When does the "Truth" takeaway from the story?
We Heard it Young Extras Vol 2
Welcome to Vol 2 of We Heard it Young Extras. There was, of course, pages upon pages of cut content from the memoir. Stories that were completely excised. Or whole paragraphs of contextualization that were condensed to a few words of description. It’ll be fun to go through and fill in the blanks, so to speak. And, starting with today’s post, to give some behind the scenes details on my writing process.
There is a passage that I’m particularly proud of in the book. It is me going into hyper detail regarding the first time I ever tried to dance. Sure I danced a bit in my childhood. At bailes or goofing around with my sister (she was actually a mean house dancer…there is a vhs clip of her battling another kid in town at my tias house that I so wish exists in the internet landscape somewhere.) But the first time I tried Breaking I fell in love. I tried to do handstands and rolls in my backyard in the middle of an Iowa summer night. It’s as Romantic a memory I can recall and I jumped at the chance to write about it. If you have the time check the link from Iowa Magazine for the full passage that culminates in this scene.
If you don’t have the time for that full passage here is an excerpt I wanted to talk about a bit more today. This excerpt is very slightly modified from the published text, as there is one change that happened en route from an original draft to the published version (you’ll see why soon.)
I imagine it must have looked a sight, this boy trying to walk on his hands and spin on his back in the grass in the dead of the night. I didn't care. This exciting feeling filled my lungs. Filled my every breath. I fell out of a particularly daring maneuver, landing on my back in the soft yard. The night sky loomed overhead as I sprawled on my back, my arms outstretched toward the heavens. Our town was small and insignificant enough that there wasn't enough light pollution to dilute the radiance of the stars. My breath labored as my chest rose and fell in time with my exhalations. Clouds of breath materialized every time I exhaled. Each inhalation stung as I got back onto my feet. It didn't matter. Nothing else mattered. I got up and kept trying every move I could think of. I haven't stopped since.
I love looking back at this memory, and I think I took one particular detail for granted. It was a detail that one of the editors of the book brought up in the form of a very valid question: would you be able to see your breath in the middle of an Iowa summer night?
This editor, Alisha, actually worked with me in both my published works. She is someone I deeply respect, as I can always trust that she has the best intentions for the story of a work. 99% of the edits she suggested I agreed and addressed…but this is the 1% that I pushed back on.
Here’s a funny thing about writing non-fiction…especially autobiographical works, it’s so hard to verify the truth. By that I mean the capitol “T” Truth that we believe is objective reality. I’ve brought up magical realism more than once in this substack…but I think there really is something to this idea of the amorphous reality that is…reality. BUT…I knew where Alisha was coming from and a part of me started to question my own memory of the events. Did I actually see my breath that night? I mean…it’s a valid observation, you see your breath when it’s cold and Iowa summers are a lot of things but cold ain’t one of them. So I did that thing that neurodivergent, anxious writers do: I went down a hyper fixation rabbit hole to see what was up.
Let me tell you when I looked up the temperatures that condensation from your breath first appears. Then came across articles like this one that mentions that, “The season has some relevance, but you can actually see your breath condensate in summer if the temperature and relative humidity are low enough, e.g. at night.”
So it roughly translates to this stat: if the temperature at night dips to around 55 degrees Fahrenheit while the humidity is extremely high (like higher than 95%) than there’s a chance that you could see your breath. Huzzah! Because as any Iowan can tell you one of those aforementioned things about the summer is that it’s humid as all get out.
But that wasn’t enough…I needed to triangulate this piece of information with this night in question. Luckily for me I had an approximate time for when I started dancing…July in 1999. And I had the benefit that the Cedar Rapids airport is close to my hometown. This meant that there is an archived list of the temperatures and humidity points for every single night in Cedar Rapids history. Of course…we were in West Liberty and not CR, but that was close enough for me.) Enter WeatherUnderground.com
I felt like a detective breaking the case when I saw multiple instances of the minimum temperature of a day coinciding with this humidity level. Or maybe it’s more accurate to picture me not like a suave private investigator but more like Charlie Day’s character in It’s Always Sunny, stressing over the data like a fiend.
But here’s an interesting take on this whole ordeal. Does it matter that this is the capitol “T” Truth? Will there be others like Alisha who, justifiably so, question the validity of the claim I made. Here is a writing lesson I’ve learned a long time ago: a detriment to your story is anything that pulls the reader away from said story. In this instance it might be the Truth but if it inadvertently causes a reader to roll their eyes right before the punctuation point than it’s not the way to go. We were at an impasse. As I didn’t want to excise the imagery that was so important to my memory. So I came up with a compromise. Quickly, as to not pull away from the momentum of the passage, I described the phenomenon at hand:
The air was cool but humid, a combination that made clouds of breath materialize every time I exhaled.
A little less elegant…but if it made it so the memory remained then so be it. Because really, what was most important, more important than Truth or accuracy at the reflection of memory, was something I strive to capture every time I sit down to write. It was the feeling. The feeling of a kid taking one of his first steps toward self expression. I hope to continue to convey and capture that feeling. Even if my timeline was wrong and the temperature and humidity didn’t actually align. Even if my memory played a trick on me in my middle age. None of that changes the fact that when you strip away everything else, the feeling remains.
-C