This time last week, I did not know that my maternal Irish grandfather went to Oxford and later served as an officer in the British army. This time last week, I did not know that my maternal American grandmother, a social butterfly of Denver’s ruling class, was a Francophone and sculptor.
This time last week, I did not know that my great-grandfather was a prominent Colorado mine owner. Had I not been writing this book and fallen down an Ancestry.com rabbit hole when I started looking for answers to character development questions of my late sister-in-law, I would never have known this. My mother was adopted, you see, and these details of her biological ancestors are all new to me.
Fredrick Ó Nialláin Neylan. Fredrick L.L. Neylan. Fredrick Leopold Leslie Neylan. Helen Harker. Ms. Helen Harker Neylan. There they are, my grandparents, a hundred years ago in the society pages of the Denver Post, he leaving his station in Canada to court her in the mile-high city. She accepting his hand in marriage. He traversing the Rockies to claim his bride like a miner bagging his gold. All of this gives me insight into why my mother may have left her adopted childhood home of St. Louis, migrating west to settle in Colorado. She wanted to be closer to her biological roots.
But anyway, I digress. Because writing, as I’m discovering, is 90% digressing and 10% writing. And that’s why it takes so damn long.
The fundamental elements of a story’s structure are proportion and order. Managing proportion is the art of making some things big and other things little: of creating foreground and background; of making readers feel the relative importance of characters, events, and ideas. Often this means upsetting normal expectations by finding a superficially trivial detail or moment that, on closer examination, resonates with meaning. – Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction
I reverted to outlining this week, mapping the timeline of my life to a diagram of the three-act structure. If it serves the story, I may decide to re-order the timeline, perhaps recounting things in an order other than which they happened. If it doesn’t, I won’t. I did write some of my independent scenes from my Big List of Memories while at the Rolling Huts and, interestingly enough, the memories that surfaced for me to write first were memories of my first marriage. Is this because, at 18 years old, I was also coming of age? Like my mother was at only 20 years old when she went to Dublin to pick out a baby.
Anyway, in honor of my Irish heritage, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
Ar aghaidh (by the way, Irish is Irish, not Gaelic).
Things That Nourished My Writing: March 8-15.
BOOKS
Aspen Style (because I was born there).
FASHION
Filson Mackinaw Cruiser (because I am tired of Gore-Tex).
Troentorp Clogs, the best pandemic shoes.
FILM
FOOD
Sea Wolf Chocolate Croissants (Damn, girl! Seattle has good bakeries.)