Ch. 4: The Short Story: Defining and Shaping

#1: False Epiphanies I Have Had

1.) Suddenly I realized… that the only men I want are the ones I can’t have.

2.) I’ll go weeks without dreaming about him, and then suddenly he’s there. He’s in the tree house I’ve climbed up into to escape the crazy man slowly stalking me through the woods—the one who no matter how fast you run is always just a few steps behind you, walking. He’s sitting in a bus stop shelter on the deserted road I’m jogging along. He comes out from around corners or is leaning against buildings, always just out of my reach, always smiling. The wave of shock and excitement over his unexplained presence is the first thing to come, followed always by the same question—“What are you doing here?” I never get an answer. Just that smile, like he knows something really great—something that will be years before I can even begin to understand. But this not knowing doesn’t scare me. When I’m here with him like this, his face so full of answers to questions I haven’t even thought of yet, the only thing I feel is safe. He’s going to hug me now, squeeze me really tight. I’ll feel the warmth of his breath on the top of my head, smell his cologne. I’ll lift my head to kiss his lips, still parted, still smiling. Just as I’m about to tell him that I love him, I wake up.

3.) The next morning, nothing will get done. Because when he comes to me like this, the rest of the day is a loss—it’s spent kicking myself for never telling him how I really feel. Because now he is married. And the one after him was married, too. And the one I almost married is about to marry someone else. And the one I want to marry now never wants to get married. And so it goes. I tell myself I only want men I can’t have… when really I cling to men I can’t have because I’m afraid of being alone. And, hey, look at that! Another epiphany! And so the cycle continues…

#2.) Opportunities Not Taken

I had planned to go north for Spring Break to visit my family, but the closer the time came to having to pack up the car and make the eight hour drive from San Diego, the more I wanted to just stay home. A little over four months had passed since I’d last seen my parents, Christmas at their house. I missed them, they missed me, and I didn’t want there to be hurt feelings. But the weather there predicted thunderstorms and snow all week, while the weather here called for sunshine and temperatures in the low 80s. My roommate would also be out of town, which meant I’d have the house to myself. Tom Cruise slid through my mind in a pair of underwear and black Ray-Bans, urging me to stay home and rock ‘n roll. Nobody says no to Tom Cruise. Instead I said no to make-up, drying my hair, and wearing anything but pajamas. I said no to healthy food and exercise. I said no to laundry and cleaning. I went to the beach and watched the surfers attempt to catch waves and small children attempt to skip rocks across them. I caught up on all the new movies I hadn’t seen. I listened to hours of This American Life while sipping coffee spiked with cinnamon. I wrote, I read, I wrote some more. I watched that new show Glee everyone is talking about, pausing every now and then to belt out the songs I liked myself—to my surprise, I’m pretty good. I drank white wine and danced in my underwear to Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Ludicrous. Tom Cruise may be the master at sliding across the floor in his calf high white socks, but I can show him a thing or two about “gettin’ low.”

Ch. 3: Details, Details: The Basic Building Blocks

#1: Harper’s Index on a Personal Level

Number of unread books on my shelf: 24
Number of times I’ve felt a connection with a random stranger: 3
Number of times I’ve acted on it: 0
Number of fortune cookie fortunes I’ve saved: 2
Number of wedding dresses in my closet: 1
Number of times I’ve been married: 0
Average number of minutes after my mom gets upset with my brother that I get a phone call: 1
Chances that when I move I will throw away all my décor and redecorate my new place: 97 percent
Number of times I wash my hands a day: at least 50
Minutes that go by after I see an illness on a medical show before I diagnose myself with the same ailment and begin naming when I’ve experienced all the symptoms: less than 1
Number of short stories I’ve completed writing: 4
Number of short stories I’ve had published: 0
Chances that I’m going to vacuum and mop my floor after you leave if you wore your shoes in my house while you were here: 100 percent
Number of marriages I’ve been responsible for ending: 1
Number of times I’ve been in love: 2
Number of food concoctions I eat that other people would think were weird: 2
Number of times I’ve read Catcher in the Rye: 3
Number of times I’ve read The Great Gatsby: 5
Number of times I’ve seen The Breakfast Club: 10
Number of times I’ve renewed my faith in God: 3
Chances that something will happen that will make me lose trust in God and go back to questioning my faith: 100 percent
Chances I’ll rewrite something that I’m writing by hand if there is even the tinniest mistake or imperfection: 100 percent
Number of times that I usually end up rewriting something I’ve written by hand before I consider it perfect: 3
Number of articles of clothing that still have the tags on it: 5
Number of times I’ll eat leftovers: 1
Chances that I’ll write “your” instead of “you’re” and have to change it: 100 percent
Number of times I check my e-mail a day: 15
Number of people I consider to be my true friends: 3
Number of times I’ve been out of California: 6
Number of times a month I say, “I’ll start working out/eating healthier on Monday”: 4 (once a week)
Number of crosswords I attempt a week: 3
Number of crosswords I finished completely without help (including not Googling a clue): 2
Number of times I usually have to Google a clue on a crossword: 4
Number of glasses of wine I’ll usually have after opening the bottle: 2
Number of songs in my repertoire that I’ll belt into a hairbrush for my best friends’ amusement when he/she has had a bad day: 3
Chances that when I’ve had a bad day you’ll find me dancing and singing in my kitchen with a glass of wine: 100 percent
Bible versus I can recite off the top of my head: 0
Number of movie/t.v. quotes/lines from books I can recite off the top of my head: 10
Number of times I’ve voted for a President since turning 18: 0
Number of times I’ve voted for an American Idol contestant: 3
Number of ex’s: 2
Number of ex’s I’m still friends with: 0
Number of dirty laundry loads that are waiting to be washed in my laundry room right now: 8
Number of showers I take a day: 2
Number of towels I use a day (to take a shower): 4
Number of “celebrities” I’ve met: 4
Number of vacations I’ve been on: 10
Number of vacations I’ve actually come back from feeling relaxed: 0

#2: Render a Tree, Capture a Forest

“Blink and you’ll miss it,” is the line often used when referring to Jamestown, California, as it only stretches for three miles in every direction between the significantly larger neighboring towns. I’ve always found the remark a bit unfair. When I’m passing through, my eyes never seem to stop roaming. In the spring, they roll over hills lush with lime colored grass and bright orange poppies, robbed of their fertility by the paralyzing heat of summer, which leaves everything dry and prickly against bare, tan legs that run down a dirt path to a neighbor’s house to play. They reach up 300 feet to the tops of staggering pines that also shift between green and brittle brown depending on the season, and whose branches bend under the weight of the crisp, white blankets of snow the town sees once every five winters. They see the Mini-Mart where, in the summers, the high school boys fill up their parents’ boats to go fishing or to ride around the pretty, popular girls who sun themselves in faded, dingy bikinis and talk about the boys they’d rather be with. Almost every jacked up Chevy four-by-four— in charcoal gray or white—on the road has a boat on its trailer hitch come summertime. They slow traffic to 30 mph as they make their way to one of the three lakes that lap against various edges of the town. The sun glistens off their stone blue surfaces so intensely you have to slow your car as you go by so as not to drive off the road. What I don’t blink for in fear of missing is the cemetery. Not a single blade of grass grows on the red, dirt hill pimpled with headstones. Like all the pick-up trucks in town, they are either white or gray. The ones with a bit of sparkle in the stone and the ones with the glossy finish tell you whose family had pants with deep pockets. There is nothing about the way the graves are positioned that gives the impression there was a plan to where each hole was dug, as perfect strangers are often just a roll away from being bedmates. Like the town, the space is not big enough to hold the increasing population, and I often wonder how many feuding neighbors are seeing their Hatfield and McCoy melodrama play out in their afterlife. The day my mom brought my grandma’s ashes to be buried in her family’s plot, which sits on the far side of the cemetery, safe, for now, from crowding, the sky, thick with clouds the color of great gray brains, poured. “She doesn’t want to be buried with them,” my mom told me on the phone that night. I closed my eyes and imagined the dry, red dirt turning into thick clay, sweeping everything in the little town away.

Ch. 2: The Gift of Not Knowing: Writing as Discovery

#1: Things I Was Taught / Things I Was Not Taught

Things my mother taught me

- That on Sundays showering is optional and you can wear your pajamas all day long, eat ice cream for breakfast and chocolate for lunch, and wrap up in a blanket on the couch and watch movies all day (getting up only to go to the bathroom or to get more food)—but on every other day of the week, you must look your absolute best before going out in public.
- How the best time of day is the hour before everyone else in the house gets up, sitting in the dark, the only light coming from the fire in the stove, drinking hot tea.
- How it is necessary to write a list of questions before going to the doctor so that if he tries to rush you through the visit you are prepared, rather than getting frazzled and forgetting what it was you wanted to ask him in the first place.
- That looking straight ahead when you see someone you don’t want to talk to doesn’t magically make you invisible.
- To never fight with your brother because there may come a day when he’s the only family you have.


Things my mother didn’t teach me

- How it’s best to leave the person you are with when the relationship isn’t working rather than being unfaithful.
- That your approach and/or response to a situation should always match your intentions, otherwise your intentions will always be misinterpreted.
- How to raise and care for a dog, and how having a dog can make you a more tolerant person.
- How to be affectionate with another person—to not cringe or shy away at their touch, or how to not get embarrassed or uncomfortable when they attempt to be affectionate with you in public.
- How to cook food with fresh ingredients rather than settling for meals that come out of a can or a box.


#2: I Want to Know Why

I want to know why:

- I freak out about people wearing shoes in the house (because of all the germs they track over my floor), but have no qualms about wearing new clothes I buy from department stores without washing them first.
- Sandwiches always taste better when somebody else makes them for you.
- When you go through a break-up every single song you hear on the radio sums up exactly how you’re feeling.
- Some women get all dolled up to go workout and sweat at the gym.
- The fifteen year old girl standing on the street corner holding a sign that says, “2 months pregnant, please help” thinks whatever money she does make will be even close to enough.
- The smell of cinnamon makes me feel like a kid again.
- I can’t find a single hot dog stand in San Diego.
- The only time I can sit still for long periods of time is when I’m sitting looking at the ocean.
- People who hate interacting with people get customer service jobs.
- My dog can love unconditionally, but I can’t.

I can’t find a single hotdog stand in San Diego. Sure, there is always Costco, but it’s not the same as the one-man-stand outside the bulk items store in my hometown. Ten years ago, when I was a senior in high school, four of us girls would pile into my best friend Shelby’s Christmas tree green mustang—me having automatic shotgun since I was six foot one and had the longest legs. We only had a half hour for lunch, so we’d race down the narrow back roads of downtown, avoiding the bumper to bumper lunch hour traffic on main street and a stop sign or two. AC/DC vibrated the stereo speakers, the other girls singing along because, unlike me, they knew all the words. When we finally reached the parking lot (only 20 minutes left!) our awkward, teenage legs would emerge from the doors before the car was even in park, feet hovering inches above the warm pavement. The man who owned the hot dog stand knew us all by name, his ruddy, red face breaking into a warm smile to reveal two rows of perfectly straight teeth stained yellow from coffee or cigarettes—we couldn't tell which—as we made our way up to the cart. His hair was a mixture of silver and charcoal grays and curled out from a dingy red trucker’s cap, the ends damp and slick from the steam that rose up each time he opened the lid of the bin the hotdogs were in. The white apron tied tightly around his waist looked like a kindergartner’s finger painting with its smears of ketchup, mustard, and relish. “Five regular dogs and five Dr.’s for the pretty college girls,” he’d always say, knowing we were still in high school. The other girls loaded their dogs with onions and relish, while Shelby and I dressed ours simply in a blanket of ketchup, spinning the dog a few times to give it an even coat. The dogs were plump and juicy; the thin skin of their casing making the slightest pop as it broke against your teeth. My favorite part was always the large, seedy bun, and when I was almost at the end I’d push my dog out a little bit so the last bite was always an inch or so of warm bread soggy with ketchup. We’d wash it all down with big gulps of Dr. Pepper, which always resulted in a burping contest on the ride back to school. Jaime’s burps sounded like the ones a newborn baby makes after gorging on its mother’s milk—a simple “eh!” forcing itself out of the throat. Shelby and I always tied for first place, as we’d been trying to out-do each other in the belching arena since the 6th grade when we’d come home after school and stuff ourselves with Hershey kisses and caffeine free Pepsi—staple items in my fridge. Our burps were long and loud, rumbling up from the deepest part of our bellies. We’d break into hysterics each time someone would say that all that was missing was the ripple across our lips like Homer Simpson got each time he let one off. Too soon we were back in the school parking lot (5 minutes left!), this time the doors staying closed long after the engine had been turned off, discussing whether we could afford to miss 5th period. Almost always the answer was no, so we’d suck in our protruding bellies, re-button the tops of our tight fitting jeans and walk slowly to our lockers, the taste of warm processed meat still fresh in our mouths.

Ch. 1: What Is This Thing Called Creative Writing?: The Basics

#1: I Don’t Know Why I Remember…
I don’t know why I remember our last night in New York. It was late, almost one in the morning, and we had to be up in a few hours to catch the plane home. But the most incredible storm was going on outside our fifth floor window. The sharp crack of the lightening, like a lion tamer’s whip, and the deep, rumbling thunder that followed less than a second after had us curious. It was the middle of June, and only a week earlier the city had experienced a record high heat wave, so the storm brewing that night came as a bit of a surprise. I got out of bed and threw back the curtain so we could lay there curled up into each other and watch the jagged lines of bright white lightning etch itself upon the night sky, which was burning a deep red—a reflection from the glow of the city. We watched as lights in the building across the way turned on in rapid succession, yellowing the windows, which shortly after were filled with the faces of tenants we’d been spying on all week. There was the woman who worked out on an elliptical machine in a black bra and matching panties, the soft, milky flesh of her belly and backside tremoring a bit with each stride. And there was the man who sat hunched over his computer, typing feverishly while his cat scaled the bookshelves mounted above him on the wall. We watched the storm for a long time, silent and still, the flashes of lightening illuminating our faces as if we were having our portrait taken. At one point, your knees pressing into the backs of mine, your arm draped over me and your hand clasped tightly between my own, I closed my eyes and thanked God for you. Finally, I rolled over onto my back to check if you were still awake. I don’t know what inspired the “Broadway musical” we then found ourselves writing. I don’t know why I remember the tune and lyrics to the “Chicken Burrito Song” and the “Wells Fargo Song,” but not the story line or songs we came up with for what was sure to be a sold out show. I think it was about superheroes. Is that right? Whatever it was, I know belting it out at the top of our lungs had us laughing so hard our guts ached and our eyes watered. How was it we weren’t tired after all the walking and adventure that had taken place over the previous four days? I wonder if some part of our conscious knew that that night would be the last time we’d truly be happy together, and fought to stay awake to experience and enjoy every possible moment of it.

Method and Madness

Recently I took a trip to the Bay Area to attend a teacher recruitment job fair and visit a very good friend. This friend is close to completing her Master's degree in Creative Writing, and, sharing my fondness for Brian Kiteley's writing exercise books, she recommended a text she fell in love with and has often referred back to during the course of her program-- Method and Madness: The Making Of A Story (A Guide to Writing Fiction), by Alice LaPlante.

When I finally do go back to school to get my Master's degree, I plan on applying to the Creative Writing program. Until then, I've decided to use this text not only as a way to live vicariously through my friend, but to teach myself how to write (better) fiction (since I do have a teaching credential and, in my mind, qualify as an instructor).

So, for now, I'm going to press pause on the Brian Kiteley writing exercise experience and post only my responses to the exercises at the end of each chapter of LaPlante's text (I'm sure there won't be much protest, since I don't think there is anyone out there reading this anyway...).

Happy writing,

Joleen