A Late Change
For the most part, I regard the manuscript of my book as "finished", with the only changes being outgrowths of suggestions or requests from my editor.
But last weekend at my high school reunion, a guy who had been in 8th grade with me approached and described this event: "I had a squirt gun and I came up to you in the cafeteria and squirted you in the face. You just sat there and didn't react and I wanted a reaction so I kept on squirting you. And after a moment you got up and broke your cafeteria lunch tray over the top of my head."
I did, of course, remember the event. I haven't racked up a lot of experience smacking people aross the head with lunchroom trays, so my foray into that activity sort of stands out in my mind. Why didn't I include the event in my book when I wrote it? I don't know for sure; maybe I found it a bit too cringeworthy, or maybe I had a disinclination to portray my 8th grade self as violent. This incident stands out as a solitary "man bites dog" event against the everyday backdrop of the biting going the other direction, and it was my goal, during the original composition of the autobiography from which my book was distilled, to convey how intensely and mercilessly I was picked on, and how alienated and hated I felt. Maybe that's it. Also, I did have a mention of a bunch of disgusting food being dumped all over my lunch when I was trying to eat, so maybe a second mention of an event in the cafeteria seemed too redundant.
Either way, having it brought up to me during the reunion, and hearing it described from the perspective of the other party to the encounter, got me thinking.
A couple years after the event, my next door neighbor laughed about it and said "Oh yeah, you were famous. Everyone was talking about that. There were people who even saved some of the plastic fragments of the broken tray as souvenirs". So let's designate it as memorable. And part of the purpose of attending the reunion was to drum up interest in the book among people who were there for some of the events described within it.
Then there's the interaction I've been having with my editor. He'd like to see more emotional vividness in the early part of my book, more of a sense of what I was feeling at the time. "It's too dry and emotionless. You need to tell it with all the bloody bits... readers want to feel what your character is feeling". But what I was feeling, from pretty early on, was shut down. I'd been told over and over again to not let the bullies see that they were getting to me, and it had become apparent to me that no one was going to intervene - and that I just had to suck it up. So the lunchroom tray incident makes a nice bridge scene in a way: I start off NOT REACTING, and (as we now know from his own description) the boy with the squirt gun wanted a reaction so he kept going, kept squirting me over and over. Then I do react, smashing the tray over his head. So it's got some expression of frustration and anger, and at the same time it contributes to the narrative that I am becoming increasingly unreactive and stoic at this time in my life.
And in retrospect, I think it is good to show my main character (i.e., me) as someone other than a passive victim to whom bad things are happening, and to show how indignant and outraged I was when being treated this way. So in it goes.
I have yanked the short mention of someone dumping a huge glob of mushed-up food all over my lunch and inserted the entire squirt-gun and lunchroom-tray scene as a better replacement.
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But last weekend at my high school reunion, a guy who had been in 8th grade with me approached and described this event: "I had a squirt gun and I came up to you in the cafeteria and squirted you in the face. You just sat there and didn't react and I wanted a reaction so I kept on squirting you. And after a moment you got up and broke your cafeteria lunch tray over the top of my head."
I did, of course, remember the event. I haven't racked up a lot of experience smacking people aross the head with lunchroom trays, so my foray into that activity sort of stands out in my mind. Why didn't I include the event in my book when I wrote it? I don't know for sure; maybe I found it a bit too cringeworthy, or maybe I had a disinclination to portray my 8th grade self as violent. This incident stands out as a solitary "man bites dog" event against the everyday backdrop of the biting going the other direction, and it was my goal, during the original composition of the autobiography from which my book was distilled, to convey how intensely and mercilessly I was picked on, and how alienated and hated I felt. Maybe that's it. Also, I did have a mention of a bunch of disgusting food being dumped all over my lunch when I was trying to eat, so maybe a second mention of an event in the cafeteria seemed too redundant.
Either way, having it brought up to me during the reunion, and hearing it described from the perspective of the other party to the encounter, got me thinking.
A couple years after the event, my next door neighbor laughed about it and said "Oh yeah, you were famous. Everyone was talking about that. There were people who even saved some of the plastic fragments of the broken tray as souvenirs". So let's designate it as memorable. And part of the purpose of attending the reunion was to drum up interest in the book among people who were there for some of the events described within it.
Then there's the interaction I've been having with my editor. He'd like to see more emotional vividness in the early part of my book, more of a sense of what I was feeling at the time. "It's too dry and emotionless. You need to tell it with all the bloody bits... readers want to feel what your character is feeling". But what I was feeling, from pretty early on, was shut down. I'd been told over and over again to not let the bullies see that they were getting to me, and it had become apparent to me that no one was going to intervene - and that I just had to suck it up. So the lunchroom tray incident makes a nice bridge scene in a way: I start off NOT REACTING, and (as we now know from his own description) the boy with the squirt gun wanted a reaction so he kept going, kept squirting me over and over. Then I do react, smashing the tray over his head. So it's got some expression of frustration and anger, and at the same time it contributes to the narrative that I am becoming increasingly unreactive and stoic at this time in my life.
And in retrospect, I think it is good to show my main character (i.e., me) as someone other than a passive victim to whom bad things are happening, and to show how indignant and outraged I was when being treated this way. So in it goes.
I have yanked the short mention of someone dumping a huge glob of mushed-up food all over my lunch and inserted the entire squirt-gun and lunchroom-tray scene as a better replacement.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts