I am writing every day for 41 days for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, the writing workshop of which I am Board Chair. And I’m posting my writing here to give anyone who wishes a chance to edit the editor.

These are not necessarily full stories: they may be scenes, conversations, bits and pieces. All the work is absolutely new, and will often be quite raw. I’ll comment on my own process and ideas, and I hope you’ll comment too: what do you see that’s working, or not working? How would you fix this piece? What can you apply to your own writing? Is there anything you’d like me to comment on? Let’s talk about whatever you like.

You can read all the pieces and comments here. I hope you’ll find them interesting and useful.

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The Rock and the River

It was good they got off the boats for lunch, because by then Betsy was within a twitch of tossing the Larson kid over the side, preferably straight into the vacuum suck of the rapids, still clutching his stupid phone, whining all the way about why didn’t they have 3G down heeeeere? Bets didn’t think anyone on the boat would miss him, including his parents, who had raised Ignoring The Adolescent to a fine art. Then she would only have to get the Anderson family and Encyclopedia Guy eaten by snakes. The rest of them could stay as long as they left her alone. And then maybe Bets could enjoy the Grand Fucking Canyon.

When she signed up for the river trip, she imagined a small group of other adults, people of calm competence and intellectual mien and passionate adventurous spirit. She didn’t expect three motorized rafts of competitively-sunglassed executives who took a quick look around as they set off, noted that the Grand Canyon had a lot of rocks, and then got down to the serious business of checking each other’s status in the real world and telling the driver how to steer. All except Encyclopedia Guy, who went into full-bore full-volume download mode on the specific amount of damage that badly-conceived government management policies were doing to the river and canyon and wildlife and downriver ecosystems. Why, it’s all dying right this second!

He didn’t seem to notice that she flinched. Bets settled her baseball cap and bandanna more firmly onto her bald head and tried not to waste too much time hating him.

Once they disembarked onto the beach, she joined the line of folks unloading food coolers and cookgear. Then one of the bluff VP-on-vacation types shouldered in and tried to take the cooler from her, saying, “That looks heavy, you just let me get that for you, honey. You go on and find a seat.”

Fine. Fuck him. Bets released her grip, and enjoyed his nearly-drop-it-on-his-foot surprise at how much it weighed. She was still stronger than she looked. But the pleasure didn’t last, and the sourness still sat like lemon on the back of her tongue; because what did it prove, except that she still needed desperately to be strong?

#

So she sat on the sand and watched the river, while the not-dying-right-this second crowd fetched and carried and set up tables under the instructions of the boat drivers. Behind her, the cheerful human chaos. Before her, the Colorado: green and serene, opaque in spite of the hard hot sun that lit the canyon walls in such sharp detail it almost hurt to look at them. But look she did: the ancient rock, the river humming to itself, rolling on and on, and it was almost like music, on and on, almost like voices, on and on and–

She came back to awareness between one blink and the next, and found a child sitting silent next to her. A girl of perhaps eleven or so, a small, compact person in a white t-shirt and jeans and well-worn hiking boots who turned and grinned and said, “You hear that?”

“Almost,” Bets said.

“Come and get it!” a woman announced from the table. It took Bets a while to unkink herself and stand; by the time she was on her feet, the girl was gone, presumably somewhere in the crowd around the table. Bets got herself a grilled salmon filet and a spoonful of rice salad, ignored Encyclopedia Guy’s lost-lamb look, and found herself a rock for one as close to the river as she could.

#

After lunch, everyone piled back into the boats, and for a while the Andersons insisted on giving everyone a move-by-move account of the season finale of Dancing with the Stars, and Bets found herself so angry she wanted to scream. Don’t waste my time! But eventually the food and the sun did their work; the chattery people relaxed into silence, the Larson boy gave up on the internet and fell asleep, and even Encylopedia Guy was content to sit and only mutter to himself occasionally. The canyon narrowed around them as the river carried them deeper in and deeper down. There were no more beaches; the walls rose straight from the river, so high now that the sun and sky seemed impossibly far away, as if Bets were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope.

Deeper down. Deeper down. Moving faster now toward the rapids ahead, just a mile or two, soon now, where the river would dash itself against the rock and break and reform and break again, on and on.

But now they came around a bend, and the boatman slowed and steered them toward a place in the wall where the rock was black and dense. “Touch it,” the boatman said.

People hesitated: the boatman was holding the boat in place with a deft hand on the reverse throttle, but this close to the wall it was impossible to miss the muscle of the river underneath them, impossible not to know that it had carved these mile-high walls one molecule at a time with irresistable force and relentless will, and that it would go on doing so, on and on, on and on–

Bets felt a hand on her arm. The girl said, “Go on, touch it.”

“Where did you come from?” Bets said.

“I’ve been right here,” the girl said, and her eyes were the dense deep black of the rock, except there was light at their center like the light of the sun. She said, “Listen.”

The boatman was speaking again. “This layer of rock is two billion years old.”

Two billion years. Bets put her hand to her mouth.

Listen, the girl said again. And Bets listened with every fiber of her being as she reached out and touched two billion years of sunlight and shadow, of water and wind, two billion years of plants and small creatures and dinosaurs and people, all the things they were and said and did and felt, what they loved and feared and everything that gave them joy, two billion years of the river that she could hear so clearly now humming Life life life, life is the rock and the river and the sun, and we are going on and on and on.

The girl said, You hear that?

On and on and on. “Yes,” Bets said, and began to cry.

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Kelley’s notes: This one gave me some trouble because it’s much closer to being “about me” than some of the other pieces. I’m not currently dying, as far as I know, but I have my ongoing wrestle with the notion of death, as I believe many of us do. I have been on a river rafting trip down the Colorado. I’ve touched that rock, and the experience lives deep in my memory. I have a lot of feeling that I wanted to explore/express in this piece.

However, as I think I’ve said before, emotion isn’t story. It’s only a part of story. There must also be events: without a plot, a piece of writing may be meditation or self-expression, but it’s not a story. Take that, New Yorker.

A story is an experience for the reader, a journey. Just because I bring a lot of deep personal feeling to this piece does not mean that the reader will therefore “feel it.” Emoting onto the page is not enough. As the river needs a guide, so does a story. It’s our job to guide the reader as best we can, and we do that by creating a series of events that lead characters through conflict and choice into the emotional highs and lows we have mapped out for them.

I re-discovered in writing this piece, as I have in many of these pieces, the sheer heavy lifting required to bring the character and reader to a Big Emotional Payoff. This story is all about the last 3 paragraphs — about 120 words. But it took me 900 words to get there, in a way that is sketchy but, I hope, sets down the bones of character and story. Still, if I wanted to work this into a story, I’d need… hmm, I’m guessing at least another 2,000 words to do proper setup — a few more scenes of Bets interacting with people, more specificity about the mysterious girl, and some conversation or memory moments to give us some backstory, so that we care about the loss of her life and we understand what a triumph it is for her to be able to weep not just in grief for death, but in joy for life, at the end.

The point is that big moments require setup. Here’s what I felt I had to establish, at a bare minimum, in order for the ending to be anything more than an emotional riff:
1. A modicum of setting. I could go on at length about the Grand Canyon, but because I was on a schedule, I needed to be efficient. I consolidated the experience into a single day so I wouldn’t have to go into the logistics of camping overnight, and so I could avoid further interaction with the other rafters. I established key qualities of the river and the canyon, including using the “reverse telescope” image to give a sense of height, and also symbolize Bets’ distance from herself and others as she goes “deeper into herself.”
2. Bets is dying. There’s no need for me to be coy about this. I find often that emerging writers want to keep things like this “secret” from the reader. Why? It’s not a secret to the character, in fact it’s the single biggest thing in her heart and mind right now. And it is the central fact that drives the story. Don’t hide that stuff. I think the fact that she flinches at Encyclopedia Guy’s “dying” remark is enough clue for the reader, but the other rafters also need a clue, hence the bald head and bandanna.
3. Bets is angry about death. It’s important to show this in her behavior with/response to others, not just through internal thoughts/conversations. Interaction and relationship behavior are events — they are part of what makes plot, and therefore story.
4. There is a Mysterious Girl. This is one of the weaker parts of the story; what does the girl really represent? Is she a manifestation of Life and Death? Is she the spirit of the canyon? Is she Bets? I don’t know, and because I didn’t have time to nail it, I kept her as generic as possible. The lesson here is that if you can’t be specific, it means you haven’t thought it through (smile). But the girl is important — she is also part of what passes for plot here, an external force to which Bets must respond. If all this conversation was simply internal to Bets, there would be less event to drive the story, and less tension for the reader.

If you’re setting up an emotional payoff, you need not just the feelings that lead up to that moment of emotion: you need events that drive the character to have that sequence of feelings.

Posted by: Kelley