Fishtailing is hard (or: autosave is slacking)
I was going to blog about writing a braided essay, and I still am, but it might be continued next week, because I have run into technical difficulties. My son has erased several hours of my work.
Not my writing, though, don’t worry.
Just my medical transcription. I was nearly done with my work, so I decided to take a quick nap since I could barely keep my eyes open. While I slept, unbeknownst to me but knownst to him, my son was playing games on nickjr.com. Which is fine. He’s four and he knows how to use a computer pretty well. But! He’s been banned from my office in the past because he somehow erases my work. Not just closes the document down, or “Xing it out,” as we call it. From losing my work in the past on my own volition, I’ve learned to name and save the file before I even start. Then I have the backup set to autosave every minute. Every minute! So I wake up to find my boy playing on my computer, and I skedaddle him out of there and find that when I open my document, there are only about 2 pages of it left. And when I re-open Word, it doesn’t appear on the left, you know, like it had been recovered. So. Somehow my son erased most of my work and then saved it that way? But my the backup file says it was saved at 10:21 a.m., which is decidedly NOT one minute after I stopped working. So maybe I didn’t save it since that time. But why is the autorecover not recovering? Why is the autosave not saving?
It’s only about two hours of work really, but with three kids running around demanding that they be fed and have their behinds properly cleansed and that I play with them, that takes me about four hours. So that’s what I’ll be doing tonight instead of working on my braided essay.
But here’s where I am. I set out to write a braided essay. Is it wrong to set out to do write with a certain structure? Probably, but I’m going to try it anyway. I’ve just finished reading Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of My Youth, because someone recommended it to me for the braided essay “Fourth State of Matter.” Which is an excellent essay. Actually, the whole book is filled with excellent essays, as far as I’m concerned. And a lot of them are braided. My favorite is “Cousins.” Beard intertwines the stories of her mom and aunt (the sisters) and their daughters, Beard and Wendell (the cousins). It’s not a clear-cut, “this is the part about the cousins” and “this is the part about the sisters,” of course. It starts out with the two sisters in a boat, pregnant with the cousins, and fishing. Cut to a scene of the cousins as 21 year olds, going to a bar, then back to some background about the sisters and enter the cousins as children. It keeps going like that, and ends up with a really beautiful scene in the hospital where the Beard’s mom is dying and her sister is sitting with her. It sort of chronicles the closeness of the sisters and the cousins, and basically I love everything about it.
One thing I noticed about Beard is that she has this amazing way of giving you a scene (the sisters in a boat / the sisters in the hospital), and sets it up perfectly, they’re each wearing this or that, they’re doing this or that, and then hits you with something important: The sisters are pregnant with the cousins. The sisters are in a hospital room, and one is dying. You don’t even realize you’re missing a big part of the scene until she tells you what it is, and that colors the whole thing over again. It’s really clever.
So. I have these two strands (I know, with braided you think of three strands, but that’s not really always the case. Hey, it’s a fishtail!). They’re related, even involve some of the same people. I’ve written them separately, trying just to get one whole story down. Though I did keep in mind where a good breaking point might be, I tried very hard just to tell each narrative separately. My next job, I think, is to look for the metaphors in each piece. Which are common to both threads, and which are singular? While the metaphors don’t have to match up exactly, I don’t think, there needs to be some crossover, or you’re just telling two separate stories in chunks.
Once I find the metaphors I think I can begin working on braiding. I plan to print out the pieces (though I ran out of black printer ink, so it might be as variegated as a rainbow – actually, this seems like a better and better idea anyway), then just start piecing them together in different ways.
I’m going to finish my typing now, and hopefully next week I will have more on the topic of braided essays.
Aw, man, that sucks, Tanya! I look forward to reading your blog on braided essays. I’d like to try one sometime.
At least it didn’t take me long to retype. and thanks!
Sorry about the lost work Tanya.I hate when that happens.
I’d love to read your essay when you’re ready to show it. I’m HUGE fan of Boys of my Youth. Your two favorites are also the ones I liked the best.
Thanks Asa! I’ll remember to send it your way. I wish Beard had more out there. I was hoping she’d have about 5 more books I could read!
I’m pretty sure she has a new memoir coming out within the year, according to Squaw scuttlebutt.
sweeeet. and I love the word scuttlebutt.