Quick:

What do you remember about March 7, 2005?

What do you remember about September 11, 2001?

Now, for all I know, you were a teenager giving birth on March 7, 2005. Or, like someone I know, you lost your spouse of sixty years on 9/11/01, and that’s what you remember. But if you are like me, nothing special happened on March 7, 1995, and you don’t remember it at all. Whereas on a day, some years earlier, everything seemed to be changing, and you remember where you were, what you were doing, who you called, what you did next . . . unless you were so traumatized that you’ve blocked major portions of your day. Memory is a storyteller. Or perhaps it would make more sense to say that stories are patterned after the human mind and soul, which is to say, the human memory.

What can the storyteller learn from human memory?

1) Not all events are equal. Not everything is part of the story just because it happened, too, just as not all the marble in the block became part of Michaelangelo’s David.

2) Details become very important when life is in crisis. The memory zeros in on the physical world. (See #4)

3) Build up, backstory and filling in the in between stuff are NOT important: jump cuts are part of human memory and serve story well.

4) Actions reveal character. You are fascinated by what you and everyone else did. Interior monologue is largely left out of memory. What you wore, who you touched, where you went–these are what stick and carry all the meaning.

5) Change–or the enormous and powerful possibility of change–are at the heart of memory and story.

Story and memory are the heightened bits, repressed or vivid, that move us to peer closely or to turn away. Everything else is just another day.

Authenticity note: I was living at 12th Street and Avenue A in the LES on Sept. 11, 2001 and teaching at Pratt in Brooklyn that morning.

What will you always remember? What have you learned from memory?

[NOTE: The GIVEAWAY is located in my Oct. 21 blog, below.]

Lately, my sons have taken to picking up the books I am reading. Leo seems particularly drawn to A Spot of Bother (by Mark Haddon), which I have floating around the bed in hardback. “That’s Mommy’s book,” I say.

He looks through the pages.

“There are no pictures,” I tell him. “The pictures are in the words.”

This is a key point in writing. It’s not that we move beyond pictures; it’s that we find them in the lines that we read. I am working on this is my class right now: you have all these wonderful ideas about your characters and your plot. How, when you sit down to write at a fast pace next month, will you turn those thoughts into pictures, into scene, into physical actions and details? This is probably the number one issue I tackle in editing, too. I want to see see see (taste, touch, smell and hear) the world you are giving me. I don’t want to have to trust you and your understanding of the characters and their choices. I want the evidence laid out before me so that I can decide what’s going on for myself.

Here’s an example: your friend is dating someone new. She tells you about him. Do you really want to know if she thinks he’s nice or smart or considerate? No, you want to know if he arrived on time and where he took her to eat and what he looks like and what they talked about and why he and his ex broke-up . . . You want no abstract ideas. You want physical evidence. CSI style.

There’s another quote whose originator I don’t know: “The more he talked of his honesty, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Let’s face it: We don’t trust people’s opinions of themselves. They’re telling, but not in a one-to-one translation of idea to fact.

Scenes from a wedding:

We have seconds to spare when Angie, the boys, their stroller, snacks, diapers, my extra shoes and alternate outfit and I roll up to the San Francisco City Hall. The over-loaded stroller goes through a special gate, but we, in our fancy clothes, go through the metal detectors. The building is paved in marble, with statues of mayors scattered throughout. We dash along, past the grand staircase and under the chandeliers. We wait in a line, fill out a form, are given a number (A110), and wait in another line. Quickly, we are called forward to present our IDs. The woman takes a look at mine and hands in back. “This expired yesterday.” Yesterday! My birthday. Of course.

Our options: go to the SF DMV and try to get a renewal or drive home and hope that my passport is where it should be and is not expired. Well, you’ve been to the DMV. I take my long white dressed self and drive back to Berkeley. I pray to the parking goddess that my passport–unlike anything else in the house–in where it should be. I listen to the radio. I think about the class I am teaching tonight. I receive an angry call from the place where we’d made a reservation for lunch.

We are getting married this day because it is the very last appointment available before Nov. 4, and on Nov. 4, there is the possibility that we will no longer have the right to be married. In fact, Oct. 22, 2008 is the four year anniversary of my father’s death and the day after my birthday when my license expires and a day I teach at 6 p.m. and we haven’t had time to plan anything or create a real wedding or even to learn–as I did as soon as we signed up for it–that I really wanted all of that. But there is a ticking time bomb: if this doesn’t happen now, it may never happen. And for the sake of my children, not to mention my relationship, it needs to happen.

I rush into the house, slide a box of toys and a folded rug back from where they’ve been pushed in front of my filing cabinet. I kneel down in my white dress and fling open the top drawer and being to file through the neat tabs that someone helped me put together a couple of years ago but which I rarely actually use. Bills and Insurance and this and that and then Official documents. There are the boys’ birth certificates. I lift them out and there, at the bottom of the folder, is my passport. I fumble it open and look closely: it expires in 2013.

We meet again at City Hall and feed the boys some apples and plums babyfood. Some San Francisco friends show up. Shilla brings a beautiful bouquet for me and a boutonniere for Angie. Katia brings lavender that smells wonderful, and strongly enough to cover the smell Leo brings right as our second number (B263) is called. Thea comes from work nearby, and brings joy and tears at all the right moments. Jennifer brings a fancy camera and her son Jacko, who had to leave chess early, and who consents to bear the rings.

A woman named Noni marries us. She wears the officiants’ outfit of long black robes and her head is shaved. She looks like a Buddhist monk, as if we are being married my a young Pema Chodrun. She zips us up the elevator to the rotunda. Charlie hates the elevator and Leo wants “more” elevator. Instead, we stand in a circle of darker marble, Angie and I. Charlie is on her back in the Ergo, and Angie has to bounce throughout the ceremony to keep Charlie on this side of the contented/ hysterical line.

Then Noni is speaking, about grace and love and commitment, about the honor she has of being vested by the State of California with the power to declare us “spouses for life.” And we?

We do!

It was rushed and crazy, but in that moment, I was fully present. I looked into Angie’s beautiful blue eyes, and I heard every word I was being asked, and I could agree to all of it, willingly. Really, what more could I ask?

But for purposes of today’s literary lesson, I want to bring you back to that moment when I did not have the correct ID and this was possibly the last possible chance to get married ever. This is what is known as a ticking time bomb, something in the plot that is set to go off at a certain time. It raises the stakes, ups the ante and puts all kinds of pressure on the obstacles that create a story.

When you get married? Check the expiration on your ID and bring an extra one just in case. But when you write your novel? Make sh*t happen, make it matter, and make sure it will explode, turn coaches into pumpkins and horses into rats, just at midnight and not a second later. And make sure that I, your reader, can see it with my own eyes. Don’t make me trust you. I’m saving that for my spouse!

VOTE NO ON PROP. 8

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of board books. You know, the square-ish kind with thick, cardboard pages. Goodnight, Moon and Bert’s Bedtime Story and Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I read them aloud, of course, and Leo and Charlie take turns (more or less) turning the pages. Very often, they turn two or three or five pages at once–sometimes on purpose, when the pace of the story needs some pick-up, and often by accident, when enthusiasm to see what happens next overcomes finger dexterity. In those latter instances, we find ourselves suddenly on the wrong page, a step ahead of where the story should be. We pause. I say, “We skipped a page!” and back we go to rescue the overlooked piece of the rhyme or plot turn.

I have such a strong memory of this phenomenon: skipping a page. The visceral feeling of suddenly landing where you did not expect to land. You see, we readers are participant storytellers. We understand the build of a story as well as any writer; the story operates in concert with our expectations–meeting them, surprising them convincingly, or surprising them wrongly, terribly wrongly–as when a page is simply skipped.

So strong is my memory of this, that I came back to it at this juncture in my life without realizing that it really doesn’t happen to me anymore in my own reading. I had to stop and think about this; I no longer accidentally skip a page–or very rarely. Well, come to think of it, I suppose there have been those moments when the line of text on the following page did not sensically flow from the preceeding page. So it does happen as an adult, but not five, six times a day. And yet I know exactly what has happened, as if I myself were one or two or three just yesterday and not some decades back.

There are other things like this, stuff we learn to navigate, only to outgrow: Stepping on the heel of our own shoe. Falling over onto flat palms. (Remember the sting?) The heaviness of jeans logged with wet sand. Bringing a piece of cheese up to your mouth and popping it in, only to discover that the cheese has tumbled away and you are popping in nothing. (“Goodnight Nobody.”) The pleasure of being able to accurately identify your own nose and head and ears and belly. And how LONG an hour can be, filled with so many different books and games and activities and maybe a snack, too.

This is what writing gives back to you, and children, too: attention to detail, delight in detail, and yes, sometimes, frustration with detail. A genuine love affair with the minutiae that, in the end, may be all there really is, though we shift our investments to theories and overviews and goals, to large organizing principles that claim to move and sort the details.

Story makes that claim, too, I suppose. I am in the process of mapping a book I wrote–first draft–in seven weeks. Now I am imposing order, logic, a train of motion. But I think it’s important to remember the surprise of skipping a page, the close-up view of the sidewalk when suddenly you’re horizontal and your hands sting, the world of the story that is made up of invisible pieces of cheese that leave your mouth empty and wondering.