I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
a scene from my life
Last night I went to M’s house for dinner. He had a glass of ice water with lemon ready for me. He poured me a glass of red wine. He’d noticed I ordered Pinot Noir at a restaurant once and had bought a bottle just for us. Then he turned back to prepping vegetables for the salad. He scraped and sliced full-grown carrots with efficient strokes, occasionally handing a piece to Bo, who sat at his feet wagging his tail, hoping for a crunchy bite.
On the counter, four burger patties waited on a plate—each one nearly identical in shape and size, squared-off edges so precise they looked machine-made.
When the grill was hot, M carried the burgers outside.
“It’s 85/15 beef,” he said over his shoulder. “Gotta keep an eye on them in case a fire breaks out.”
“I’d love some char on mine,” I called after him.
Back in the kitchen, he drizzled gluten-free bread with butter and followed it out to the grill, returning a moment later to do the same with a regular bun for himself.
He set out chilled salad bowls—actual cold bowls, like at a steakhouse—and handed me a plate for the burger.
“Which dressing do you want?” he asked, holding up two bottles.
One was raspberry vinaigrette. The other was ranch, a favorite of my last boyfriend, the one I discarded because he bored me.
“Raspberry vinaigrette,” I said.
“I thought that’s what you’d pick! I’m having it too.”
show don’t tell?
With this short scene, I want to communicate to you who M is, without saying it directly. Now you know: He doesn’t take shortcuts, like using already-peeled baby-cut carrots in the salad. He goes beyond what he needs to, like buying me gluten-free bread and then improving upon it with butter. He lives simply–a grilled burger and a side salad for dinner is enough for him, and for me too. We match that way. He pays attention to what I like (the Pinot Noir, the gluten-free bread, feeding my dog crunchy veggies). He’s got good taste—he chose the raspberry vinaigrette to offer as an option, and, along with me, went with that versus the ranch.
That was a fun exercise to write the scene, and now I’ve recorded it for a future memoir project. Right now, I’m working on improving my writing as I rewrite my memoir-in-progress as a set of personal essays about modern love, each of which will be paired with an abstract painting.
the story of the ring
I have an essay in progress right now tentatively called Something Blue that tells the story of how I acquired a Tiffany ring featuring a cushion-cut aquamarine surrounded by a halo of tiny diamonds set in platinum. It’s a gorgeous ring, the most beautiful ring I’ve ever owned. A couple of the pavé border gems have fallen out, lost to the passage of ten years’ time, but you wouldn’t know without a jeweler’s loupe.
Last night as we were walking Bo, M noticed the ring.
“That’s a pretty ring,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen you wear it before.”
I was wearing it on my right hand ring finger. When I got it, it only fit on my left hand, and I wore it on that hand’s ring finger, but later I had it resized. I am all too conscious of the symbolism of wearing a ring on my left-hand ring finger.
I want to share the story (as personal essay) of the ring with M, but it’s a really important story in my life, so I am not going to share it with him or anyone until I’ve made it very, very good. It might take me years to be ready to share it.
There are revelations to be made, characters to be portrayed (including the character of myself at that time of my life), and rich detail to provide interest and engagement. It all takes place against the backdrop of Denver and Steamboat Springs, with mountains and chairlifts and Cherry Creek mall as setting.
I suspect it will make an enlightening and satisfying story, but I don’t feel my writing skills are adequate to it yet. I seek mastery of narrative writing in essay format. In creative work, it’s not enough to merely be inspired. You need skill too.
I spent fifteen years, and more1, developing mastery of the skills I needed to be an effective data scientist and AI/ML leader. Now I’m ready to spend a decade or more on writing, and painting too.
The story of the aquamarine ring from Tiffany is a central pillar of my personal-essays-plus-paintings project. It’s probably the most important gift that set me on the path of writing about Things Men Gave Me. It was one of my most cherished gifts, but also one of the most disappointing.
Ultimately, it became a symbol for me of emotional upheaval, personal growth, and the achievement of independence and autonomy that I so desperately needed after my divorce.
structuring revelation
In Elements of Fiction, Walter Mosely says plot is the structure of revelation. He further explains:
[Coming] back to the phrase structure of revelation, I find that we can meditate on different kinds of structures and reveals; our writing has the potential to show different ways we can make our work transcend itself, bringing new and different truths to the fore.
These truths are in plot, character, physical appearance, place, ideas, and time as it passes.
Through my essays, I’m seek to transcend the stories I tell. I want to use character, time, and place to uncover what matters: the truths beneath the gifts, the meanings that last, the lessons that guide a reader.
Mosely further writes:
Story doesn’t start out as structure but slowly assembles inself into a tale filled with surprises, comparisons, and resolution….
[Fiction] and art in general are mostly instinctual, unconscious endeavors. Certainly there is a good deal of craft in creating revelatory moments in your writing, but that is only mechanics. Discovering what is important to both the story and the reader comes from [a] tumble down the grass hill. What I mean to say is that the child, the child-mind, instinctively understands that the world (in our case the novel) is larger than your head, your conscious experience.
I have found that my best paintings are channeled instinctively or intuitively; they are not planned out. Paintings I plan almost always fail. Similarly I expect my narrative essays are not going to be mechanically outlined, and they may go to places I don’t expect as I tumble down the grass hills of my memory and the meaning I can construct out of it.
- My ten years as a software engineer and software engineering leader were crucial to my success in data science, so all told I had 25 years invested. ↩︎