In Three

triptych

A few years ago I took an online workshop with the illustrious Jeannine Ouellette. She’s the author of the memoir The Part That Burns as well as a prolific writing teacher who has taught thousands of people to Write In The Dark, as she describes it.

She’s an extremely compassionate teacher and I learned a lot over several weeks. But the exercise that hit me the most in the workshop was the triptych. The aim was to take one narrow topic and look at it three different ways, as if through a prism.

It’s a fascinating way to observe something. In another workshop,I encountered a variation on the theme where you write about a character through the eyes of two or three other characters in the story; of course, this can work for fiction or non-fiction.

But with Jeannine’s exercise the sky’s the limit. I chose an inanimate object, the key of D, and I was amazed at what surfaced.

The Key of D

D4

The D above middle C on the piano — technically known as D4 in tuner parlance — is a mere afterthought.

Surrounded by two black-key neighbors, it’s something to pass by on the way to someplace else. Inconsequential. Bullied, almost. Little emotion or opportunity to shine.

Her fingers always got stuck there, requiring twisting and negotiation to facilitate a quick exit, particularly in a fast scale passage.

For some reason, G and A — the white keys nestled between the three other black keys — felt freer. Their passage into the world felt more efficient, and with more room to grow.

And to leave.

There was no room for her, her emotions, her voice. Just her perfect piano fingers blurring across the keys. Dazzling them with pyrotechnics, on display like a trained seal. Smiling. Unprotesting.

She taught herself to sit rigidly on the bench, never swooning or swaying like the others.

That way no one could see the speck buried deep inside, a few cells of nascent emotion concealed early on by hard pearlescent layers to protect her from the people who surrounded her.

D Major

The key of D major was easy. Bright. Only two black keys. Fingers morph into carefree dancing sprites, always on the surface, easy to maneuver.

Handel’s Hallelujah chorus is in D major. It was also Beethoven’s happy place, the key of his violin concerto and second symphony, bows bouncing across strings, written before life beat him down and he couldn’t hear the masterpieces spilling from his pen.

With few challenges, there was no need for her to go deep. In D major, the masquerade could continue. She could block out the buried speck and pretend that everything inside these perfect four walls was as it should be. Just the way people liked it/her.

Don’t speak. Don’t feel.

D Minor

With only one black key, d minor is the key of stormy pieces. Sad pieces.

At a live performance of the Mozart Requiem in d minor, the sniffles around her start slowly and softly at first, a harbinger of what’s to come.

By the time the Lacrimosa — Latin for tears — rolls around, the mostly-female audience breaks out into full-scale weeping.

Other people’s tears only made her double down. She is not weak. The speck must be protected at all costs. She doesn’t feel this.

She doesn’t feel anything.

Even so, d minor was always her favorite key, the only key where she could acknowledge the speck’s existence to the world without a trace of betrayal appearing on her face or body. The speck remained safely tucked away, 20,000 leagues under her sea, visible to no one.

Everyone’s happy. She is a good little girl.

But d minor always won. It was the tuning fork to her speck, an invisible beam to blast through thousands of microscopic layers of hardness.

Just like the decoder ring cushioned inside a box of Wheaties, in d minor she could send secret messages out into the world. The truth she could never speak out loud. Look away from the manicured lawn, the Sunday school teacher/dentist/father, the interior decorator/mother pressing sharp creases into satin dresses with dainty lace collars deep into the night for the one day every year when she and her sister were told to smile for the camera. The resulting photos would provide adequate cover to the world for what really went on inside the house.

What key was her father’s untreatable war trauma written in, and the decades of addiction to follow? A key with at least four sharps, something Shostakovich-y. Probably C# minor...which is on one side of her D.

And of her mother’s occasional pleading lament, “I want to die”? Obviously, as many flats as you can rustle up: Eb minor is perfect.

That’s on the other side of her D.

No wonder she felt stuck.

This Week’s Takeaway: If you’re stuck writing about a particular topic, try writing about it from three different angles. Or take an indirect route via an object, a holiday, or another living creature. Sometimes you have to look away in order to touch upon a difficult topic.