CHAPTER SEVEN: YOUR FOCUSED STORY: Editing
Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good. . . . The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.
DONALD MILLER, A MILLION MILES IN A THOUSAND YEARS
“TEN MINUTES TO GET OUT THE DOOR!” I shout up the stairs, with a dish of applesauce in my hands. I’m feeding my nine-month-old son, Abraham, and throwing sandwiches into lunch bags, looking anxiously at my watch. The babysitter is late. Elisha, five, comes up beside me and thumps my leg. “You forgot to listen to me read last night, Mom. Can I read to you now?”
“Sure, go ahead. Even if I’m not here, I’m still listening.”
Isaac, nine, yells, “Anyone seen my shoes?”
Noah, eleven, emerges from his room. “Sign my planner, Mom.”
“Fred . . . gets . . . a . . . duck. Are you listening, Mom?”
“Freddy buys a dog, yes, go ahead,” I call behind me as I retrieve the baby, who is stuck between the steps to the living room. His diaper is soaked through. I am trying not to look at all the toys on the floor, the dirt rimming the living-room rug. When will I have time to sweep? The sink is full of dirty dishes as well.
Naphtali, thirteen, runs down the stairs. “Don’t forget I’ve got piano right after school, Mom. Please don’t be late!”
I decide to skip the diaper change, run back for a look in the mirror, frown, pull another layer of red across my lips, head down the stairs, check the window —the babysitter is still not here. I scoop up Abraham on the way out the door. I see he still has food on his face.
“I don’t have any shoes!” Isaac shouts at me as I speed past.
“Then go barefoot,” I shoot back. He loses his shoes every day.
“This is it! I’m leaving!” I call. Baby in one arm, briefcase in the other, I stride, head down, into the rain toward the minivan just as the babysitter pulls into the driveway. I about-face, march Abraham over to her as the kids spill out of the house, then sprint back to the van. Isaac is running barefoot, shoes in hand, now diving into the open door of the car.
Within the next ten minutes, I deliver the kids to their two respective schools. At the first, the older three tumble out. “I forgot my lunch,” Noah announces on his way out. Isaac is running for the front doors, dragging his coat in the mud. “Piano, Mom,” Naphtali admonishes as she jumps out. Then one more stop at another school: kindergarten. Elisha springs out of the van and runs for the door while I blow him a kiss. We made it! And no one was late. I take a long, deep breath, then turn the car toward the college and hopefully, later, to my writing desk. I have lots of edits to do on the memoir.
Writing this scene now makes me sigh. Then laugh. Then say a prayer of thanks. Somehow, improbably, despite the whirling forces of kid energy and universal morning chaos, every school day we were able to collect ourselves into the van and end up at our necessary destinations. Couldn’t those six bundles of energy, desire, and excitement have gone quietly and gently into each good day, at least occasionally? I would ask in a kind of prayer on particularly frenzied mornings. But I knew the answer: No. That would violate the norms of human behavior. And who wants docile robots for children, kids who merely do exactly what you say? (Yes, okay, some of us some of the time, but we’d totally miss out on the drama and stress that, in the end, grows our soul, etches interesting lines on our faces, and gives us harrowing stories to tell.)
Our memories have that same wild, unpredictable energy, don’t they? They never behave, and that’s a huge part of the mystery and the fun. The writing life itself is like this, as well. In composing this book, I have taken over two entire rooms in my house, with long tables littered with stacks of chapters and note cards. I have never written neatly. Perhaps because I’ve never lived neatly. And I think I’ll be forgiven. You will be too.
I don’t know what kind of life you’re writing out of —whether you’re overscheduled and frantic or serene and even-keeled. Yes, take care of your loved ones, always that, and don’t worry if you leave the dishes in the sink as you write. Don’t worry about dirt around the rug, dust on the blinds, and mud on your car. What you’re doing now is important. At the End of Days, when we’re whisked away to stand before the Judge, fiery, loving, and vast, I don’t think God’s thundering voice is going to say, “Well done, child. You’ve been good and faithful in cleaning your bathrooms, in washing your car, in keeping the dust bunnies under control. And good job cleaning behind your fridge all those years! Enter my heavenly gates —and here’s your cleaning bucket!”
I think God cares about cleanliness and neatness sometimes, and so should we. But only sometimes. Writing is messy because spiritual work is messy. Over the last twenty-five years of writing books, I have learned this: If we begin a story and map out from the start with clean, straight lines where it will go and just how it will get there, and if we invest days and months, maybe years into this work; and if, when we are done, we end up with a book exactly like the one we first outlined the month or the year before —then we have failed. If we’re lucky and we’re doing it anywhere right, the story will shimmy and shake under our trembling hands. We will falter. Our perceived order of the world will shift. We’ll get scratched and dirty. As our manuscript grows, so will we. And we’ll be glad.
But how do we get there, to that gladness? How do we get the kids rounded up into the van and deposited safely at the school doors? What do we do with all those bodies spoken back to life? They weren’t raised up to simply stand in that valley, vacant and lost.
This is the part of the dry bones story we often forget. The “vast army” is raised to its feet for a purpose. God said, “I will bring you back to the land of Israel . . . and I will settle you in your own land.”[37]
Those risen bodies have somewhere in particular to go. And now, after WordSeeking into our memories and scenes, discovering a phrase, an idea, a paragraph that sizzles and pulls, we have discovered a direction for our own. And after writing into difficult places and relationships in our lives, we know where we want to go. We’re not accounting for our entire lives; rather, the inner story helps us focus on a transformative event or a particular theme from a portion of our lives that we wish to excavate and name.
Michelle began her life story by writing about the onset of her dystonia, a crippling condition where her muscles spasm uncontrollably. But through WordSeeking, she found that the real inner story was her relationship with her mother and their shared affliction. (See “Of Bodies and Birds” on page 181). Now she wrote to further explore their common ground.
Jerry was writing an essay about his father. He seldom talked to Jerry on the phone, always passing it off to Jerry’s mother when he called. While writing and reflecting, Jerry realized the root of his father’s noncommunication: Jerry had advanced degrees and his father had only finished eighth grade. His father was self-conscious about his lack of education. Jerry edited and reshaped his essay. Now it was about his father’s knowledge of the trees, of horticulture, of woodworking. His father was an educated man.
Amy Reiff started to write about a terrifying operation her son Stanley had when he was just five years old. She thought her story would be about fear, but WordSeeking led her in another direction. It was now going to be a story about strength and a surprising way she saw the presence of God.
Shall we do it then, unbolt the door and call her back in, our beloved inner editor, Mrs. Lynchpin? She may be a perfectionist who sometimes cramps our creativity, but when it comes to moving the bones and the bodies to their newly discovered destination, we need her.
In my own story, I needed her as well. In my last phone call with Kate, she asked why I didn’t leave the island. What she meant was, Why didn’t I leave my new life? Which also meant, Why didn’t I leave my husband and new family?
But I knew now that my outer story wasn’t enough. Because I did leave the island. Twice. I had begun writing about one escape —across the spit to the shack down the beach. But I knew now I had to write about another escape, about the time I got lost.
I had already written the outer story. And it was a good one, though possibly humiliating. I insisted on running a skiff on a day-long trip. Alone. On the ocean. In the winter. A snowstorm came up. I got lost, and the engine broke down, and . . . on the story went, eventually including the Coast Guard. In my defense, I was young and foolish, and I had been living for an entire winter on a remote island populated with two: my husband and me, building a house together, completely cut off from the rest of the world in our second year of marriage. (Don’t imagine Swiss Family Robinson. It was more like Cast Away meets The War of the Roses.)
I wrote the scenes with lots of detail: how scared I was when it started snowing. When the engine died. When I knew I had drifted out onto the open ocean. When I thought I might die. But the inner story? I didn’t know it yet. It was tempting to just stay with the outer story because it had woman-against-nature drama. It had storm, fire, and even some possible bears. What more could a story need? But I needed to know more than this.
I began to WordSeek into that day and it slowly came clear, word by word, what I was doing. I was escaping. I was escaping a place that wasn’t mine: an ocean, an island, a life that belonged to my new husband and his family, but it didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t belong to it. It wasn’t mine except by marriage, by proxy. My life was borrowed, shoehorned into what cracks I could fit in, like the tiny loft where we slept for three summers, that we climbed up a rickety ladder to reach.
As I wrote, as I did the WordSeeking into that day and all that happened, it slowly became clear. This event —more than any other —revealed the inner story of the whole book. I knew now this book would indeed be about endurance and perseverance. But something else came as well, something I didn’t expect: I felt compassion for the young woman I was, and for my husband, for the two of us trying to make a marriage work on a wilderness island with endless nets, ocean, and fish we couldn’t control. We knew so much about strength and determination and work, but we knew so little of love in those days.
But my fingers on the keyboard showed me yet more. There were so many rescues and second chances! I began to see that this was indeed a story of survival, but it was also a story of grace. Not easy grace. Hard grace, the kind you pray you’ll survive. And there it was, the title and the paradox that came to shape the final story: Surviving the Island of Grace. I knew then how I would shape the book and finish it. Kate would be glad for it.
It meant, though, chapter by chapter, I would do some outlining. I had gotten lost in my words and stories, which were now such a part of me I could no longer see them clearly. I needed a way out. I began outlining each chapter. Sometimes I would outline it after, descriptively, to see what I had written. Other times, I outlined prescriptively, ahead, deciding on the main ideas, the sequence of stories and support. Both helped me to see what belonged and what didn’t.
This meant I had to let some pages go. (No! Not those hard-won words, those beautiful sentences! Not the story of the two pigs, Charlotte and Harold! And the goat —don’t forget the goat! And how we got our Christmas tree from a boat that winter, hauling it home in a storm. What about trucking through Africa that next year? And not the story of my first octopus?) But yes. Of course there must be a letting go. Jacob had to let go that night. At some point, as the sun slipped above the horizon, Jacob released his stubborn grip on the man he couldn’t defeat. It must have been a great relief. You can only wrestle for so long.
As the inner story came clear, and as my rough outlines made more and more sense, I heaved a massive sigh. I knew I had found the direction for my resurrected bones. As many other writers have quipped before me, it was now time to murder my darlings. But it didn’t feel like murder. I didn’t kill —I actually rescued them from the wrong story, saving them for the right story, whenever it came along. Those bones would come alive somewhere else. My story now was so much clearer, brighter, fuller, deeper without the distraction of the animal farm.
My own Mrs. Lynchpin rejoiced, even kicked up her heels. I had clear direction now. Every scene, every reflection I included would somehow illuminate the inner story, the story of finding and making a wilderness island my own. I wanted this for my readers. I wanted my readers to live my life wiser and better than I did the first time through.
Jeanna cut many pages, even chapters from her manuscript. Amy had to let some paragraphs go, the earlier versions of her story that she found no longer true. Michelle cut some pages about swamp and insect ventures. They were no longer part of the larger story, which was now a story about her mother, her dystonia, and her hope for restoration.
But you must understand: We’re not editing our lives on the page to make ourselves look better. We cannot be the heroes of our own stories for so many reasons. If our stories are an undercover effort to hoist an equine statue in the public square with us, triumphant, astride, for all to applaud, it won’t work. No one will read or care about our me-as-hero story unless we pay them. Nor are we being honest. If we make ourselves the unsullied protagonist, we’re simply not telling the truth. Aren’t we all made of dust, subject to temptation, prone to wander (don’t you feel it?). We go to blockbuster movies to see superheroes vanquish evil, but we read memoir to hear human stories, stories that are nuanced, complex, and honest, where winning and losing cannot even be measured. But maybe this is the most compelling reason: We cannot be the heroes of our stories because these stories aren’t actually about us. We’re not studying our lives simply to know ourselves better (though this will happen). Or to offer up to the world our own guttural howl and yelp to the moon. (Though occasionally that is just what is needed.) We are not writing to justify or defend or ennoble ourselves. We are far more ambitious. We’re after growth, however painful. We’re after truth, however hard. We’re hoping our words will serve others. If we’re seekers, we may even be writing ourselves toward God, that he may further shape and author us, allowing us to find ourselves in his story and him in ours.
Not everyone understands this. Because we write our life stories in the first person, some people assume that we write out of ego. As I wrote day after day, I imagined my family of origin muttering, “Oh there she goes again, writing about herself. She’s nothing special.” The mutterings weren’t imagined, actually, and they’re perfectly right. I am no one special. I am everyman and everywoman, as common as dirt. I know that every quandary and question that plagues me visits a thousand, a hundred thousand others. So I dare to ask for all of us.
The memoir was one of those “dares.” I didn’t know it at the time, but writing into and through my first twenty years in that piece of Alaskan wilderness gave me a vocabulary to name this new life and world. It gave me courage to call out secrets and doubts. I finally saw what I was looking for all along: wholeness, belonging. At nineteen, I thought I found it in Duncan and in this raw, stormy land. But I discovered that what I was looking for couldn’t be found in a person or in a place: It must be made, and it is made out of whatever is around you, whatever is given, whatever can be found. Sometimes all we’re given is words. But words are more than enough.
In the next few months, the memoir was done. I was exhausted, but the bones were walking.
Maybe they were even dancing.
Your Turn!
- 1. Read Amy Reiff’s short piece, “Held,” and Duc Vu’s longer piece, “A Bike after My Own Heart,” which is set in Vietnam. Amy’s piece is the final draft begun with the prompt For once, I want to tell the truth about the night I was so scared. Duc’s is part of a memoir about his escape from Vietnam. What kind of editing decisions do you think each writer had to make?
- 2. You’ve written scenes from your life, which detail the outer story. You’ve done WordSeeking into those scenes to find the inner story. Now we’re ready for the inner story to edit and focus the outer story. To help you in this process, choose one of the life stories that you’ve brought this far. To prepare and help focus your thoughts for a new version, go through the form below, “From Bones to Moving Bodies: A Guide to Resuscitation,” answering every question.
- 3. You’re ready now to create a new, more finished draft of your story. But caution! Don’t try to cut and paste a new draft from earlier versions. That’s like putting a new patch on a tattered quilt. With your new ideas and insights, start fresh! Don’t worry, all the writing you’ve done until now will make this new draft easier and quicker. Take as much or as little time as you want. With focused attention, and with your new skills, you can write a decent LifeStory in an hour. You can spend a year on it, as well. But the greatest danger in writing our stories is not that we write them too quickly —it’s that we don’t write them at all.
- 4. When you’ve finished the new LifeStory (which can be done in class), gather into your LifeStory Circles and share your work with one another. Talk about some of the editing decisions you made.
HELD
by Amy C. Reiff
It was in the middle of the winter, frigid cold, thirty-something below zero, Fairbanks, Alaska. The surgeon had told us that Stanley had to have this surgery: a bilateral derotation osteotomy with abductor releases. It could not wait; his hips were coming out of the sockets. Without this surgery, he would live in pain, deformed.
Stanley was only five. He had cerebral palsy. His frail body weighed all of forty pounds, held together by muscles so strong, his bones would not stay in their proper places. The muscles needed to be released to break the tension. If successful, the operation would bring growth and vitality to his body.
In the hospital now, it was hard to see him lying on a bed so large it swallowed his small, bent frame. My husband, Stan, and I walked with him to the double swinging doors at the end of the hall and handed him off to a waiting nurse. “We’ll take good care of him. Don’t worry; he’s in good hands,” she said, smiling pleasantly just before the doors swung behind the oversized gurney.
I felt weak. Too weak to face another monstrous surgery with Stanley. I was still healing from surgery myself. Baby number three, just four weeks earlier, had been surgically removed from my body.
I cannot lie —I was afraid. I was fearful of this whole process: cutting bones in half, removing a wedge of femur, legs rotated, plates attached, then screws drilled through. I was afraid he would not make it through. I was afraid of the pain he would experience; he did not have a voice or words to speak of it. I was afraid of not being able to console him.
In my anxiety, I prayed for God’s help. Prayed that my body would be able to nurse my infant still. I wanted to turn away from this monster, but it seemed to keep coming. I think it was my mind that tormented me most. I wanted peace but just didn’t understand how to let go. The muscle of fear was disjointing my trust. How could I trust deeply when I was hurting so deeply? I knew in my head that God was enough, but my body had chosen to focus on the needles, the scapula, the agony my child would endure.
How do you trust God when you are afraid? Can one really reach out and take it? This gift God meant it to be? Can one want it badly enough that the desire changes you?
As we waited, a group of us sat in a circle. Stan and I, our newborn, Rhett, our pastor and friends and my sister, Reba, all sat close together around the room, as if held in the hand of a warm and inviting personal friend. Reba, fourteen years my elder, had left her job to spend the next four weeks with us. I will never forget her sacrifice. They had all come to throw their arms around us, to encourage us, to pray and to wait with us so we didn’t have to face these moments alone. They held us together with their strength, for our strength was gone.
When the nurses brought Stanley back, his face was white with pain. He could not speak to us to describe the shock of trauma his body was experiencing. It was all in his face —white, almost translucent. His eyes were sea green, their color lost. His small body was covered from his chest down in a fresh, thick white cast, with a bar between his knees. From the chest down, he was unable to move. Stanley lay still, frightened.
Here was our child, knit together by God from our flesh, known by our Father before he was even born. God knew Stanley now in this room of suffering. We knew God had not abandoned him. And neither would we.
We did not leave Stanley’s bedside. But as we stood there, our son seemed too far away. Without warning, Stan lifted the rail that had come between him and his son. He bent his six-foot-one-inch frame onto Stanley’s sterile hospital bed. With strong arms and love flowing through his veins, he scooped him into his arms, body cast and all, and held him. He held him through the tears of his broken body. Held him through the confusion of this nightmare. Held him through the rest of that day and through the night, until the pain gave way to rest.
Stanley was held.
A BIKE AFTER MY OWN HEART
by Duc Vu
When South Vietnam collapsed on April 30, 1975, my father lost his job with the US Air Force base in Bien Hoa military airport. There were seven of us in my family: my parents, second-oldest sister, next-older sister, younger brother, and youngest sister. My oldest and third-oldest sisters were married and had their own families. I was sixteen and would begin my junior year in the fall. We had no income whatsoever. My parents quietly started selling their valuables to get food. Wrinkles deepened around my mother’s eyes, while my father’s shoulders bent as if under a huge weight.
As the oldest son, who traditionally bore the main responsibility for the well-being of the family, I felt helpless and ashamed. Nobody in my family said anything to me because I wasn’t eighteen yet, but the burden I felt was tangible.
My oldest sister’s husband, Lam, was a captain in the South Vietnam army, so with six children, he was in a situation a lot worse than mine. Sharing the same familial humiliation, Lam and I often talked about what we might do to make some money. There was no possibility for a regular job because no one hired, and no one knew when the new government would begin closing all private businesses, as a Communist regime would surely do. Everything was up in the air. We knew that no matter what, some means of transportation was indispensable, however. Cars? Forget it —no one in the North owned any car, except the big-party bosses. Motor bicycles? Hardly. Very few folks owned them except the elite. Bicycles? Certainly —everyone could afford a bike. The VC soldiers and party cadres all cherished their China-made bikes as if the bikes were their beloved —cleaning them, polishing them, keeping them in their living room.
It wasn’t possible to open a bike shop, but a bike-repair shop was not forbidden. New bikes couldn’t be purchased, but new bike accessories were available for sale, especially tires. An idea flashed in my mind. I drove my brother-in-law’s motorbike to the main flea market in Saigon to check the prices there. I was ecstatic at what I found.
In the 1970s, one particular type of bicycle was very popular, at least in Asia. The standard bicycle has a fifty-five-centimeter-diameter wheel, and a racing bike has a sixty-five-centimeter-diameter wheel. The Japanese produced bikes with forty-five- and thirty-five-centimeter-diameter wheels and called them minibikes, or simply minis. Unlike the standard frame with three pieces of steel tubes welded together, the miniframe consisted of one single tube bent into the shape of a check mark, similar to the Lexus logo. Their colors were usually bright and striking. But it was their round, black tires that caught my eyes.
As soon as I found out the price of a minitire in Saigon, I drove the motorbike to a repair shop in downtown Bien Hoa and bought every minitire there —about a dozen pairs. I tied them on the seat behind me. Not enough room. I put the rest down in a pile on the ground, stepped into the hole, pulled them up around my waist, and sat on the Kawasaki. Like a hula-hoop dancer with half a dozen hoops, I rode back to the flea market. They sold like hot cakes, and the merchants asked me for more. That trip alone earned me almost a hundred VN dong. I felt like a man.
From then on, my mission was to buy as many tires as I could find —not just minitires but all kinds of bicycle tires. I made my profits from the ignorance of the repair-shop owners. Once these tires were gone, they would never be restocked, for there was no importation whatsoever. And I felt great. When the tire supplies ran out —which didn’t take long —I handled all main components: rims, hubs, chains, freewheels, chainwheels, pedals, brakes, and seats. Again, once their merchandise was sold, these shops would have no more parts as replacements for their clients, or they would have to pay much higher prices for the same items. Yet I never hesitated when I found a piece at low price. I had my own family to help support. The more the better. I expanded my territory to include Long Khanh and Vung Tau, two neighboring cities about one hundred kilometers away. I bought quick and sold fast.
But my business soon ended. By the summer of 1975, I hardly found any more profitable accessories. They all went to the flea market in Saigon, or the owners found out and kept them for themselves. But I had one consolation. I kept the best of what I had found to build my own bicycle: the hubs, chainwheel, pedals, tires, bottom brake axle, bell, and stem were French; freewheel and handlebar were German; chain, rims, brakes, spokes, and carrier were Japanese; the seat was Italian. I personally picked every item, and I put them together with care and devotion. It was a bike after my own heart.
When it was completely assembled, it stood there triumphant. The frame was in deep green with highlights in gold. The handlebar had a tall U-shape, preferred to the low bar for comfort and ease. The Italian seat was rare, for the Italians were famous for their racing bikes, not the regular ones. Its contours were so flexible as to snugly fit anyone. It looked good. It felt good.
On my first ride on the bike, I took a meandering route in the neighborhood. People noticed and chuckled. The pedals under my feet rotated effortlessly as if by their own will. Any bump on the road was absorbed by the springs under the seat. As I went once, twice, and thrice around the neighborhood with hands high on the handlebar, I felt confidence, pride, and pleasure. Every night, I kept the bike in the living room. Every day, I dusted it and checked the lubricants. The bike was the culmination of all the opportunities presented to me.
I adored it —but my next-door neighbors lusted for it. They were three young drug addicts who stayed inside their closed doors during the day and went out at night. They used to live with their wealthy parents but were kicked out because they stole every salable item in their parents’ home. The parents bought the house next to mine just to keep them away. Thus, even though I kept my bike in the living room, I still locked it with a big chain.
One evening, my family had a prayer service for my grandfather. The bike was moved from the living room to the kitchen, which was detached from the main house. That night, the bike wasn’t moved back into the living room but remained in the kitchen room overnight.
As soon as morning broke, I rushed to the kitchen —and skidded to a stop. The bike was gone. I wanted to cry but couldn’t. My insides were scooped out empty. The bike was more than a prized possession to me; it was part of me. For the first time, I understood loss. My gut feeling was that my neighbors had stolen it. (A decade later, these men admitted to stealing my bike.)
Lying awake late that night, I wondered if God had punished me for my business practices. The faces of the shop owners whose goods I had cleaned out stared at me. Of course, I didn’t do anything illegal. But I did pretend to be in the bike-repair business so that I could buy parts more easily from them. And the way they looked at me when I returned to their shops to scour for more parts, they knew. Had the chickens come home to roost?
More than thirty years have passed, but I still miss the bike. It was uniquely mine, beautifully, wonderfully assembled. Even in the darkest pages of Vietnam’s recent history, I could still find exquisite components to turn into something wondrous. Now, living in the United States, pastoring a large parish, I have much more of everything. But I find myself still doing it —creating and assembling shiny wonders after my own heart. Someday, I hope, I will stop.