Read Your Own Stuff

Along with "quit before you get ahead" (our last post) the next logical step to keeping in motion is to read your own stuff.

If you feel stuck for any reason, take a step back to the top of the chapter, the beginning of the current scenario, or the start of the thought you're pursuing.  Read through for a sense of momentum. Sometimes that's all it will take to carry you on to the next sentence.

In working on Free Bird, a memoir about my brother, I stalled out after writing what I thought was a pretty good lead up to an experience he had with a tornado.  Here's an excerpt:

The sky blackened and rain crashed into the scene, flying hard and fast, parallel to the ground, assaulting the strip center.  Then the plate glass window forming the storefront of Glenn’s Coney Island began to bow in toward the transfixed young men.  It bulged, concave, as the vacuum formed by the colliding fronts pushed outside in, toward implosion.  A rumbling, now a roar, overtook all other sound.  Glenn and Harold dropped below the countertop. 

Before they could speak, silence rushed in and sat heavy and ominous around them.  They raised their heads and peered across the room.  Black and still, eerie anticipation held them motionless.  Then Glenn spoke. 

“Let’s get out of here.” 

“Don’t wait for me,” Harold agreed.

 Glenn fished in his jeans pocket for the keys to his van as he hustled across the dining area and to the door like Chester with his prosthetic leg.  Harold flipped a series of electric switches and loped toward the door behind him.  When they crossed the threshold, Glenn slammed the door, threw the deadbolt, and they made for their cars.  Harold headed toward West Tulsa.  Glenn would have to go east northeast.

 He buzzed north to 71^st Street in his hollow, white ’72  Ford Econoline van before turning east ahead of the storm.  When he crossed Lewis Avenue, he looked to his left in time to see a funnel drop from the clouds and begin skipping along the ground, keeping pace.  A long, thin funnel bending into an s-curve, its tip hopped back and forth like an enormous mechanized sewing needle zigzagging across the neighborhood, choosing this house, then that one, to demolish in a brutal blitz.  Lumber and rooftops and trees burst into the air in a surreal symphony of destruction.  Boom!  Boom!  Boom!  Power poles splintered in dreadful rhythm.  Electric transformers exploded, flashing in brilliant accompaniment. 

Glenn pulled his head down and shoulders up, gritting his teeth and clenching the steering wheel; he jammed the gas pedal to the floor, the van whined, and he found himself ahead of the front.   

Oral Roberts University, to Glenn’s right, lay quiet at that rise just between inhaling and exhaling.  Its huge geometric panes of iridescent glass reflected the murky grays and muddy greens of the squall.  At that moment, in the rearview mirror, Glenn could see the cyclone traverse the thoroughfare, smash those mirrors into thousands of shards, and twist their frames into grotesque new sculptures, before rising again into the firmament.

Glenn zipped along to Sheridan before turning north toward his little house on Florence Avenue. Blood flowed again through his shoulders and hands. He checked his rearview mirror time and again until he felt certain the twister would not pursue him home.

That was it.  A pretty good action scene, so I thought.  But oddly, it left me frozen in place.  I stared at that last sentence for a couple of days, fingers resting on the keyboard, motionless.  Maybe because the storm passed and he survived, I sat immobile.

Then I went back and read it from the top.  Doing so carried me forward to a next step.  My brother was still in the car after all.  And my focus needed to shift from the violent tornado to another violent episode in his life.  Here's how I changed direction:

The storm seemed to have made a decision.  It lifted its sucking feet releasing its hold on Tulsa.  It slipped eastward, rumbling, tossing threats back over its shoulder with lightning flashing on its underside.  The afternoon sun lit its trailing edge with magic glowing gold.  As if pulling a giant tarp west to east overhead, the storm clouds left clear blue sky in their wake.  People emerged from their basements and turned their faces upward, smiling at God, filling theirs lung with electrostatically cleansed air.

Safe for the moment at least, Glenn’s mind turned to the storm that lay ahead.  Karen.

Now we know exactly where to go, right? 

If your narrative is advancing the storyline, you'll find the rising action and the call for transition at the fall.  Reading your own stuff from the top can give you the momentum.

Read your own stuff, and Write, Dream Writers, Write!