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H&L - 1c: Quest for the Ring

I adopted an air of irritation, hoping to throw him off the scent of my failure. "Forgot? No!"

Briggs said nothing.

Scrambling for inspiration, I glanced around the room. I spotted a pile of newspaper on the edge of the breakfast table; trapped beneath it, I could see a stack of colorful sales circulars. 

"We're going ... shopping!"

"For?"

I leaned left, straining to see more of the circulars. "Um, jewelry. No -- rings. We're going shopping for rings."

Briggs raised an eyebrow. "We're getting rings?"

"Yes. I've already been thinking about styles. And I don't want white gold -- it's too easy to mistake for silver. I want yellow gold. Something substantial, but not too flashy." I leaned further left, trying to make out the name of the store in the ad. "And I know right where to go for 'em."

Briggs leaned to his right and straightened the stack of newspaper, obscuring the circulars. "And where would that be?" 

I snapped up straight, my mind whirling. Having no other choice, I took a leap of faith. "Capitol City Jewelers?"

Briggs rummaged under the pile of paper, extracting the jewelry store circular. He studied it a moment, smiled to himself, and passed the circular -- from a store named Capitol City Jewelers -- to me. "Good choice," he said. "They're even having a two for one sale."

I beamed. "That's why I picked 'em, baby. That ... and their convenient location."

* * * * *

We live in extreme northeast Jackson, Mississippi -- about as far north as you can go in Jackson, actually, before you have to start claiming to live in Madison.

Capitol City Jewelers, it turns out, is about as far from our house as a jewelry store can be. In fact, on the way there, we pass at least a dozen bright, inviting jewelry stores, including one flying a rainbow flag.

[pause]

H&L - Master Outline

Spoiler Alert! This is the master outline for Husbands & Lies, where I'm banging out notes about future chapters and logging all kinds of surprise twists. If you just want to enjoy the story as it gets written (and savor the surprises), please don't read this entry. 

Chapter One

Quest for the Ring. At breakfast, when Thomas realizes he's forgotten his 10th anniversary with Briggs, he pretends that he's planned a trip to shop for wedding rings. At the store, things go badly when the boys discover the jewelry store's Spring Specials apply only to heterosexual couples -- or, as the counter puts it, "People who can really get married." Afterward, Thomas pouts ... but when the pair get home, a sleek limo is parked outside their house, waiting for them.

H&L - 1b: Quest for the Ring

Across the room, Briggs turned to face me. Brown eyes twinkling, he crossed the kitchen slowly, carrying a big red tray of bacon and waffles.

He was painfully handsome the first time he did this, when he was twenty-five and launching his own landscaping business. Today, after ten years of planting bouganvilla and laying sprinkler pipe, there's a gray strand or two in that generous mop of brown hair and a little more meat around the middle -- but he's still sexier than a man in a pair of sweat pants has a right to be.

What caught my eye, though, was not the breakfast or the man behind it. Instead, I saw only this: around Brigg's neck was a bright green Ted Baker tie, lying flat against the smooth brown skin of his perfect chest.

He put the tray down in front of me. Grinning from ear to ear, he yanked off the tie, lassoed my neck with it, pulled me forward, and gave me a big, wet, sloppy kiss. As he withdrew, he brushed my ear with his soft lips and whispered, "Happy anniversary."

I went from half-asleep to wide awake in less than a second. "Anniversary?" 

Briggs nodded.

You don't know me, so I need to tell you this: I am an incredibly skilled straight-faced liar. Here's how it started: when I was in eighth grade, my mother, slurring her words only slightly, looked up from her morning glass of milk and Kahlua and asked, "You're some kind of faggot, aren't you?"

I was fourteen at the time -- extremely conscious of my pale, hairy, Irish-influenced body and how different it was from the lean, tan, wiry, bodies of the other guys in gym class -- and terrified that someone could tell, strictly from looking at me, that I was a lot more interested in seeing those guys naked than I ought to be. 

My cheeks went red. My lower lip trembled. "No."

Mother burst out laughing. "Baby girl, you gotta learn to suck that shit up. You turn scarlet every time someone calls you the f-word, you're gonna spend high school being called Tommy Tomato." She poked me, hard, on the chest. "Let me tell you something only a mother would. You're a faggot, and it's oblivious."

My cheeks burned. "You mean it's obvious."

She toasted me, sloshing sticky white liquid over the rim of her glass. "That, too."

Right then and there, I decided to prove Mother wrong ... and I dedicated the bulk of my teenage years to learning to lie.

I lied in word: reeling off heterosexual fantasies I never had, boasting about back-seat conquests that never happened, and trash-talking the other faggots who didn't have the skills to blend in. I lied in deed: asking Jenna Barnesworth out, telling her that I loved her, and fantasizing about her brother, Dennis, in order to get Mr. Jiggles to rise to the occasion.

Instead of crossing my legs when sitting down, I learned to sprawl. Instead of squealing, "Oh, excuse me!" when I farted, I learned to adopt an expression of supreme self-satisfaction. Instead of keeping my own saliva in my mouth where it belongs, I learned to snort and spit. 

Well, that's not entirely true. I gave up on the spitting. For reasons I could never determine, I was never able to get the trajectory right. While straight guys are impressed by someone who can hawk something up and launch it three or four feet away, they aren't particularly impressed when you hawk something up and send it sliding off your chin and onto your shirt. 

But the point is this: I manned up so I could pass myself off. Spend years lying about the most intimate aspects of your life, and you develop a poker face that not even Stu Unger could penetrate. 

So I put on my best poker face, waggled my eyebrows at Briggs, and said, "Yeah. Um. You, too."

Briggs sat down opposite me, passed out plates, and started serving waffles. "You forgot our anniversary."

H&L - 1: Quest for the Ring

I am on the verge of lunging across the display counter, grabbing Bethany by the neck, and squeezing her tender throat until her eyes bug out.

And this is odd, because I'm not a violent person. In fact, I'm ridiculously soft-hearted. As a kid, when I accidentally popped one of my Cookie Monster's bulging eyeballs off, I tortured myself with guilt and prayed that God would heal him. 

At some point, my Mom, possessed briefly by the twin demons of humanity and sobriety, bought me a new Cookie Monster and threw the old one away. I spent one golden afternoon praising God for what I sincerely believed was a Muppet miracle. And then, while scraping dinner dinner scraps into the garbage can, I spotted my old friend Cookie -- his glassy eye staring up at me, his mouth frozen open in a silent scream. 

I wept for weeks, and in my diary -- in the big, sprawling, sloppy letters that only a nine year-old can muster -- I wrote: "There is no God."

You might think my early flirtation with atheism would have rendered me a cold and calculating human being. You would be wrong. I'm still soft-hearted and emotionally vulnerable as ever. I have pulled over on the side of the road to aid animals in peril -- or, at least thought about pulling over to help them, which is, if you think about it, almost the same thing.

Every time I refuse to give spare change to the crazy homeless man on Capitol Street in downtown Jackson, my heart aches. When those commercials about swarthy children with no food or clean water come on during Oprah -- you know, the ones featuring those big-headed babies with flies circling their mouths? -- I have to change the channel to the Food Network and cleanse my mental palette with some Rachel Ray.

So, knowing all this about me, you'll understand why it's unusual that I'm making a scene in the middle of Capitol City Jewelry and debating whether or not to do bodily harm to a bottle-blonde teenager I've known for all of seven minutes.

Especially since, just two hours ago, I was the embodiment of Spring. I woke up to sunshine, bird song, and the mouth-watering smell of Briggs frying up a batch of real bacon. 

That's real bacon, mind you -- not those nasty vegetarian strips we switched to briefly after my little heart scare a few months back. Listen, honey: when it comes to breakfast, vegetarian bacon misses the point. Breakfast is meant to be visceral. When a bear hibernates, he wakes up ready to eat an animal. When I sit down to breakfast, I don't want to wrap my molars around strips of textured soy -- I want something that was, until just recently, alive and kicking. When I bite into my morning protein, I want to taste some fear. 

I stumbled into the kitchen and plopped down at the breakfast table. I yawned. I stretched. I ground my knuckles into my eyes. I reached out my hand and looped my fingers through the handle of my favorite green mug, which Briggs, bless him, had already filled with coffee, three Splendas, and half a cup of Half and Half. 

Briggs stood at the stove, teasing the bacon with a bright red spatula. Every morning, he rises early, pulls on a pair of sweat pants, fetches the paper from the end of the drive, and makes me breakfast. He did this the morning after our first night together, ten years ago; he's done it every morning since. 

Nothing gets in the way of this routine. Mississippi rarely gets snow, but even when the front yard is blanketed with icy whiteness, Briggs pads out -- barefooted, bare chested, steam trailing from his nostrils -- and sticks to his schedule.

The neighbor lady -- twice divorced, liquor-thin, and apt to minister to us heathens by sticking Chic Tracts in our mailbox -- likes to watch this ritual. And I like watching her watch it. I like thinking about her, alone in her cold bed, thinking about us, naked and warm in ours.

[pause]

Four Stories in One

There are almost as many theories about how to create and evaluate a story as there are stories.

One of these theories -- called Dramatica -- comes packaged as a website, a book or two, a slew of classes and workshops, and some (outdated, tired-looking, badly in need of a facelift) software. While I don't buy into every claim the creators of Dramatica theory make (I don't believe, for example, that their theory reflects secret truths about brain structure or the underlying structure of the universe), I have found some of their ideas useful. 

Story Map Calculator

In an earlier post, I wrote about a "story map" -- a spreadsheet I use to calculate where, in a book of a certain length, certain story milestones should fall. 

Here's an Excel spreadsheet containing a story map for a 70,000-word novel. To adapt it for your own use, all you have to do is enter your the length of your own story (the number of words) in the "Number of Novel Words" field. The sheet will then calculate the location of each of the most important story beats.

Download Story Map Calculator

If you don't have Excel, you can always look at this .PDF of a story map for a 70,000-word novel, and use it to build your own:

Download Story Map Calculator-PDF

Enjoy!

What's a Story Map?

While working with Family Thais, I came up with the idea of a story map.

I got the idea for story maps while reading books on writing screenplays. In screenplays, certain story events -- the major "beats" or story milestones -- tend to happen at very specific times. For example: within the first five pages of a screenplay, the writer needs to present an opening image that defines the world of the story ... and state (usually in a fragment of dialogue) the theme of the story. 

Other milestones include the catalyst (around page 12), the Act Two break (around page 25), the midpoint (where stakes are raised, around page 55), and so on. (And yes, screenplay expectations are that specific. Don't believe me? Watch a mass-market movie, and you'll see the opening image within five minutes, the catalyst appear about twelve minutes in, the break into Act Two about twenty-five minutes in -- like clockwork.)

So I got to thinking: what if I took that very specific structure and converted it into something a novelist could use? 

Husbands and Lies - Random Story Snippets

In this post, you'll find a growing list of story snippets: little things that occur to me as I write the book that don't quite yet have a home. This is more of a reference space than anything else -- a sort of notepad for catching ideas that may or may not be integrated later on. 

Husbands and Lies - Beat Sheet

A beat sheet is a high-level overview of the major milestones (or big "beats") in a story ... including moments like these:

- A beginning, set in the "every day world" of the movie before things get out of hand.

- A call to action, or catalyst, or Big Change that has the potential to pull the hero out of his or her comfortable routine and launch a new adventure.

- A debate about whether or not to accept that call. 

- A commitment to the adventure (usually made after rejecting it first!).

- A midpoint, or a crisis that turns the action in an entirely new and unexpected direction.

- A dark night of the soul -- the low point that comes when the main character has lost it all.

- Third Act Break - new energy, new direction, and a chance for redemption.

- The Finale, in which the bad guys lose and the good guys win.

Take apart virtually any story people love and remember, and you'll find that these stories (even if they're dramatically different on the surface) share these (and other) beats. 

My first-pass outline for Husbands and Lies is, in fact, a beat sheet. (I use the one Blake Snyder teaches in his superb Save the Cat! screenwriting course.) For me, as a writer, a beat sheet like this one gives me my first, high-level overview of what the major story points are. In a way, the beat sheet is like the skeleton of my novel, revealing its shape ... but few details. 

The Outlining Question

When writing a novel: to outline ... or not to outline?

Oddly, when I was earning an MA in creative writing from The Center for Writers, this question never came up. The workshop structure favored short stories. The program's leadership favored a freewheeling, "writing for discovery" approach to generating fiction. 

The result? We focused almost exclusively on voice and tone and whether a story "felt satisfying." In fact, during my two years in the program, I don't remember a single conversation about the role of structure.