when getting in the head of a female...

i've had a lot of people ask me whether yesterday's post really happened (well, more than one person, anyway). and, yes, it did. i invented the old lady, urns, and pink slippers, but the basic storyline was conceived in the brick and mortar of the real world.

if time grew on trees (like money, leaves, and squirrels), it might be interesting to see whether my future elaborations of whitney's story got closer and closer to the truth or whether they drifted off in an entirely new direction, an entirely different kind of truth. i'm not sure which would be best, but either way, i still think that i'd struggle with writing as a female narrator. however, my brief encounter with SPU's writer types may have offered some encouragment (should i ever choose this unusual path) and affirmed my earlier writing strategy.

one afternoon, as the MFA students salt-and-peppered the room with their writerly epiphanies, mark explained that he'd had a breakthrough in writing his female character. he'd struggled for months trying to make her seem more natural: he'd made her obsessed with alcohol, sex, and sewing fabrics*, but nothing seemed to work. then one day he tried something counterintuitive: he decided to write her as himself, as mark the lumbering tall guy, just without the lumbering tall guy part. and it worked!

then, during an art and faith lecture, the MFAers tossed about martin buber's idea of writing as the other. they discussed the interconnected mirror-like relationship between the self and other seemingly foreign characters. now, all of a sudden, i'm starting to feel like a writer--i broached that very issue several posts ago! weird....

andrew david. "writer's block" greenwood, wa.

*i can't remember the third item that mark named, so i made this one up. it was definitely something less unisex than beer and sex. something like sewing fabrics.

the crime

as you can probably tell, i didn't get a chance to craft that short story that i'd been planning (and also mentioned here) before i left to visit the SPU MFA students at camp casey, and now that i've been humbled by their brilliance, i'm afraid that the best i can do for this first-person narrative is a basic plot outline:

the main character starts by nervously introducing herself as whitney, a nordic do-gooder with rather central american tastes. we get the sense that she doesn't really want to be here, narrating her story to a thousand invisible cyberfaces.

(although, i'm not really sure how this hesitation would be communicated to readers; after all, unless she breaks the illusion that this is a story and directly addresses the crowd, how are we to know that this whitney is uncomfortable in the spotlight. still, it's a necessary bit of foreshadowing, so a solution must be found.)

she then sets the scene in the cosmetic aisle of the community drug store. a wild looking man in a trench coat and fuzzy pink slippers approaches her and asks for shopping tips. he speaks out of the side of his mouth and smells like alcohol. he seems desperate. the elderly woman who was camped out at the table of free estee lauder samples flees, but whitney considers the alarm bells in her head and can't help but assist the man as he shops for his two girlfriends. if i weren't so clueless about cosmetics, i might mention all of the product types that he tosses in his cart, but perhaps it's sufficient to mention that whitney is surprised by the breadth and volume of the man's generosity.

the story climaxes a few minutes later as whitney finishes her shopping and joins the man in line. his lips twitch as he approaches the clerk and announces, "that this is a robbery."

sure enough, the man appears to have a gun or a convincing ketchup bottle in the left front pocket of his scrappy corduroys. as whitney tells the tale, she spreads the tension on thick. thoughts of violence fill her mind. she peels her attention away from the man and the emptying till long enough observe other customers: a nine-year old tugging insistently at his mother's jeans and estee lauder lady peeking from behind a stack of holiday urns.

and then the man is gone and the police arrive. she then learns that some of the employees think that whitney is an accomplice. at this point, my notion of the story grows cloudy. if i'm writing creative nonfiction, she tells her story to the officer, runs through the store to repurchase her goods (the man took them with his perfume), and has trouble sleeping the next night. if i'm a fiction writer, she is arrested for the man's crime. or better yet, perhaps it's all a rouse and she turns out to be a real-life accomplice.

well, i suppose it doesn't matter much: there is no story, just an outline.

(but there is an afterword!)

espn. "andrew's bracket as of sunday night."

march madness (1) and a clarification (2)

1. here's the st. louis region of my march madness bracket. i haven't watched much college ball this year, so it would be a miracle if i nailed many of these games. but not according to the newspaper industry--i was browsing a forum of angry newspaper editors this afternoon, and those crotchety red inksters insisted that there is no room for miracles in the media. writers, get your religious beliefs out of our stories, they cried. this seemed rather excessive to me. i appreciate that a journalist's duty is to report the news and not reflect on it (that's what the quasi-anchors and pundits do), and perhaps we over-use the term in colloquial speech, but as one poster suggested, miracles have been around since chaucer, why should they stop now?

(despite the presence of a few upsets, the closest thing to a miracle in my bracket is the prospective advancement of UNLV into the sweet sixteen.)


2. i hope yesterday's post wasn't misleading. i started the post by describing authorial out-of-body experiences in which writers swap the self for the other and then i concluded with a subtle variation on that idea: rather than dwelling within another soul, my next step is to sample others' experiences and make them my own. thus you won't find me speaking in an unfamiliar dialect or complaining about cramps. i'll still be expressing some sense of myself, but i'll be using new avenues for this exploration. that is, if i follow through and actually write something....

the something that i wrote