Chapter 7 offers great insights. Of course, no one cares about your mum unless you make them. A few years ago, I workshopped with the well-known writer Gary Steyngart. He read my story about my mother and said in its analysis, “this is a story about an ordinary woman who goes through extraordinary circumstances.” I was deeply shocked. To me, my mother had been a woman of mythical proportions, but I was forced to reconsider her from an objective point of view. She was merely an ordinary woman and my job became one of clarification to make readers see that she had become something more in the course of events. Hers was a story of transformation.
It was especially interesting to me to see in this essay the comments about telling of ordinary life events sequentially. It is a trap that I fall into easily. I will decorate the narrative with imagery to embellish my list, but nonetheless I do let things drag on before coming to the point of what I want to say.
And this brings us to the point of editing things out. I am quite happy to cut, but I’m less comfortable putting them back. I like the tool box presented here very much. It is incredibly useful to have things clarified and listed so that one can check them off.
