Hi! Hello! Welcome! Glad you're here.
You really want to know, don't you?
That must be why you're here with me, reading these words, hearing them echo in your head as though they are being spoken to you, just to you, our little secret... My voice, the familiar warble you know and love... inviting you into the mystery of my Saturday evening... Or, if we've not met, perhaps you fill in the sound of my voice with some sense of voice that matches my photo, something blonde and LAish...
Before I tell you what I did last night, I want to point out that we spend our lives telling each other stories. How many times do you say the following or some variation thereof:
Oh my god! I have to tell you something!
You'll never guess who I saw yesterday!
You'll never believe what I heard after yoga class!
Get over here right now (call me right now): I have something urgent to tell you!
Did you see what I saw?
Wait'll you hear who I ran into at the airport!
You have to hear my dream from last night...
By now, you may be saying, Rox, actually, I really don't give a hang what you did last night; can we just get on with the bloody prompt? And to this, I might point out that I have somehow faltered as a storyteller if you are not in the least bit interested in what I did last night, especially because it was so...incredibly... well, you'll see. Anyway, still, if you don't care, it's because I have failed to represent myself as a sympathetic character, one whom you care for, would like to root for, would want to witness a happy ending story to an otherwise ordinary Saturday night, yet again frittered away trying to use my crystal glasses as singing bowls to play the Close Encounters tune.
You may really be curious by now.
When we tell these stories to one another—our friends, our families, our beloveds, our stylists, our coworkers, classmates, FaceBook family, blogs, strangers on the bus, etc—we don't think about how we tell them, which "good writing" words to use. We don't think about tense change or adjectives or anything like that. We just tell the story. Because if we don't, we're going to explode. A word volcano is smoldering beneath the throat line until we can tell someone, anyone, about the this freaky thing that happened at Starbucks on the way to work. So we release it. Then we feel better. In return, we sometimes get advice. Or someone tells a story in return.
As writers, we learn to build up those stories and make them sound really good so people will really want to read them. Sometimes it works. Other times the stories drown in the word dressing. But that's a conversation for another day. The point is, your stories don't have to be dressed in word-gowns in order to be heard. You just need to know which stories you really want to write and then write them. Truthfully. Chances are, we are going to want to read them. Look, if we want to hear about your dream or what you cooked for dinner, we'll want to read a story about what you did last night.
So... what'd you do last night? Wait. Before you write it, think about which part you really want to tell. No need to ramble off a bunch of details... which story do you want to write? Or, fine, if you don't want to actually write it, what part do you really want to tell (or already DID tell)? In a single evening, there are about 18,000 stories you could release from the folds of your experience, yet a mere few likely carry that sense of "dude, I got to tell you about..."
So write it. Write it like you'd tell it. Or told it. I can't wait.
Post here or private at rox@writingwithrox.com!
So, you still want to know? Really? Of course you do. If you've read this far, lingered with me for this long, you're already invested in my story... you care about me. Aaaaaaaw.
Still want to know?
Okay. I went to Dulano's with a good friend and watched a band called Sawtooth, whose collective ages would still add up to less than mine. One of the leads smiled like Buddha and sang and fiddled at the same time and I wondered, how can he do that? At one point, some Blue Moons in, I had to of course find the bathroom, but was to self-concsious to cross in front of the stage to get there. Oh, I eventually made it, but it took some pep talking from my overly confident companion. First I had to tell her a story.
I felt better.
Whatever happened to backyard burning? When I was between about 9 and 12 in the 1960's, one of the jobs every kid did for the family, was to take the burnable trash out to the very back of our big suburban yards and put the accumulation of pizza boxes, cereal boxes, paper, and cardboard waste into a 55 gallon drum and light it on fire. The drum was a brown orange color from all the rust. And every now and then, a Dad would buy a new drum when the old one rusted completely apart. I liked how the rusted sides of the barrel would become very lacy, and you could break it apart, pushing orange rust into the pile of ashes. I remember doing this job in the snow and the cold. It was pretty dark at supper time in January, and very cold, so when my mom reminded me to go out and burn the trash. I would put on my winter coat, hat, and mittens, and carry the paper grocery bag filled with the trash outside. I had to take off my mittens to light the match, flipping the cardboard cover open and scraping the match across the strike plate, and watching the flame come alive. I put the match inside the drum far enough so the wind wouldn't blow out the tiny flame. You had to find a corner of an old tissue, or pizza box to catch the flame on, and build up the fire. Kids usually had a stick they used to stir things around a bit, once the fire got going. I liked to wrap a piece of old plastic wrap around my stick and watch the transparent film turn colors and melt on my stick, crumpling like the witch in the Wizard of Oz. I liked how the fire would warm you up as you stood there and looked up at the black sky, sometimes there were stars, and the smoke curls rose up to meet that endless darkness. Sometimes there were astronauts up there, circling around in the dark. My outside clothes would take on a rich smokiness, like grandma’s cigarettes, and I would carry the smell to school with me until the cold wind knocked it out of the threads. As I poked the trash around in the fire, I stood facing the house, and I could see my mom inside the yellow light of the kitchen, cooking. I was hungry by then, and it felt good to watch her putting food on the table. Sometimes she would make roast beef with mushroom gravy and mashed potatoes, and canned peas. Dad had a one job his whole career, and he came home from work, at exactly the same time every night. Sometimes you would see neighbor kids standing at the back of their yards stirring up their fires with sticks. All our yards came together in the backyards, because, we did not have alleys in the suburbs. So there were no cars or anything back there to disturb your thoughts. I got paid a dime or 15 cents at the end of the week for this work. If we did our jobs, we checked them off of a chart that my parents taped to the refrigerator. Dad kept his coins in a plastic coin purse, which would open when he squeezed the edges of the purse. He paid us an allowance so we could learn about jobs and money, although right now, I don’t have a job. We had a big cornfield down the block from us in those days. And in the spring, when the snow would melt in little rivulets through our backyards, sometimes we would find salamanders by those little wild trickles. The kids in the neighborhood would love it when we found a salamander. A salamander was better than an insect, but not quite like our cats or dogs. They lived in their own special category, which we had not yet learned about in school, although one kid suggested that they were like frogs. We marveled at their moist skin and bulging eyes. I liked how they stared at us, evaluating us silently. I don’t remember anyone ever hurting or acting cruel to a salamander. I remember we put them down gently, sometimes in our window wells, and we watched them waddle away. The trash burning job was passed down from kid to kid in the family (most families had 4 or 5 kids) until the practice of backyard burning was eventually banned by the various city councils due to the air pollution it created.
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