80 Pages of Crap

So, back to the 80 Pages of Crap. There were a few writing books that I was into when all of this started. A friend of mine had taken me through The Artist's Way, as I mentioned before. Also, an amazing book that I would recommend for anyone who reads words, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. My copy is now battered and coffee stained, the spine nearly rendered useless. I return to it a lot, especially when I need to be reminded of what's really important in all of this.
One of the suggestions she gives is to write your life. That's how I started. Only, in order to garner freedom from my repressed, egocentric, (again) uptight personality, there were some things I had to do to feel safe.

1. I had to change names in order to protect the guilty. Some of you who will read this blog were so named. I still have the legend on a 3X5 card so I could remember what name I had given who. If you think you made the cut, let me know and I'll tell you what your alias was. I don't know why I did this. No one was going to see it, at least not initially. I just went with the impulse to protect myself at all costs, so I could get something on the page.

2. I set myself up in the only room in our house that wasn't a bedroom or a bathroom yet had a door – the laundry room. It's a big laundry room, but I still had to jump over my “desk” in order to get to the chair. The screen of my computer and my back were to the wall. That's all I cared about. It didn't matter what kind of gymnastics I had to perform in order to get there.

3. Maybe most importantly, like Ms. Lamott says, I had to give myself permission to write crap.


And I did. It was crap, but it was necessary.

I wrote with as much honesty as I could muster, even when it was painful. I wrote religiously, obsessively, in a committed, disciplined way until I was ready to put down in black and white the ugly ugly underbelly of my life. I wrote the truth about the horrible things that happened to me and, more importantly, the horrible things I did to myself. After I wrote about losing my virginity, I had to call my best friend. I remembered that I had broken my own heart, and when I wrote about it truthfully and with some distance, I could see that clearly.


There were some funny things, too, like my first obsession in first grade at Fred Graff Elementary. I wrote about how we played a game called Kiss Chase and how, when it became apparent he wasn't going to chase me, I would yell, “SWITCH!” so the girls could chase the boys. Then I would corner him in one of the huge tractor tires that stuck out of the ground and force him to kiss me. (I've always been bossy. Especially with boys.)

I'm sure there were some other amusing antidotes, but I don't want to look too close. I'll remember how horrible it really was and then I'll feel badly about myself.


One of the things that was awful was that I did a lot of telling and hardly any showing. And that was a problem. Not at first, because I was just sort of getting my groove on. But a lot of beautiful descriptions and self-discovery does not a story make. There was little to no dialogue, a tiny detail that sometimes helps to move things along in a book. It was pretty much 80 pages of being inside my head. Scary. Right?

The other thing that was awful was that, as Bestie A will tell you, I was so tethered to the reality of my own life, the story of what REALLY happened, I couldn't allow myself to deviate from the path AT ALL. That means that when I got to a point where something bad happened with my mom, I was immediately in terror that my mom would be hurt by me writing it down for all the world to see. Bestie A would say, “Quit writing with your mom on your shoulder. No one's going to see anything.” So, I would forge ahead, determined to write down the truthyness of it all.


The real deal about 80 pages of crap is that it is really hard to look at your own life like that – no matter how much fiction you try to infuse by changing names. I'm prone to self-loathing anyway. Being honest on paper about the sometimes awful turns my life had taken sometimes drove me to the brink. At the end of many a writing therapy session, after trying desperately to assuage my self-hatred, Bestie A would say, “You have to remember, no matter what you're writing down, no matter how bad YOUR PERCEPTION of it is, you didn't kill anyone.” She said it so many times that I wrote it down. People who came into my office often wondered about the neon Post-It note taped to my computer monitor that read “YOU DIDN'T KILL ANYONE.” I think they were probably glad, but also curious as to why I had to remind myself of that fact.

When I turned the corner in to Fictionland, which we'll get to later, 80 pages of crap allowed me to do so with abandon. Out of maybe 80,000 words, two tiny little lines made the final cut. But you can bet they're two tiny little glowing, miraculous lines. That's what those 80 pages brought me to. If I hadn't learned to write about the stark truth of my own life without being afraid, I never would have found the tools I needed to be true to these sons and daughters of my pen. I had to squirm until I couldn't squirm anymore about who and what I actually was in order to expose someone else in exactly the right way.


I'd actually rather forget about them, but Bestie A wishes me to pay proper homage. “Let's call them '80 Pages of Jumping-Off-Place,'” she says.

I think “crap” sounds better.