Writing Beginnings

More from Utah

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I’m thinking about this quote from Louise Erdrich’s A Blue Jay’s Dance - “Beginnings suggest endings and I can't help thinking about the continuum, the span, the afters, and the befores.”

I read A Blue Jay’s Dance in college while writing a paper on Erdrich and while it was beautiful, I don’t think it resonated with me very much as it is a memoir on the first year of motherhood. But I think about this quote a lot. It was bouncing back and forth in my head as we hiked in Canyonlands National Park while I thought about how to write the beginning of a novel. The pain of starting things.

While I loved my education at Columbia College Chicago in the Creative Writing Department, one thing they seriously did not teach us was how to begin. The curriculum was (I say was because I think they have phased out the Story Workshop Method that was taught to us then) largely focused on scenes and moments happening with dialogue. They encouraged stories that had two people in a place doing something. They wanted heightened moments and the meat of the story. I think this is why a lot of Columbia graduates have gone on to write vignette collections. Movies always show a writer sitting down at their desk and writing the first sentence of a book first. Typing out something like “I remember when it all began…” then just going. Front to back. This is not my experience - I have not learned how to write linearly. I think this is generally okay because I can amass a lot of different scenes and moments and then draw them all together with connective tissue and make the story make sense in a timeline. But some exposition is needed when writing, always. I can’t get away without some set up, at least with this story I’m writing.

(Side note interjection from the last paragraph- Story Workshop Method is a writing philosophy and processed-based way of writing that was created by John Schulz in Chicago in the 60’s. John started teaching Story Workshop Method at Columbia College Chicago at the same time and that’s how I learned it in 2013ish. John was still alive and teaching when I was in college and we all existed under his magical realm. All telling stories that took place in the moment, sitting in circles, using imaginative word play to dig deeper. John passed in 2017 after I graduated and with him, the Story Workshop Method has gone at Columbia. The writing method itself means a lot to me and has shaped how I think and feel about writing. May he Rest In Peace and may his ideas and spirit live on in all of our writing.)

So today I decided I needed to write beginnings. I don’t know if it will be the exact beginning I end up going with or if it’s even going to make it into the novel itself but I realized I had to set up the characters on the page first and they couldn’t just keep floating as these non-static versions of myself that change slightly every time I write something new down. Everything has to begin right? But this feels hard right now- it’s stuck in my throat like acid reflux I wanna force back down. I don’t want to regurgitate how this story started. Trying to explain how it all started so sweet. The boyfriend character soft and light in the beginning saying that my eyes were the color of root beer. Me not knowing where things would go- the ending that the beginning suggested.

How do you write a character that’s real but feels like they only exist in your memory? I am fictionalizing most everything I’m writing so it will not be completely parallel to the truth but it will be close. Writing this exposition has drudged up memories of the first time I saw him, what I thought then, the person I was then. It’s brutal. I had a lot of questions for myself then that I still can’t answer now. How can I write the beginning of the story of these characters that so closely resembles what happened to me when even I can’t answer why?

Is why a question I can answer in this novel at all? I think that’s why I’m experiencing pain while writing and bringing up these memories. I’m trying to force myself to find a ‘why’ in the midst of all this. Because if I write a beginning, then I need to write an ending, and endings need resolve.

Maybe the resolve here is me right now- far away, years away, from the non-fiction version of this story. The me that has spent the last 4-5 years healing and learning and sometimes ignoring the pain that brought me here.

I started writing early yesterday morning and got myself in a weird headspace- lost between the fictional characters I’m writing and the real life experience I had. I pulled myself away from my laptop and got on instagram and unblocked the ex-boyfriend to take a quick look. I was trying to remind myself that he was real and not a ghost that just rode along with me on canyon trails years ago. I wanted to make sure he was still alive, albeit doing well. He looks the same- older. I scrolled back a couple of posts and saw that he went back to Utah in June of this year. It shook me in a weird way- that somehow our paths are crossing again. But I think the reality of it is that were both trying to find ways to heal- that’s what I hope for him. I hope he is writing beginnings too.

I ended up blocking him again because, well, boundaries are still good. I tried to go on with my day. My mom and I hiked to a waterfall in Moab and when we got there it was so quiet. There was only a couple others who had hiked the mile or so back through the brush and red rock to get to it. The water itself was freezing cold (run off from melt in the La Sal mountains) and getting in was a shock to the system after being baked in 99 degree heat on the hike in.

I promised no cliches but there is something to be said about the physical act of rinsing yourself. Plunging yourself in bodies of water where you can’t see the bottom and coming up with a breathless gasp and then wanting to do it again. When I was having sad teenager moments in high school I used to take baths and put my head under the water to hear the complete silence and the rushing sound created by the faucet running- I would try and reset myself and come up feeling better. It did always work. We hiked up on the red rock bluff above the swimming hole where the mouth of the waterfall was. The creek was shallow there so I sat down in the water, my legs outstretched on slick rock. I listened to the quiet and the rushing of the water over the cliff in front of me. The creek had started far up in the mountains and made its way down into this canyon. I imagine it lost speed at some points and then picked up again when there was a bend in the rock. The water I was sitting in was slow yet still rushing past me - it was surprising how just yards in front of me, it picked up pace and started again and threw itself off the side of the rock and plunged itself down below. Jumping before looking. Just going. I thought maybe I can do that too.