Self-awareness is not my fort
I was describing a difficult character. I said she had a sketchy past, drank too much, and was dodgy in general. Remind you of anyone?
Just last night I was telling my writing group about my character called Kate and really it was their feedback that inspired this post, mostly anyway. They are a clever bunch. Funny and surprising.
So I was lamenting. Told them I was taking Kate to my imaginary fort for the weekend to see what I could get out of her because she’s a quiet one, you know, seething with something and all I can get her to do is cook and all I can get her to cook is grilled cheese and she’s up to 67 different ways and although she’s lovely in many ways, she is beginning to remind me of Forrest Gump’s lippy shrimp friend, so you see where the story is going don’t you.
Exactly fucking nowhere
I seem to be at a dead-end, and have taken up baking again.
At first I thought those were two totally different sentences and wrote them a couple of paragraphs apart, but now I think they belong together and the paragraphs in between were just distance, you know, obstacles to the truth, not unlike Kate’s grilled cheeses.
And getting into stupid details is what happens when you can’t move a story forward and it goes all messily sideways on you and sometimes you just have to euthanize your entire community because it’s more humane than watching your peeps struggle in a cold, remote landscape where they run a restaurant which is the environment I built for Kate to accommodate her fucking penchant.
I know it sounds like I’m mad at her but of course I am to blame
I put her in a tragedy right off the bat and then I tried to change it, erase it, and I rewrote that part over and over again, sometimes actually and sometimes at three in the morning clickety clacking the keyboard in my head, trying to get a more pleasant tragedy if you will, but the old one kept bossing everybody around and so I kept it, but I whittled it down and didn’t dwell on it.
I told it in 67 words and we moved on. Or we at least tried to move on
I mean she was only 16 when she got to the restaurant, her and her banged up suitcase, the sole survivor in the late-night car accident.
I know, right. Fuck. That’s the part I tried to change but couldn’t
And now for something completely different. Something nice that happened to me yesterday, in between baking blueberry muffins and gingerbread.
Do you believe in micro-love?
You probably don’t because I just made it up and it goes like this.
So I went down the big hill, first time in a while because of pitch and snow and icy patches and dark clothing and all kinds of mostly invented dangers, and I walked the sixish kms I used to run/trot (lie/truth) in the summer but by invention again, I decided I am too old to run in the winter.
Instead I walk so fast I feel ridiculous
I wear my long down coat which is unfortunately black because the old me worried about things I forget like pretend chic or matchyness maybe but whatev there I was plodding (and plotting) along the nice winding sidewalk, dodging gooses hit, thanks Spellcheck (and also thanks for the doozie in the header which all subscribers got to see) but I’d rather be Frank – oh fuck – anyway I was dodging goose shit and I knew there was somebody behind me but it was a comfortable distance and I wasn’t anything about it.
Then he ran by and said “run with me” and I did
He didn’t look back and didn’t know I had taken him up on it until he stopped running just before I was about to collapse because his pace was way more runny than mine ever was. We started chatting and he’s only been running for three weeks and he’s lost a bunch of weight already and has changed his diet and stopped eating like shit and I said I’d been so good with that lately until just this week I’d taken up baking again and there it is. There’s the fucking twain. And we said goodbye and maybe see you again and all that and it was a nice little parcel of time, you know, an episode of micro-love which, by definition, involves only your heart and mind and leaves all the messy bits out and is inspiring and encouraging which it totally was because I’m going running again today and have hidden my cookbook.
Coincidences like the number 67 are what writers live for and I for real picked the number 67 for grilled cheeses out of nowhere and then paragraphs later I counted the words in the tragic bit and everything twained again proving there is no nowhere
Writers live for things like that.
So you can imagine what I felt when I figured out Kate’s secret which I only just did. And now I’ve got a story to write. Thanks for helping me work it out because when I started this blog an hour ago I was at a dead-end.
