Digging in The Past, Again

I’ve been writing an essay. I’m basically writing it because I’ve been trying to get into this one publication for about half a year, and I’m almost there. If I could just tease out a theme, said the editor, I love the stories, but where’s the theme?

For the love of all that is sane, I cannot figure out why I do this thing, writing, but there you go. Without it, I fear I am nothing, that my meaning runs dry. That I’m simply a snail shell, and the writing is the snail. It’s going to crawl away and leave me…empty.

***

I’ve always had a hard time with tying things together. I’m good at metaphor, at symbolism, at wrapping a truth up in one sentence. I’m good at showing you what happened and asking you to figure it out, the “show don’t tell” literary tactic that was drilled into me in my creative writing program (so what if it doesn’t make sense, decribe the oily black depths of the cesspool under the halo of a yellow moon) But for me to figure it out for you? That seems like cheating.

***

I took up the challenge.

I have written this same essay about twenty times now. It’s a classic case of what my husband calls my “obsession.” I get all into something and it becomes all there is. Every conversation turns back to this thing I’m working on. I can parallel what you just told me about steak sauce to my essay, tie it in to you stubbing your toe just now.

I’m like that picture of the writer who is writing a draft, crumpling it up, tossing it until she is surrounded by piles and piles of paper, except if electronic word documents were paper, I wouldn’t be able to breathe, there would be so much paper around me.

Each draft, I told myself, wow. This is it.

But it never really was it, not in a way that I knew this editor would need. Not in a way I thought the readers would want.

The first time, I sent it to a friend–I thought it was done. The second time I asked the same friend advice in a roundabout way and he gave me some really good advice on roughing it up, teasing out the theme, “going there,” again.  So I did. I spent an excorbitant amount of time reflecting, reliving, analyzing and trying to figure out the why of the story, the theme, the lesson learned, tried to round everyone out, good and bad sides included.

With the third draft, I felt like I’d expanded some truths, but it still didn’t have that thing. Something was missing. I sent it to two friends, and they both had different angles on how it could be expanded upon, worked out. I took both of their good advice and tied it in.

Then I was left to my own devices again. I tweaked at it, using google docs on my iPhone, for two days straight, putting it aside and coming back to it. I interviewed the people in my life who knew about the events that transpired, namely, my husband, asking what he thought. I tied his words in. I read it out loud to myself. I read it out loud to him. I reworded it. I typed it up from scratch.  I read each paragraph multiple times, switching sentences to be stronger, rewording to make things more concise.

Then, I simply hit a wall. I do not want to look at it, because I keep tweaking it. I can’t stop. It’s become some type of fixation at this point. I have to get it. I have to make it work.

At this point, I am not sure if I’ve succeeded in finding a theme, but I’ve learned a lot about myself from digging through these memories in my head, memories I’ve hashed out in a number of ways for a number of different stories.

I also dug up things that were true, but unnecessary for the story. A couple of times I looked at what I wrote, sat back and went, “Ouch. That hurt.” Or I laughed, because in retrospect, something was funny, even though at the time, it was horrifying. I went back and erased things, I tried to fit paragraphs into one or two sentences.

It took me, for this essay, talking to four separate people, not including myself, to get to the themes the editor was asking me to weave in, the themes he pointed out when reading the first draft. And I still don’t think I have it. I’ve succeeded in making myself insecure and crazy. I have a lot of good drafts, but I’m fearing none are *the* draft. Maybe I’m being too much of a perfectionist. Maybe, as usual, I am trying too hard, taking myself too seriously.

My point in doing all of this? I don’t know. I feel sometimes as if I’m simply a crazy person focusing my OCD on typing words and getting them perfect. But I’m hoping, like a recent short story I wrote, that when I set it aside for a day or a few hours, I can go back to it and find what I was looking for, find that I’ve finally written out a tiny piece of my truth, my experience, what makes me who I am.

And as a result, I hope telling about my experiences, in this case, about dating dysfunctional people, I can hold a mirror up for other people, that they might see something of themselves in what I slaved away to coax out. Maybe they won’t make the same mistakes I did. Maybe they will stop in their tracks.

I know, I’m not really telling you anything, not using metaphors or phrases or giving your examples to tie it all in, but I don’t want to right now. I’m done. I’ve squeezed the blood from the freaking stone. It’s over. That’s it. I’m letting this thing go, this Frankenstein creation, and I’m hoping it won’t haunt me, killing all that I held dear, peeking in their windows, strangling them. I gave up everything else in my life to work obsessively on this freaking story, and here we are. I’m going to spark it into life, see if it walks on its own.