they teased us, fondling the loose straps carrying our parachute packs. I describe my husband and his tandem companion sliding down the bench toward the door-less opening and the roar of the wind outside. I call the wind “deafening,” which it was, “blowing like an angry hurricane,” which it wasn’t. I write my husband turned into an “instant speck” when he jumped, a phrase I still like, but what I don’t do is describe the turbulence of my relationship. Why did I get married two days ago when I was still having doubts? Why did we not have sex on our wedding night—or the next day? Why is jumping out of a plane less scary than hurdling into this marriage? What is this essay about besides skydiving?

When a Scene Misses the Significance

I write, “I had lost him,” both during his free fall and in our relationship, but I fail to explain why. I talk around it: “Our three-and-a-half-year relationship, complete with a condo, a dog, and a variety of motorized toys in the garage, had led to this moment. Even though it was supposed to be the beginning, it felt like the end.”

Readers don’t read minds; they read the words writers write.

I then describe my tumble from the plane. There’s an “unfettered cry”; “spinning like a rag doll”; and that irksome Miss Salter: What if the chute doesn’t open? What will happen when I hit bottom? Why can’t I breathe? I didn’t actually have time to think anything when I was dropping from the sky at terminal velocity, but I’ll let those questions slide. But then, there’s this: “The screeching pressure pierced my ears like the needling voices that had been guiding my life for so long . . .” So many adjectives, so little explanation. I say something vague about being a people pleaser, but the reader still knows nothing concrete.

After my tandem instructor grabs my hand to pull the chute, we float “like a pendulum,” and I know I will survive, “gliding in for a perfect landing in the soft grass.” I describe this as one of my bravest moments, along with the moment I leave my husband six months later because I finally “listen to my heart,” a vague realization that leaves the reader with more questions than answers.

So Many Questions

I recently wrote in the margin, “How” would I survive the metaphorical fall? “Why” did I stuff my backpack full of clothes and head home to my parents’ house? “What happened?!”

I still like the idea of an essay about skydiving as a metaphor for my marriage. The piece could have worked if I’d been more adept and willing to dig deep into what happened between me and my husband when we wrote the vows we both broke immediately. Part of the problem was I didn’t fully understand our situation yet. I needed more time to work this story out, and my ex-husband didn’t get sober and make amends until 2011. Even then I didn’t accept all that had been hidden from me, nor did I fess up.

Also, when I wrote the piece, I didn’t feel free to write the whole truth. The man I almost married in Georgia once said, “You have storytelling disease.” I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. The desire to make meaning out of one’s personal history is not a disease. I knew if I wrote the real story, my current partner would be upset and wouldn’t understand why I’d felt compelled to do so. This stopped me.

What the Teacher Said

Here's what my UCI Extension instructor said about “The Fall”: “I’d like to know more, have a few more details about what was wrong. Had your husband pushed you into jumping out of the plane, which may have been the last straw?”

The smart reader shouldn’t have to guess what the writer is trying to say. The writer should be forthright, not obscure the facts with excessive, flowery language.

Skydiving was my idea. Getting married wasn’t. It took fourteen more years to write, revise, and publish the genuine story of these two overlapping partnerships, and I didn’t mention skydiving once.