On Writing & Storytelling: Slowly, Surely, Chapter 11 of Reunion: Coda is Taking Shape

Late Morning, Tuesday, September 12, 2023, Lithia, Florida

“Tuesday just called and wants to know what happened to Friday!!” ― Neil Leckman

Greetings, everyone.

As I write this, it’s almost 10:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time here in the Tampa Bay area on this, the second day of the work week. It’s a typical early fall day in the subtropical zone; the current temperature is 84°F/29°C under sunny skies. However, with humidity at a sticky 79% and the wind blowing – just barely – from the east at 2 MPH/3 KMH, it feels like 92°F/33°C. The forecast is more summer-like than early (meteorological) autumn: we can expect scattered rain showers and a high of 93°F/34°C.

If there is one bit of good weather-related news, it is that Hurricane Lee is far away from the Continental United States and is not likely to have a serious impact on any of the Lower 48 states. For a time, there was a possibility that even if Lee spared the Southeast from a direct blow, it could have taken a northwesterly track that would have steered it to either New York or the New England area.

As of right now, it doesn’t look like this will happen. The steering currents do not seem to favor Hurricane Lee making landfall anywhere except the Canadian Maritime Provinces – New Brunswick, specifically – so, my friends up North will likely be spared from the now-weakened Lee. I’m happy about that; I’ve lived through more hurricane and tropical storm hits than I cared to, so I’m glad that this particular hurricane will not be coming to the U.S.

On Writing & Storytelling: The Novel-Writing Process Continues

“Being a writer all boils down to this: It’s you, in a chair, staring at a page. And you’re either going to stay in that chair until words are written, or you’re going to give up and walk away. The great writers have to fight for their words. They have to choose to write, choose words over distractions, and their characters over their friends. Great writers can be lonely, exhausted souls. But through our characters, we live.” ― Alessandra Torre

I am pleased to report that yesterday I finally made some progress with the third scene of Reunion: Coda’s 11^th chapter. Despite a frustratingly slow start – I think I started typing with confidence and a sense of “Hey, I know how this is going to go!” sometime around 3 PM – I added 528 or so new words to this particular bit of the story, which is – at its core – a more detailed account of an event that is mentioned in passing in Reunion: A Story, the first book of the Reunion Duology.

The chalk made a sharp scraping sound as it traced the letters on the board. Even though I was sitting at the opposite corner of the practice room, I swore that I could smell the faint dust that rose from the board as he wrote. He turned around and faced the class with a nervous smile. “Good morning. My name is Mr. Abner, and I will be your choral instructor for the rest of this school year. I know that Mrs. Quincy’s departure was unexpected and that many of you are disappointed, perhaps even upset that she left before the Spring Concert. She was, I’m told, a wonderful teacher and a well-known choral director.  She’ll be missed by her students and colleagues in the Music Department. A true living legend in the South Miami High family; I can only say that I can’t replace Mrs. Quincy – I can only succeed her.”

Alex Diaz-Granados, Reunion: Coda

Here are some of those “new words,” some of which I’ll probably replace or delete altogether during the Editing and Revising phase of pre-publication:

“Well, Jim,” Bruce Holtzman said from his seat next to me in the chorus practice room, “maybe this new teacher won’t be too bad. My brother Sam – you remember Sam, right? – is in the first period Boys’ Chorus class, and he says Mr. Abner is kind of nice, in a nerdy way.”

I bit my lip to stop myself from smirking. “We’ll see, Bruce. We’ll see.”

The heavy door of Room 136 squeaked open. A hush fell over the room like a shroud. The only sound was the clack-clack-clack of shoes on the cold tiled floor as a tall, slender man in his late 30s or early 40s walked briskly into the chorus practice room.

He looked nothing like Mrs. Quincy, who was short and plump and always wore colorful dresses and scarves. He wore jeans and a button-down shirt, and his eyeglasses had metal frames and round lenses that made him look like John Denver’s nerdy cousin.

“Sorry I’m a bit late, ladies and gentlemen,” he said as he reached the center of the room with a Styrofoam cup half-filled with water in one hand and a black Dade County Public Schools-issued teacher’s notebook in the other.

He gulped down the water from his white Styrofoam cup, then tossed the empty cup into the black wastebasket in the corner near the chalkboard.

“Okay,” he said as he walked up to the green-colored chalkboard, grabbed a piece of white-colored chalk, and started to write in neat cursive letters, “Mr. Henry Abner, Choral Instructor.”

The chalk made a sharp scraping sound as it traced the letters on the board. Even though I was sitting at the opposite corner of the practice room, I swore that I could smell the faint dust that rose from the board as he wrote. He turned around and faced the class with a nervous smile. “Good morning. My name is Mr. Abner, and I will be your choral instructor for the rest of this school year. I know that Mrs. Quincy’s departure was unexpected and that many of you are disappointed, perhaps even upset that she left before the Spring Concert. She was, I’m told, a wonderful teacher and a well-known choral director.  She’ll be missed by her students and colleagues in the Music Department. A true living legend in the South Miami High family; I can only say that I can’t replace Mrs. Quincy – I can only succeed her.”

While I am sure I could have written this passage a bit better, this is just the first draft, and I will be making another pass at this particular scene before I move on to Chapter 12. The key thing to remember, my friends, is that I managed, at long last, to get this scene beyond the first paragraph or two without resorting to the “let’s do this first as a screenplay, then rewrite it as a prose story” method I used in a dialogue-heavy final scene in the previous chapter.

“I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.” ― Neil Gaiman

I still have not decided what exactly I want to do with the manuscript when I resume writing after my daily break at midday. It can go one of two ways: I can either press on and continue adding new words to the scene – and maybe even finish it today – or retrace my steps and start editing and revising the rough draft.

Both of these options are necessary, and if I were younger and more energetic I could probably attempt to do both in one day. But…I’m not in my 20s, or even my 30s – the two ages that I was in when I began (unwittingly) writing this duology. I’m sixty and a half years old, and what used to be “easy-peasy” for me to do when I was a college student or even a thirty-something freelancer is a bit more difficult and time consuming. Thus, I can only – realistically – choose one option and stick to it.

Right now, I am more inclined to go for Option One – to write new words and keep the scene going. Even if I keep my expectations low and don’t push myself to finish it today, I believe moving the narrative forward would serve the story better…and it would give me a feeling that I am making progress.

As the old Polaroid camera commercials used to say back in the Land of Ago, “we’ll see what develops.”