The Tip of the Iceberg

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

As I continue to slog away on my memoir, I realize I work a bit differently from others who start at the very beginning and keep plugging away until they can finally write THE END.

When I started writing my memoir sometime around 2018, I couldn’t remember much about my childhood so I usually began with a fragment of a memory, or an object. I picked up my yellow legal pad and oversized kindergarten pencil and just headed off into the yonder.

Years of starting and stopping and starting again eventually resulted in a stack of pads several feet high, especially since I rarely paused to type them up.

Several months ago I started to whittle them down, enduring a couple of weeks of marathon sessions where I voice-transcribed them. Of course, I also continued to write while I chipped away at the stack, resulting in more pads, creating an endless infinity loop…WILL I EVER BE DONE?

Of course not. With most of the books I’ve written, given the typical time lag of a year between handing in the manuscript and publication, I could have easily added another chapter based on certain events, and whether the subject was still breathing…or not.

But I got plans, as they say, and with two other book projects on my wish list I don’t want to still be slogging away at this years from now. So my current phase is where I separate out all of these written fragments and memories into their own documents and create a color-coded Post-It for each so I can figure out where they fit in the timeline. I thought it would be enlightening for you to witness a bit of the curtain pulled back, to provide proof that first drafts tend to be ugly, confounding things that often make no sense, but also that sometimes they are so distilled down that all secrets are laid bare.

What follows are a few of these fragments. Who knows where they’ll end up, or if they’ll even survive to make it into the final draft?

The important thing is that I’ll know they’re there. I’ve always considered any book to be only 5 or 10% of the iceberg that we can see, but without the unseen remainder a book in its final form wouldn’t exist at all.

Photo by Justin Cron on Unsplash

September 23, 2023

The upside of not being parented was that I could do whatever I wanted. Everything was open to me. And there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.

I always liked to hide in a pile of leaves, the smell, the leaves that had holes in them, in my treehouse, in my room. But no one was looking for me, so what was I hiding from?

The change of seasons. I’ve always loved change in the weather. I never wanted the natural world outside to stagnate. When it does, like in July, I get antsy.

Childhood is a blur. Why do we remember some things and others? Trauma is either remembered, indelibly, right down to the scuffs on the left shoe you were wearing that day, or immediately pushed into a holding pen, which may or may not ever be accessed.

Photo by TStudio_lv on Unsplash

Piano. September 2, 2023

A whole section following the pattern of a magician.

When I sat down at the piano, I was a magician. Pulling rabbits out of my hat, all eyes on my hands.

Which is just how I wanted it, because if they looked at me, then they would know everything about me.

Noodle around with this a bit, I’m not sure it’s entirely true. Maybe I told myself they were just watching my hands and not my body, I created an impermeable shield so I wouldn’t feel their eyes on me if they were indeed looking at me and not my hands. No feelings coming in, but more importantly, no feelings going out.

Rippling arpeggios in which piece? My teacher wants it? You’ve got it. Faster? No problem.

I’ve been doing magic tricks at the piano since I started. Take a pillowcase, any pillowcase, cover the keys, and I’ll play over it as if it wasn’t there.

Watch this: I’ll pull a rabbit out of my sleeve.

They weren’t watching me, they were watching what I could do. The best prestidigitation of all.

I played without emotion. How could I when it was buried so deeply, under layers and layers, it never saw the light of day. Maybe with the piano, I only told myself I was playing without emotion because I wasn’t supposed to feel. Or speak. And the piano wasn’t speaking, it was trying to save my family, and to block them out at the same time.

So maybe, while I was participating in the pyrotechnics and banging, the emotion was indeed coming out. Because it had nowhere else to go, maybe there was a tiny release valve somewhere in my fingers that somehow let it out onto the keys.

Oh, you play so beautifully.

Yes but what about the octaves arpeggios scales playing more notes than I have fingers?

Whenever they said you play so beautifully, I would shrug off the words and double down on dazzling them.

Because maybe then they wouldn’t notice the emotion.

I never wanted the emotion to be noticed because then maybe I’d have to notice and acknowledge it too.

Date unknown:

A memory: I used to stick the TV remote control in my mouth and see if it would still change the channel. I don’t think it worked, but I remember the top had some kind of mesh screen that tasted metallic. What does this represent, both back then and today?

This Week’s Takeaway: It’s okay if your early work — various jottings, doodles, or whatever — is one big horrible mess. Sometimes, one point in a project merely serves as a steppingstone to another, more important one, and the sole purpose of this early mess is to prime the pump for something better down the road. Of course, this could also be applied to crappy jobs, rebound relationships, etc.