Learning to Expand Before Learning to Cut
How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VI
I doubled the length of an early workshop piece before chiseling it for my manuscript.
For the first assignment in my Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir I class in 2008, I wrote about colliding with a new romantic prospect in Las Vegas—a destination I neither chose nor particularly like. Our chance meeting was significant and instantaneous at the worst possible time in the worst possible place under the worst possible circumstances. My first—but nowhere near my last—attempt at writing this story filled just over one page single-spaced and skipped key information that would have provided the reader with the full picture. I chose to revise the assignment to turn in for week ten. The revision was more than twice as long and filled in major gaps, but it didn’t provide pertinent elements that now appear in my memoir manuscript across multiple chapters. What happened in Vegas only makes up 762 carefully whittled words in my memoir. I couldn’t have written the final version without these first two pieces.
Deliver on That Great First Line
“I fell in love with a stranger three months before my wedding,” I start. The instructor responded, “There’s no one alive who could read that first sentence and not want to keep reading.” The piece as-is, however, doesn’t deliver.
The second paragraph describes the setting and my physical state when I stumble into a post-trade-show meet-and-greet—the place where small talk with industry colleagues over drinks ensues when one’s feet throb and brain no longer works after standing behind a registration desk all day. I mention my blue button-up shirt and beige work pants. I carry a backpack because my purse handle broke. “I needed a shower, a thorough teeth brushing, shoes with proper soles, and hairspray.”
I understand why I depict my disheveled state: I was in no shape to experience that zing of initial magnetism with a new person. However, like Maria Semple would explain years later during a Hugo House lecture series, I should start the scene as far into the story as possible, dropping the reader into the action already in progress. A description of my outfit and my exhaustion isn’t a solid hook.
What Happens in Vegas
In the next paragraph, I introduce my “impeccably dressed future,” suggesting there is a future with this attractive stranger, giving away too much too soon. The reader wants to begin the journey with the author, gaining knowledge of important milestones as they occur in real time, not necessarily from the all-knowing narrator’s perspective who has the advantage of hindsight. Make the reader wonder what will happen next: “This nonsense in Vegas couldn’t possibly work out. Could it?”
The conversation in a conference room that could have been in any convention center in any state in any country centers around another colleague congratulating me on my upcoming nuptials. I note the wedding plans are a “brakeless train,” complete with an accent color for my curated gift registry and an “ivory gown that hung patiently in the closet.”
The alluring man says, “I got married the first time when I was twenty,” as I twist my confining engagement ring in circles. I include internal dialogue—he’s tall and his voice is deep—and later share a conversation we had about his children as we sat on a velvet couch at a rooftop dance club. I end the piece abruptly, repeating the mantra I’m getting married. I’m getting married. I’m getting married, leaving the reader to speculate about the outcome of this auspicious meeting.
Don’t write a first sentence like that one, then leave the reader hanging.
What Happens in Vegas Expanded
Based on the instructor’s feedback, I write more about Vegas. Back on the couch in the VIP section of that rooftop dance club, my new romantic interest shares details about his ex-wife that fall squarely in the not my story to tell category. In my future manuscript, I carefully determine what to leave in and what to nix. At this early stage, though, I don’t worry about it—and rightly so. No one reads what isn’t published. Ultimately, however, the story isn’t about his ex-wife, so scrap the minutiae about someone else’s former marriage.
In the week-ten revision of my workshop piece, I write, “I couldn’t remember the last time I felt this connected to someone.” Then I toss the reader out of the Vegas club: “Scratch that. I remembered exactly. It was eight years prior. I never thought I’d find this again.” The guy from eight years ago isn’t relevant here. Pulling the reader out of a crucial scene without a seamless transition is irksome. Put the reader back onto that swanky couch in the dark club, where the music thumps, and I get myself deeper into trouble.
A group of us return to the same club the last night of the trade show, where inappropriate conversation with my new friend gets more intense. After a few drinks, he asks me to kiss him. We stand outside on the roof overlooking the Vegas Strip. At first, I balk but relent after determining our colleagues aren’t paying attention.
Reading this version now, I am struck by something he suggests. After a brief, magical kiss, he says, “Do you know what you need before you get married?” I cut that question and the jarring statement that came after it while I was working on my manuscript. Then I revised and revised and revised the story again. Eventually, I forgot the startling dialogue I removed altogether. I not only rewrote the story on the page but in my consciousness—like parts of it never happened.
What Happens in Vegas Expunged
In the decade to come, I cut an elevator scene. I cut him following me to my hotel room where I shut the door on him. I cut a mutual colleague asking, “What’s wrong?” on the rooftop after I ran to the bathroom on the verge of tears and returned to the group, thinking, “I’m marrying the wrong person.” I cut “I loved this man I barely knew” because, in hindsight, “love” was a stretch. (I didn’t know him!) I cut the apologetic phone call I received on Monday at work. I removed the email I sent him to apologize for cutting our phone conversation short because my coworker was in the room, and I deleted this: “From then on, the correspondence never stopped.”
But here, for this class, I share everything I remember about Vegas while it’s fresh in my memory and emotions are still raw. To be able to carve, sculpt, and smooth a giant lump of clay, the giant lump of clay must exist in the first place. Get it all down first; excise it later.
It would take another decade, when I was no longer attached to the story, to properly weave all of it together with the one involving my fiancé—when I had the benefit of perspective, more experience, and awareness about why I chose to overlap those two relationships. These intertwined stories no longer feel like my own, as if they happened to someone else. In some ways, they did because I am no longer the same person I was eighteen years ago.
Extensive editing may be the reason so many people wonder about the “therapeutic” nature of writing. While writing is not therapy, the act of creating art out of pain is a restorative exercise if performed with the intent and endurance that comes with a desire to improve one’s craft. There are no shortcuts. There is only time, practice, and the altered person one becomes.
What the Teacher Said
When I submitted the expanded revision of my Vegas story, the instructor wrote, “This revision is GREAT. It’s the same material, but it feels like now you have so much more control of it. Your voice is recognizably the same one from week one, but now you’re the boss of it. You’re funny, and sometimes you’re even cute, but it’s not the main point. You get to things much more quickly. There’s nothing here that’s extraneous. Everything is doing a job. I can’t think of the last time I got to see in week ten a revision version of a piece I saw in week one, and it’s great to see such clear evidence of progress. You should be really pleased with yourself: the work you’ve done, the elements of the course, they’re utterly visible . . . you’re now able to strip down to the real stuff, the good stuff, the necessary stuff. And that’s huge!”