I'm a brunette again. Before you jump to any conclusions about my personal depths or lack thereof*, let me assure you I did it for the salon. Only for the salon.
Finding good stylists is a never ending challenge, and from time to time my sister and I sacrifice our heads to the cause. We needed to check out a candidate's color skills: I had gray hair. What's a girl to do?
So imagine this: after finding out that I write, the young woman tells me she wants to be a writer but doesn't have any stories worth telling.
I say everyone has stories. In a sad, slow voice, she replies that her life is too boring to have any stories.
Over the next two hours, she mentions that her great grandfather was killed while robbing a train, her great grandmother raised four children alone on an Iowa farm at the turn of the century, her grandmother mostly raised her because her mother was a drug addict, when she was 8 she lived in Texas with a group of drug dealers her mother got mixed up with, and her pre-teen daughter has something called "mush mouth," which she describes as a particular kind of speech delay. She is in love with one man and recently married another because her daughter needs a father and her new husband tries to be a good one.
Yeah. I feel bad about her story-less existence. Don't you?
*The other day I read about a character who survived a fall from a ladder then drowned in a rain puddle half an inch deep. Sometimes I feel so shallow that if my depths were that puddle, the character would have lived to raise all kinds of hell.
So imagine this: after finding out that I write, the young woman tells me she wants to be a writer but doesn't have any stories worth telling.
I say everyone has stories. In a sad, slow voice, she replies that her life is too boring to have any stories.
Over the next two hours, she mentions that her great grandfather was killed while robbing a train, her great grandmother raised four children alone on an Iowa farm at the turn of the century, her grandmother mostly raised her because her mother was a drug addict, when she was 8 she lived in Texas with a group of drug dealers her mother got mixed up with, and her pre-teen daughter has something called "mush mouth," which she describes as a particular kind of speech delay. She is in love with one man and recently married another because her daughter needs a father and her new husband tries to be a good one.
Yeah. I feel bad about her story-less existence. Don't you?
*The other day I read about a character who survived a fall from a ladder then drowned in a rain puddle half an inch deep. Sometimes I feel so shallow that if my depths were that puddle, the character would have lived to raise all kinds of hell.
3 comments:
: )
LOL! Ha!
But I kinda "get" it. People are always telling me I need to "write a book", right? But when you LIVE that kind of stuff, it is hard to see it as a story. Sometimes it feel like telling people's secrets. Sometimes it feels disloyal, or like it is not all yours to tell. Or you worry about how you tell it not being all true, or too true.
I am reading a book right now about this, called "Turning Life into Fiction". I think the trick-- that I need to wrap my head around-- is just not telling the REAL story, but rather USING what I understand and know because of the event, and telling a different story.
:)
PS, I wanted to email you and send you a ((hug)) for your comment. You are such a good friend to me, and we have never even "met". I hope we can someday.
No, I am not myself right now. I don't want to talk about it on my blog, because my blog has just been such a downer lately. But I will get it together! Thanks for sending me love, J. It touches my heart. It matters to me.
;) oxoxox
Well, that young woman certianly stumbled into the right salon. She got to meet you! How'd she do with the hair?
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