The Writing Machine

Stories by Christian Cloud Abraham

Thanks for Holding my Head

MEMOIR PROJECT ROUGH DRAFT

It’s been about a year and a half since I’ve poured any liquor down my gullet and submerged myself into lugubrious wallowing in my shit and even longer since this wallowing wallowed me into vomiting on myself, but it is evident from my last post about my memoir that I am still capable of ingesting enough whine to wake up and find myself covered in last night’s vomit. But much like a good night of drinking leading to a bad day of recovering, the point of the puking is in the purge, and once the toxins are cleared of the system, the world takes on an even sweeter smell. So in regards to my vomit from ingesting too much whine from my memoir project, I am living in the euphoria of the body feeling lightened from the removal of the toxins and able to appreciate my life again. And in this clarity, I saw myself in the arena with the two doors and the knowledge of which door led to the lady and which door led to the tiger and instead of choosing one or the other or both, I chose neither. I just walked out of the arena. The story that wrote me there wasn’t the right story to be writing, and so I wrote myself out of that story and into another.

What I am trying to say with my mixed up analogy is that I sat down and contemplated what the dramatic question is for my next book.

In writing terms, the dramatic question is usually a single question that a story must answer. All the action in the story serves to answer this question and the plot is just what happens along the way to answering the question. The movie, The Abyss, is an interesting example. It may appear to be a movie about UFOs, tolerance, and the dangers of living in the nuclear age, but the dramatic question is: Will Bud and Lindsey ever fall in love again? Yes, they will. But it is going to take a UFO crashing a submarine into an ocean canyon wall, a nuclear crisis, space aliens and a self-sacrificing plummet into the abyss by Bud to cut through the emotional shit between Bud and Lindsey and make them finally reach out and love each other again. So, slowly but surely, the actions of the movie tricked you into thinking you were watching a sci-fi alien drama, but what you were really watching was a love story delivered with the action by way of masterful sleight of hand by James Cameron.

Not all stories have a dramatic question, but most good stories do, and often answer only one dramatic question. The dramatic question is usually not too exciting on the surface: Will Todd ever love again? Will the raccoon realize that he doesn’t have to go it alone anymore? Will the cocky young racecar ever discover that it takes a team to win in life? These don’t sell books or movie tickets and that is why you need the plot, or the actions and situations that move the characters forward towards answering the dramatic question.

So I sat down and looked at my story and isolated my dramatic question by focusing on the pivotal scene in the book where my mom and a friend of the family try to exercise a devil spirit from me because of a dream I’d had a day earlier. I thought about this scene. I thought about how back then I was so afraid of my own mind and imagination and I wondered how I’d got there and how I’d escaped from the fear I developed of my own mind. And there everything made sense. That moment in my life was one of the most intense and terrifying moments I’ve ever experienced. Yet the story that lead to that moment, and away from that moment, is a dark, bizarre, surreal, frightening, and yet fun story that I can’t wait to tell. As for the dramatic question, I guess it is as bland as: Will Christian Cloud Abraham ever stop being afraid of his own mind? Or: Will the raccoon that lives in Christian Cloud Abraham’s pants ever stop foraging through the neighbor’s trash and just learn to become a team player in the pits for the cocky young race car?

If I focus all my writing energy on this scene and this dramatic question (the first one), it filters my life down to a limited set of scenes and also offers up a certain perspective to these scenes that not only makes this installation to my memoirs more manageable, but also emotionally tolerable.

So by puking my guts out on my site, I’ve purged the crap in my system preventing me from working on my next book, and after proverbially brushing the chunks out of my teeth, a hot shower, some greasy food, and quart of soda from QT, the hangover has cleared and I’m good to go.

Thanks for holding my head over the toilet.—Christian

END
© 2006 Christian Cloud Abraham

Posted on November 29, 2006 in
Emotion: Elation, Type: Essay