WRITE A BOOK, THEY SAID. IT’LL BE FUN, 2

 

 

What is the goal of writing a book?

To get readers to turn the page.

Such a modest goal.

Should there be any other? I call it a building block, that’s what I call goals.

What happens when you achieve your goals, when you have readers turning to the next page.

Write another book and make it easier to turn the page.

There’s that page again.

Coal miners move coal, loggers move wood, writers move pages and they’re heavy.

Heavy. A page is heavy. Do you know heavy?

Heavy is getting paid to do hard things. Heavier is looking for others to do something with it, not finding anyone, and doing it yourself.

Who Reads Books

Who asked about an editor?

Everyone needs an editor.

Do you have an editor?

Since I consider myself in the ‘everyone’ club, I do.

Would they agree with the coal and wood and page thing?

It depends on context, the original meaning, and if it’s important enough to the story to include. And if it is, you do stuff with it, like circle back on a metaphor to expand the meaning.

Is this you or your editor?

Call it part of the story tools. If a writer includes a gun in a story, it’s got to be used or why bother?

A gun can’t just be a casual thing?

They never are, so no, a gun is an action even if it’s not doing anything. Mention a gun in the first act of a story and it needs to do something in the second, like trouble. The gun trouble fix early in the third act makes it worse, but things get resolved toward the end and everyone sails off into the sunset.

Haven’t I seen this movie? Read this story?

It’s a framework of concepts you’ve seen and heard all of your life.

Like a formula?

It’s not a formula or a recipe or a stereotype, but it feeds them. Three acts and hit the road, from the first Greek tragedy to Lady Gaga and Star Is Born last Friday night at the Joy Theater in Tigard.

Just three?

Act I shows normal life with the usual endearing quirks and twitches that make us love a character. In Act II trouble starts when normal life gets misunderstood, goes off the rails, crashes and burns. Act III starts with help on the way, but it either makes things worse or doesn’t show at all and the characters have to figure things out on their own.

You sound like a writer.

I’m working on a book. 90K words on the fourth pass with editor notes, so yeah, I’m a writer. I write a blog, too. And four screenplays.

A Book Platform

As in platform? You’ve got a platform and you’re writing a book. Break your book down in three acts.

Act One: Normal life is being a partner and husband to a wonderful woman and trying to prove to her the decision to get married thirty years ago was a good one. She said she wanted me to remarry if she died first, that she didn’t want me to be lonely. I said I wasn’t lonely before we got married. Then I got tagged by a growing cancer trend in men, sex cancer in the neck.

Isn’t that the same thing …

Act Two: I took my act into the treatment waiting rooms and engaged patients in theraputic cancer talk. None of them had sex cancer. It was an awkward conversation every time and I insisted on talking it out. It was either going to happen in there, or a counselor’s office, or social worker, or some professional listener. The treatment room talks went south when modern times intervened and one older man verbally abused a cancer patient driver with a President Trump attitude and another explained the true origins of the Civil War. For all of the reserves I wanted to focus on a cancer cure I had to cut loose on one of them.

How does all of this …?

Act Three: After the physical and emotional drain of chemo and radiation over I was set to resume my normal life of making my wife the center of the universe in every way possible. Except the fine print on the hpv cancer cure said the treatment program carried an ‘accumulative effect.’ In other words, for all of the anxiety and horror of getting my head locked under some kind of beam shooting space weapon, all of the disbelief of watching a black bag of chemo cancer killer drain down a tube stuck in my chest, the worst was yet to come. I decided dying wasn’t a bad option since I’d began looking like the walking dead and my neck felt like it had been treated with a rototiller. After an intervention where my wife and kids turned on me in spectacular fashion, I turned the corner with medical marijuana instead of oxy, forcing food instead of a stomach tube, and daily visits to the infusion clinic for huge bags of fluids to avoid the kidney failure I was heading for.

Kind of sounds like the third act is the real story.

It ties everything together.

Memory Book

And here you are with a new memoir.

More than that, it’s a story parents need to share with their kids, a story kids can share with their parents, that clinicians can share with their patients. This is a book that will define a cancer cure experience.

So you’re cured?

That’s the ‘ride off into the sunset’ part. Yes. And here’s the deal. Am I cured? The radiation oncologist report said I had a Full Response to the treatment. The chemo doc said no cancer detected, which the scans support. So yeah, cured. But there’s the other part, the part where everything is cancer, every muscle pull, headache, every kink in the neck is cancer. It’s the mental part of the deal. My story faces the mental part from a deflecting angle.

Deflecting angle?

The hospital I went to had cancer social workers who were good looking women, the sort of ladies other men and women listen to. I felt like I needed to interact with one in particular since she kept asking about me every time she saw me and I didn’t have much to report. One day I pretended I needed someone to talk to, someone to comfort me in my suffering, or else they might think I was depressed. Truth is I felt pretty good, all things considered. This was before the real suffering began. So I gave a ‘my neck hurts, feel sorry for me’ line of talk. This lady must have known I was on a pity party rant. “This is bad, couldn’t be worse, but I’ll try and show up tomorrow. I don’t know, though, it’s bad, real bad.” Convincing enough, right? No. “It could be worse. HPV16 also presents on the penis and in the rectum.” Now I was stunned and laughed. “So you’re telling me it could be worse? Not having ass cancer is my takeaway today?” She said, “That’s one way of looking at it.” This moment set the tone. “Works for me. Thank you.”

Ass cancer?

That was my take.