Tommy just walked by and stuck a cup of dirt, twigs and leaves in my face, and with the irrepressible enthusiasm of a four year old, he said, “I put the whole world in this cup, and now I'm going to fill it and make mud!” You can almost taste the joy and excitement at his latest discovery. It's not a bad analogy for writing: Take a few things you can see and feel and taste, mix it up in a cup, and there's your world in a rich muddy broth that you can carry around and show your friends. Most of us need more than a cup, or so we think. Our experience of the summer often reads like an elongating list, a catalogue of separate events without a common connection to each other. How does my watching a sunset on the Vineyard connect to the stock portfolio I managed this morning (not me speaking, of course:)? What do the drills I went through at football camp have to do with a game of flashlight tag with the cousins? We are so often afraid to mix the profound with the mundane, but the reality is that one can't exist without the other.
The art of writing an extended narrative on something as broad as “My Summer,”and one that holds together for the reader, is to make sure there is a single theme that “pervades” your writing piece--one that you can recite by heart in one breath. Often that is enough to hold the many strands together. But sometimes that is not enough. In this case, use a recurring motif to help keep your reader following you on your literary journey. If a theme is an idea, then a motif (at least to me) is a real place or thing that you return to when you feel the strands untangling. It grounds the reader in a recurring image of a special time and place in your life. The motif is that part of the original setting that pops up again and again as you write.
For my summer, it is our now antique motor home, the places it takes us, and the thoughts it sparks in my mind.
With the fuel tank hovering precariously close to empty, I back the bus into its home beneath the towering pines in our side yard. Only one breakdown this summer, and that easily fixed with a new bank of batteries. Not bad for a thirty-year-old icon of steel, chrome and spots of rust. The old Cat diesel running just a little rough; the generator well past the 5000 hour mark; the tires slightly scuffed and worn, all remind me of where we've been and how we've returned. While the kids erect a monstrous fort out of soccer nets and a massive blue tarp, I top off the oil, flush the tanks, and scrape the dried dirt off the mudflaps: some fine sand from the National seashore fresh with the minke whale swimming just offshore beyond the reach of our skipping stones; heavy clay from the mountain pass in Thetford Vermont that we just barely managed to get over while the engine steamed and smoked in disbelief at our audacity; the specks of field grass from Windsor Mountain in New Hampshire--flashes of the Perseieds showers raining out of the night sky while we laid on our backs in wet dew heavy with mosquitoes and fireflies; crushed blueberries and wild grape leaves from the spot we carved under the power lines at Nana and Papa's house in Brewster; the parking lot gravel of every ice cream stand, town fair, and festival we happened by on side roads off of side roads; the shells, bottom paint and turpentine of the boatyard on Pleasant bay where the kids in oversized life jackets spun dinghies comically trying to reach the mooring and our plain and barnacled ketch.
Inside, I pull the countless sleeping bags out of the overhead bins and stretch them over the fence between ours and our neighbor's yard. They are musty from the massive storm in late July that caught the kids unaware in their pop up tent and soaked them all clean through to the bone. Denise and I listened to them laughing, comparing, and wringing out pillow cases in the wind freshened morning. As I shake out each bag, long lost crocks and sandals and flip-flops fall out like they won the final game of hide and seek, along with the wet jeans and bathing suits reappearing from the cocoon that for weeks on end was their dressing room, still screaming, “Don't look! Wait for me! I don't need a sweatshirt!” EJ constantly reminding everyone: “If Fitz says it's not going to rain, it will! He can't be trusted”
Everything in the bus reflects the magic disarray of action: Books are shoved into every free corner: Nora Roberts, Hemingway, Dr. Seuss and Jack London piled like comrades in trench warfare: Harry Potter relinquished to sharing a drawer with Reptiles of North America; Thoreau lowered to a conversation with a pile of Spider Man coloring books. Nothing, no one, and nowhere is more important than any other in this egalitarian assemblage of memory. My drawer for tools also holds the missing cinnamon pop tart that caused Emma so much distress on a hungry morning. The registration also makes for a perfect bookmark, and my coffee cup holds a universe of broken crayons, screws, and a pack of old maid playing cards. Only the keys--the majestic and untouchable single set of keys--remains in its pristine reserve set in the dashboard. Who could or would ever try and steal our bus? It is as unthinkable as joy.
There is a balance and a linkage between the material and the immaterial. Our family is carried towards and away from our dreams in a ponderous conveyance built by union men and women working long days in another time and existence. They made a thing in which we are transported and recreated by the renewing power of experience. There are times on the open road when I find myself quietly thanking them for their efforts. I wonder if they knew what kind of life they were enabling as they constructed our bus back in 1977. Did someone say a prayer as they packed the grease into the bearings? Is there an initial scratched into some impossible to find crevice of the frame? Back then it was top of the line, a toy for the rich to see America. Now it is like a vestige of an old folk tune that anyone can sing--but few do. I wonder how our summers would be different if Denise hadn't spotted it sitting in the back yard of a Mack Truck repair lot amongst the dump trucks and semi's just a row or two away from the junkyard. All I really know is that we took a chance at creating a new opportunity--something which, regrettably, I am less and less inclined to do. But the bus sits here waiting for its tanks to be drained and reminds me that I should create those opportunities and that I shouldn't be intimidated.
Here's a couple of practical ideas to get you started:
Sights, Sounds, and Sensations
Every writing teacher will tell you that writing rich in the five senses makes for better writing--especially personal narrative writing!
• Create a list of images and actions from your summer that includes as many sights, sounds and sensations as possible. Be sure to include names, places, dialogue you remember, things you smelled, touched, avoided. Include the good, the bad, and the ugly. Make your list impossibly long and detailed. I'd say fifty separate sentences at minimum.
• Find a theme that captures a good chunk of your list, such as: Trying new things, meeting new people, going to different places, trying to do too much, nor doing enough, etc.. Write that theme down as the title of your piece.
• If there is something or place that happens in a lot of your list, use that as your motif. If you post your list in your blog, I will be glad to help you find a theme and a motif.
• Start your writing piece by first creating a setting-- a place where you re writing from. It doesn't have to be the actual place, but rather the place from which your memories flow.
• Balance the size of your paragraphs. It is an effective way of keeping to your theme. If the paragraph doesn't have anything to do with your theme or motif, get rid of it or rewrite it so it does.
• Have your last paragraph be a reflection on how you “think” about your summer. It is a nice way to create an ending.
Give this writing piece the time it deserves. Three or four hours at least.
Write with the intensity that you will die tomorrow, but with the patience of someone who has a thousand years to live.
Thanks for doing this! I hope your summer is “still” going well.
Fitz
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