Walking the Dog is a Good Thing For a Writer To Do

Posted on April 30, 2017 by dfsalvador

One complaint I frequently hear in writing critique groups is that the writer is “walking the dog.” This describes the writer who leads the reader step by step through a scene sequence, often subjecting the reader to tedious monotony. Many times, this is a fair critique. Beginning writers often struggle with ending scenes and transitioning to new ones, so they drag the reader through a play-by-play of minuscule events to tie scenes together.

While this error can easily be fixed, I find the remedy offered by many critics to be just as harmful. Many people will advise the writer to “get to the action” or to “stop walking the dog.” For example, they might say, “We don’t need to know that Jane got out of bed, got a glass of water, took a shower, dried her hair, painted her toenails, got dressed, and made herself a cup of coffee before jumping in the car and going on her way to uncover a terrorist cell in Boston.”

This laundry list of actions is not effective writing, but I would resist the advice to avoid walking the dog, because walking the dog is so fundamental to composing a good scene. That’s not to say as a writer, you should list everything that happened like a diary entry. Rather, be mindful of the things that happen while walking the dog. What does this particular character see on the walk? What important things do they fail to see? Walking the dog allows the characters to interact with their world in a meaningful way.

Perhaps Jane woke up an hour late, her bedsheets stained with fluorescent ink because she fell asleep with an open highlighter and her notebook on her lap. Perhaps when Jane goes to the bathroom, she sees her husband’s clothes strewn over the floor, a quarter-filled coffee mug balancing on the edge of the bathtub, a pile of books and notepads on the bathroom counter. Perhaps as she paints her toenails, she winces at the sight of her ugly, misaligned pinky-toe that she broke while cliff-diving off the coast of Spain the previous year. In the kitchen, she sees the cereal bowl her husband left on the table, the sugary remnants of the cereal flakes caked onto the ceramic. Frustrated, she puts the bowl in the sink to soak it, but at least her husband has made a pot of coffee. Perhaps when she gets to the car, she realizes her husband has filled the gas tank for her.

By filling in these details, the writer is offering setting and characterization in an efficient, elegant way. We get the sense that Jane is adventurous and that her husband is a slob. But we also see that he’s not purposefully inconsiderate, since he’s filled her car with gas. Of course, this example is paired down to its bare bones, but you can see how the reader can learn a lot about characters and their personalities without the writer having to waste a paragraph telling us that Jane’s husband is a slob or that she likes to seek out adventure.

Write a lot of these scenes, or at least go through them slowly in your head, imagining the world though your character’s eyes. I would argue, the subtle emotional responses a character has in the small scenes are more meaningful than the obvious and predictable emotional responses in the big scenes. We know a character will be angry when they’re betrayed by a friend, or sad when their beloved father dies, or afraid when a menacing stranger pulls a knife on them. Beginning writers often reserve detailed description of emotions for these scenes and fall back on clichés. His blood boiled. Tears welled up in his eyes. Her heart thumped. What has happened, is the writer has failed to build up an emotional cache with the character. However, if the reader is already intimate with the character, in the momentous scenes, they’ll already feel what the character is feeling without the writer having to tell them.

The secret to good writing is to be acutely aware of everything. Go out and walk the dog! Stretch yourself to see the world in a different way and have an empathic response for all of your characters, no matter how good or evil they may be. Get it all down on paper. The redundant details can later be excised from the manuscript, but it’s so important to go through the process. This isn’t just advice for writers of literary or upmarket fiction. This is true for all writers. It’s the basis of great storytelling.

The Dog and the Bird

Posted on February 9, 2016 by dfsalvador

Growing up in a small town in Oklahoma, my friend Marc and I used to entertain ourselves by making up stories on the fly and recording them on a tape cassette recorder. We were seven or eight years old. On our less inspired but rambunctious days, the stories were simple and action packed, usually involving some indescribable yet inherently hideous and menacing beast chasing us through the neighborhood or our homes until we finally got away or killed it. We would dive to the floor, crash into the walls, or hurdle over the sofa to simulate our evasive maneuvers. Then, panting from our efforts, we’d whisper into the tape recorder how frightened we were as we pretended to hide. On other days we would attempt more intricate mystery stories—Scooby Doo type adventures—that routinely failed to reach a resolution before one of us was called home to dinner. When we’d meet up again, we never picked up where we left off because listening to the previous day’s recording always revealed some fatal flaw with our plotline. Before Marc moved away sometime around my third-grade year, we had compiled several cassette tapes worth of unfinished stories.

But the storytelling bug had bitten. For school, we had to write a story. Mine was called The Dog and the Bird. I don’t remember what it was about. It probably featured a dog and a bird working together to achieve some noble outcome. Whatever it was about, I just know I put a whole lot of effort into it and was really proud of the finished product. My teacher gave me some encouraging feedback which immediately inflated my writing aspirations. I asked her about getting it published.

She said, “Ok. But you’re going to have to type it up really nice.”

So I did. I typed it up, checking it multiple times for errors and letting my parents proofread it. I told them I had to get it ready for publication. The Dog and the Bird would be my breakthrough as an author. The story had to be flawless. I took it back to my teacher.

She read through it again and agreed that it was much better typed out. “But you’re going to need to bind it,” she said. “So people can read it like a book.”

That night I three-hole punched it and put the story in a report folder with a clear plastic cover. Now someone could read it like they were flipping the pages of a book. I gave it to my teacher.

Again she was impressed. “Now, you just need some cover art. Every book has a cover.”

I was stumped. I was an author, not an artist. I was also growing impatient. I wanted to be done with it. I knew drawing with crayons or pencils would look amateurish, so using the computer technology available before the days of clip art and the internet, I drew a rudimentary picture of a four-legged animal that might have resembled a dog, at least to the type of person gifted at locating constellations and finding images of animals in clouds. Next to my dog, I drew a faceless, two-stroke picture of a bird—essentially a ‘V’ with curved tips. I centered the title in big bold letters above the drawing and printed it out on my dot matrix printer which made the big letters and the drawing of the dog look hideously pixelated. It didn’t matter. I had completed a book. My book. The next day I presented it to my teacher who promised that she’d share it with all her future classes. I promised I’d work more on the artwork. I never did. But I was satisfied. I was as published as I needed to be. The project had taken all my energy for two weeks, and I needed a rest.

I owe so much to that teacher who recognized and cultivated that creative spark in me. She didn’t give me a cold dose of reality by informing me of the cruel world of publishing, or by telling me to expect a pile of rejections, or that being a published author is extremely difficult. This would have been the truth, of course, but at that age, if faced with these mountains of obstacles, I would have given up before even starting.

I think we forget sometimes that one of the primary goals of teaching is showing someone how to set a goal and complete a task. Everybody wants to achieve something. Guiding a student to find their true bliss is part of the process.

We should never forget this function of teaching. Performing well on a standardized test is an admirable goal for a school but falls way short of being inspirational for the student. If we simply grade teachers by how well they show someone where to place a comma or how to turn the remainder of a long division problem into a decimal, then we are truly selling ourselves short.

Because of my teacher, I experienced a wonderful sense of accomplishment. It was my first completed story. I’ve continued to write stories. Some have been published but most of them shared only amongst a small group of friends and fellow writers. I would have forgotten about The Dog and the Bird except that recently I was sifting through an old box of schoolwork and came across the cover art that had been hidden beneath the rubble of my life like a lost puzzle piece. I hadn’t thought of it in years. I honestly don’t recall which teacher was responsible for encouraging me to continue on the story; otherwise, I would gladly give her credit here. Until now, I didn’t recognize the value of that lesson in publishing.

The most profound moments in life are often not recognized until the moment is long gone. Insignificant and untethered memories reappear and unexpectedly reveal their importance upon distant reflection. But this, I’d argue, is where the true substance of living resides. In the end, when we sum up our histories, our purpose or meaning in life will not be perfectly articulated like a corporate mission statement but will instead be buried deep beneath the subtext of a thousand little moments and scattered memories.

32 Useful Words to Describe Looking or Seeing

Posted on November 6, 2015 by dfsalvador

As a writer I often gaze out the window while searching for something else for my characters to do besides gaze out the window. There must be something else to look at and some other way to describe seeing. Here are 31 useful words for looking or seeing. Some of these should be used more sparingly than others, and some should be used only in very specific contexts.

Watch
Notice
Glimpse
Gaze
Peek
Spot
View
Eye
Survey
Leer
Study
Gawk
Ogle
Observe
Goggle
Witness
Turn attention to
Check out
Spy
Search
Scan
Inspect
Detect
Examine
Take stock of
Scope out
Scrutinize
Behold
Regard
Contemplate
Peer
Glower

Beauty Matters

Posted on November 14, 2013 by dfsalvador

You’re one of fifty-two people who mill about in a large room. Each of you holds a playing card against your forehead. No one knows their own card, but you can see each other’s. The goal of this little game is to pair off with the highest card possible, but to accomplish this, your request for partnership has to be accepted by the other. Of course the Aces and Kings are the most popular and they pretty much know right away that they’re the cream of the crop. It’s instant mutual acceptance when an Ace requests to partner with another Ace. It works fairly quickly with the Kings as well. By the time this experiment is over, for the most part, Aces have paired with Aces, tens with tens, sixes with sixes, and twos with twos.

It must be kind of depressing being a two, being the last in the room to find a partner, watching all the high cards go, then the middle ones, and experiencing the horrible realization that you’re the low card that no one wants to pair with.

Research has shown this is how couples typically pair off in the real world. Hot women tend to be with hot guys. Sevens with sevens. Twos with twos. Through the process of assessing interest and receiving rejections, we get a pretty good gauge of where we stand relative to others, and we choose our partner accordingly.

The popular belief is that beauty is subjective—beauty is in the eye of the beholder—but really, we all hold similar opinions as to who we consider physically beautiful. Even people in one culture can easily pick out beauty in another culture. We are hard wired to perceive beauty.

So we do our best to enhance ourselves, to add value to our card. We’ll diet and exercise to maintain the best proportions or wear makeup to project the illusion of youth. We do this because it’s necessary to attract a partner with the most sexual allure. We value other traits too, but physical beauty reigns supreme. Talents can add to one’s overall allure but it’s more like one suit value trumping another. Adding a Harvard degree to a killer body might make you the Ace of Hearts to the Ace of Clubs. In other words, talent, charm, and intellect can increase the value of your suit, but not your pip value.

We often talk about the shallowness of physical beauty and how real beauty is something within, and there is a certain internal beauty we do admire. It’s this internal beauty that makes a close friend or relative loveable in a heartwarming kind of way, but this kind of beauty doesn’t translate to romantic attraction. They are two distinct kinds of beauty—one endears us to many friends and the other excites a potential romantic partner.

So can a Six ever make it with an Ace? It happens but it’s not common. If we’re slightly devious, we’ll try some sleight of hand. Alcohol to level the playing field. The use of power and/or intimidation. Money.

Our stories, myths and legends try to convince the lower valued cards to hold out hope and that maybe in some perfect universe, Marisa Tomei might be attracted to short, stocky, bald men.

The lesson that many of our most cherished love stories attempt to drive home is that inner beauty is everything. But in what fairy tale is Prince Charming a three hundred pound oaf with big ears and acne? The truth is, most fairy tales and stories are populated by pretty heroes and ugly villains.

So what about the twos and threes? What is their destiny? To become witches? Criminals? Is this what we expect from less physically attractive people? With constant rejection and low societal expectations, wouldn’t a two or three naturally come to resent the world? I’m sure at some point we’ve all felt that sinking feeling of being the last man or woman standing in the room—it sucks—but we all haven’t faced this rejection on a day-to-day basis. This rejection does not come from only potential sexual mates. Pulchronomics, which studies the economics of beauty, shows us prettier people earn more money than their plain counterparts. Handsome children earn more attention from teachers. It’s no wonder that criminals tend to be uglier than most.

Obviously, being ugly does not make one a criminal just like being depressed doesn’t cause someone to commit suicide. There is, however, a striking correlation, and I wonder if we fully consider and appreciate the consequences of being physically unattractive and receiving constant rejection.

What we do tend to do is ridicule those who are preoccupied with their looks. But in a world where looks has a greater bearing on future success than education, a focus on primping actually seems to be the smarter path to take.

This being said, we also tend to overvalue the benefits of beauty in relation to overall happiness. Perhaps being the perpetual object of desire makes it easier to engage in extra-marital affairs, which can lead to painful divorces, breakups, or love triangles. Perhaps the promiscuity associated with Hollywood is less indicative of the loose morals of show business and more the result of extraordinarily beautiful people constantly in the midst of each other.

So what’s the lesson? Obviously beauty matters more than it seems appropriate to acknowledge. But the more important question is what can we change? Do we try to make the not-so-physically attractive more eye-appealing and encourage vanity? Or do we try to change the perception and importance of beauty? Can we really transform something that is hard-wired within us?

I think it would be nice if we could occasionally ask for a reshuffling of the deck.

Superheroes

Posted on February 2, 2013 by dfsalvador

“Whatever you do, no climbing any trees while I’m gone,” my mother had said before she left the house to go shopping. The simple warning had slipped out of her mouth, fallen to the floor, wiggled through the carpet, squeezed behind the TV set, crawled up the wall, wafted over my head out the window, and caught up with me thirty minutes later as I was shimmying up the largest oak tree in my neighborhood.

Dressed in my Spiderman suit—which were really pajamas with sleeves that no longer reached my wrists and tattered bottoms that extended just beyond my knees—I stopped just as I reached a broad, upwardly expanding limb. I watched in wonderment as Steven carefully eased himself away from the trunk, avoiding prickly branches as he neared the end of the limb. His Superman suit fit him perfectly, and the falling sun cast a phosphorescent glow on the red cape tied neatly around his neck.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be climbing trees,” I called out as I made the critical mistake of looking down.

Steven remained focused on the branch supporting his broad chest. “You don’t have to. I just want to see how high I can get. I’m Superman, remember?”

I looked up. We weren’t even halfway to the top, but we were higher than I had ever climbed. I timidly followed my friend out onto the limb, hugging it securely and ignoring the pricks on my forearms and ankles.

I had a sinking feeling. With our combined weight the branch bent until it was nearly horizontal. But it didn’t break. Steven sat upright and flung his cape proudly over his shoulder. He watched with compassionate concern as my fragile frame inched closer to him. A semi-circle grin rounded out my elated face, and I was beginning to maneuver myself upright, to sit beside greatness, when I heard the crack. The geometry on my face reversed itself as I whipped my head around to see what had happened. The limb remained securely attached to its trunk, but my reaction had been too abrupt, and I lost my balance. The world flipped as I swung around the limb, my arms flailing but catching nothing but empty air. My legs, though quivering, held strong, and I hung upside down staring at the hard ground that awaited my head. I cried out in fear.

“Grab my hand,” said Steven. I strained my neck to find his silhouette framed in a flare of sunlight. Reaching out my arm, I swung it until I found his hand. My fingers wrapped around his, and I sighed in relief as I began to be pulled upright.

What happened next was one of those rare unexplainables, like biting into a salad fork or poking an eye while putting on a t-shirt. My feet suddenly lost their grip, and though I tried to hang on to Steven’s hand, I flew—miraculously feet first—toward the ground. Impact sent a violent shock throughout my entire body. Pain had no identity, but it overtook me. I squeezed my eyes and rolled on the ground in anguish. I needed my mother to absorb my pitiful groans. Burying my head in the ground, I let the tears puddle beneath the bridge of my nose. It was my own fault. I couldn’t let Steven see this—my defeat.

Even as I suppressed my barking breaths, they lingered, orbiting around my head. After what must have been almost a minute, I took a deep breath and held it, but the gasps continued. I realized they weren’t my own. I cautiously lifted my head, and my eyes climbed the tree and followed the limb to the red cape firmly in the grasp of prickly branches. Dangling several feet below, his head in the noose of the cape, was Steven. His strong fingers struggled to untie the knot around his neck. His legs thrashed the air as raspy whimpers escaped his throat. My tears hardened as I watched in horror. I was going be in trouble if my mom found out where I’d been.

Months later, standing on the stage in front of my classmates, I accepted the wooden, shield-shaped plaque amidst the chorus of cheers. My mom had taken off work to be there for that day, and my eyes teared when I saw her smiling proudly at me from the back of the auditorium.

I stood uncomfortably beside the principal of our school as he gave my little hand a firm shake. He put his hand on my shoulder and spoke into the microphone. “Steven Keller wanted to fly like Superman, and for a brief time he did. He was a model student and this award, in his memory, is given to a student who best exhibits exemplary behavior. You should be very proud, son.” He handed me the award and pushed me forward to the front of the stage to accept the applause.

I didn’t know what “exemplary” meant at the time, but in my mind it was something horrid. My refusal to speak since Steven’s accident had been mistaken for good behavior. Exemplary behavior.

But to this day, every time I hear the word, I remember the scared little kid who ran home and cowered in his bedroom while his friend dangled from a tree.

I Confess. I Cheated.

Posted on January 23, 2013 by dfsalvador

145

You’re in school taking the most important and hardest class you’ll ever take. There’s a lot of pressure because if you make an A you’ll be guaranteed a job. A B might get you the job depending on how everyone else in the class does. But you’re pretty confident because you’ve worked harder than your classmates.

First test you make a B. A few of your classmates make Cs and Ds but the majority make As, and you wonder how they did that. Soon, you hear that one of your classmates has a copy of all the semester’s tests, obtained perhaps by cleverly hacking into the professor’s computer. The ones who are cheating ask if you’d like to come over and “study” with them for the next test. You decline because you don’t want to be a cheater.

You study more than you did for the last test because you know you have to just to keep up. You end up with a B plus. They make As again. They’re contacted by job recruiters. You are not. Even some of the ones who made Cs and Ds on the first test are now making As, moving you closer to the bottom of the pack. You’d like to tell on them, but you have no proof. Besides, that would really tick off the whole group, and they pretty much detest you anyway for your goody-two-shoes routine.

You do what you have to. You join them. You make your A. You get the job. You’re financially independent and so happy about that. You get married and have kids, whose piano and tennis lessons you can pay for thanks to that good job. Your family is happy. No regrets. You and your college buddies laugh about that class years later.

Now you’ve got this great job in a tight economy. Again, you’re working your butt off, eating lunches at your desk, never taking sick days or personal days, yet the productivity of your co-workers is surpassing your own. You know they’re cutting corners, backdating documents, shredding customer complaints and doing what they can to stay a step ahead of the curve. One misstep and they could be fired. They know that. You know that. At the same time, you know that management tacitly condones this behavior as long as they don’t make an obvious blunder that forces management’s hand. You have a family and hate taking risks especially when it comes down to your livelihood. However, you wonder that if you can’t keep up with the pack and their inflated numbers, you might lose your job. You give up vacations, work on holidays, extend your work week to eighty hours just to do what your co-workers claim they do in a forty hour week. You have your integrity. You keep up this pace for twenty years, put your kids through college, watch them have families of their own, and finally you retire.

When you look back, you wonder what it would have been like to spend just a little more time with your kids? You regret not spending more, because when it comes down to it, isn’t the family the most important thing? You feel bitter at the rest of the world who seems happier than you with fewer wrinkles around the eyes. They never faced the consequences of their misdeeds. Or were they really misdeeds? You wonder if making three follow up calls and fibbing on the required fourth would have made that much of a difference.

We face these kinds of tough decisions every day, sometimes without even considering the moral and ethical significance. Cheating and getting ahead is the easy decision. Choosing not to cheat is the tough one. However, cheating does, after all, imply getting a competitive advantage. What if you are at a competitive disadvantage if you don’t cheat because everybody else is? It’s easy to justify it in our own heads when we are pursuing our goals to be successful and respected.

Let’s be honest. What we all want is to be successful. Society puts pressure on us to be successful. In our culture, success is measured by the acquisition of things. A businessman who nets one million dollars is more successful than one who nets a hundred thousand dollars. No one asks to compare their bookkeeping or business practices. An NBA superstar who has five championship rings is more successful than one who doesn’t have any. Even successful parents are ones who produce successful children, children who are able to obtain a lot of things and money. Sometimes we need to see ourselves as successful.

It’s time for me to come clean. I am a Scrabble cheater when it comes to games played on my mobile device. At first I just played against a friend at work against whom I racked up a record of twenty wins and no losses. I branched out and began playing other players online. I’d lose a few games here and there, but I was much more serious about the game than ninety-five percent of the other people that I played, so that in itself gave me an advantage. There was one guy I liked to play. We’d have close games but I’d win about eighty percent of the time. Then his average score suddenly shot up by sixty points. I’d been playing long enough to know the difference between making good use of the board and pulling insane words out of nowhere, and not just crazy two or three-letter goofy words like ZO and ZA that every Scrabble player with a hundred games under his belt begins to know. These were words like ALUNITES or HODJAS or ORIGAN (no, not “origin” or “Oregon” but “origan”, in botany, another name for marjoram). I didn’t want to directly accuse him of cheating but I sent him a message that said, “Are you a Muslim botanist and chemist?” to which he replied, “No. Someone just played these words against me once, and I remembered them.”

Whatever. I knew he was cheating. It’s easy to hop onto the internet and use an anagram solver, and no one on the other side can ever prove it. He started beating me. It made me mad. I watched my win/loss record fall below ninety percent, not that it really matters since no one but me ever looks at it.

So then, I started doing it, using the anagram solvers. I started to beat him again. And it felt good. I didn’t feel guilty about it. If that’s the way he wants to play, that’s the way I’ll play, I told myself.

The point of all this is not to suggest that cheating is the proper way to go but merely how easy it is to justify to ourselves that not only is cheating the better way but also the vital way. There is an insane pressure placed on us from birth to succeed, and although many of us are brought up in the Christian tradition of humility and charity, we all know that piety and moral purity are not the main criteria society considers when labeling a person a success.

Since we are social beings, how others see us is so important to how we define and view ourselves. We want others to like us and we naturally hide our flaws.

So now we come to Lance Armstrong. Of course I had to watch his interview with Oprah. I genuinely feel bad for him not because I sympathize with what he did but because I can only imagine how painful the fall from the top to the thorny pit of despair must be. The truth is, we’ve all been in his situation. You might say my Scrabble example is nothing like Lance Armstrong because there was nothing really at stake. But really, that makes my actions even more preposterous. The only thing at stake was my own vanity.

I’ve talked to some who might understand why he cheated, but cannot tolerate the way he viciously went after the people who accused him of cheating. Anyone who has had an affair and is trying to hide it will scorch the earth before they reveal their lie. It’s not noble or right. It’s just a desperate attempt to stay above everything and scrape and claw at whatever might catch before the inevitable avalanche sends us tumbling down the mountain. The deeper and more important the lie, the more people we are willing to hurt to protect it. The way I see it, a man at his worst is usually no worse than most men.

To be clear, I’m not excusing Lance Armstrong’s behavior. His titles should be stripped, a ban implemented, and his legend in the sport of racing tarnished. But I don’t hate him either. I’m just considering the reality that Lance Armstrong, like us all, is human. Perhaps that is the biggest disappointment.

Snitch

Posted on December 9, 2012 by dfsalvador

Dragging with her the gossip queen
She slips away to hidden space along the edge
Where whispers are suppressed by industrial woosh
And where webs are weaved
And transgressors trapped
And where ears sneak into seismic cracks
This is the real business
Salt and pepper to the filet of mundane
Can you believe
   No way, no how
   It’s the truth
   Here’s the proof
   Maybe it’s something misunderstood
   But how can it be, how can it be
   It is, it is

The shame of secrets spilled
From voices
from voices I know
Nowhere better to follow the show
Than from behind a thin sheet of drywall

Let me tell you something…something about what they said
As I…As I heard it all.

Meet the Author

Posted on September 15, 2012 by dfsalvador

“The only way to get there is to pass through Griffin. No one wants nothing to do with Griffin.”

Gabby arrived to the conclusion that she wasn’t going to get any help from the man in the orange hammock, but she felt it would be rude just to walk away. The last customers of the day were loading their haul of junk into their pickup trucks. She wondered how any of these items actually sold. They weren’t really antiques as the sign advertised. They were just unfinished, well-weathered pieces that had never seen better days. “So once I get through Griffin, where do I go next? Wait, Griffin’s a town, right?”

The man in the orange hammock sat up. His face looked worn as if the sun had tattooed an old leather glove onto it. He wore workman’s overalls and had an oval patch with “Dan” written on it in white, cursive letters. “You ain’t curious why no one wants to go through Griffin?”

“I just assumed it was because it didn’t have a Dairy Queen.”

“Oh, it gots a Dairy Queen. Fact, looks like any ordinary place. But once you step outside, you’ll know you ain’t in just any ol’ town.”

“I don’t plan on staying.”

“Hah!” His laugh was coarse and guttural. “They ain’t gonna let you leave that quick, I promise you that!”

“Can you just tell me where he lives?”

“I can tell you, but you really need someone in town to show you. It’s kinda complicated—a couple forks in the road, some landmarks that are tough to see. That’s how it is in these neck of the woods. Why you so bent on seein’ Mr. Salvador? You an author, too?”

“Me? No. I’m a nobody. At least for now. But I’ve read some of his stuff. Meet the Author was the one that did it for me.” It was no exaggeration. After reading that story she had to meet D.F. Salvador. It was like her existence depended on it. The story hadn’t answered any questions or exposed hidden truths, but it connected with her, like she knew exactly what the author had gone through in writing it.

“I read that one,” Dan said as he flicked a fire ant off his arm. “There was a big to-do ‘bout that one ‘round here when it got published, you know, on account of the familiarity of it and all.”

Gabby thought about biting her tongue, but she couldn’t resist. “I can’t help but notice, but in that story he had a guy in overalls on an orange hammock. Did he base that character on you?”

“Nah. I based me on that character. Honestly, I don’t care for the man. After the drought, he bought out my deeds forcin’ me out here to the fringes.”

“So you know where he lives?”

“Sure. Right on the banks of the Oeeokee River. If you can find it.”

Gabby pulled out her map and studied it. “Now I know you’re messing with me. There’s no Oeeokee River on the map.”

He tumbled out of the hammock and stretched his limbs. “That’s cause it didn’t exist until Mr. Salvador moved in.” Dan put his finger on the map, leaving an oily smudge where he dragged. “He dug some trenches along here, moved some boulders around, redirected the flow of that other river you do see here on the map. Made the old house riverfront property. Suppose he wanted to make an oxbow, but I guess he didn’t have time to finish. Problem is the Oeeokee ain’t got nothing to flow into, so it kinda bottles up and busts its banks whenever we get a good rain like we did last night. Floods the place. He’s always cleanin’ up the place, but the waters always comin’ in faster than he can clear it out. That’s what happens when you fight nature’s course.”

“Does he live alone?”

“Yup. He has some children in town, but he let go of them some time back. You’ll probably run into them. Griffin’s a small place. Maybe they can tell you where to find him.” He coughed out another laugh. “You best be goin’. Storm’s comin’ in.”

He seemed to be ushering her back to her car, now the only vehicle in the dirt parking lot, but Gabby felt somewhat compelled to buy something, at least for Dan’s time.

“How much for that Velasquez print?”

“Ma’am, that ain’t no print. That is a genuine painting. Lost Manyness, I think is what it’s called. It reminds us of when we lost our many niceties.”

“It’s Las Meniñas. It’s by Velasquez. It’s like in every art book.”

“Then this Velasca fella’ must’ve copied this work here.”

“It was painted in Spain—”

“Still could’ve seen this one.”

“—like five hundred years ago.”

“How you know so much about art? You an artist too?”

“Maybe I am.”

“Good luck findin’ your writer friend Mr. Diego Savador.”

Dan walked Gabby to her car, a shiny, new hybrid. He held her door open as she got in. She thanked him and said goodbye and tried to pull the door shut, but he held firm. “They say he killed a man,” he said.

“Do you believe that?” she asked.

“The important thing is if you believe that. You’re the one goin’ to see him.” He finally let go of the door. “But you can’t believe everything you read.”

Gabby pulled out of the dusty parking lot of the antique shop and followed the road north to Griffin. When she rolled into town, she was struck by the familiarity of the places lining the main road—the pizzeria with the cartoonish pepperoni pizza missing one slice painted on the window, the coffee shop with the wrought iron cafe chairs on the patio—but they existed together like an impossible memory, incongruous with the reality she knew. She had never been to Griffin before.

She stopped her car when she came to a red light. She found it peculiar that there should be a stoplight at a point in the road where there was no intersection. Minutes passed. Was this what Dan had meant when he said the town wouldn’t let people go? She was about to run the light when a sheriff’s cruiser pulled up behind her. She waited longer. He inched closer. She didn’t know what to do. The sheriff turned on the flashing red and blue lights, but she still had nowhere to go without running the light. Finally, the sheriff pulled alongside her in the southbound lane where oncoming traffic would have been had there been any traffic. He gestured for her to follow him to the Dairy Queen parking lot. She followed.

She parked, rolled down her window, turned off her car, put her hands ten-and-two on the wheel, and waited. The officer walked to her door and leaned in.

“You must be lost. The road pretty much ends here, or a little ways down the road. The only people who stop here at this light are people who are lost. Everyone else just drives on through. So, what exactly are you doing here?”

Gabby wasn’t sure if she’d done anything wrong. “I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I’m looking for a writer,” she said. “D.F. Salvador. Do you know him?”

“I sure do! If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be sheriff!”

“Can you help me find him?”

The sheriff removed his cap and scratched his head. “Well, you follow this road until it comes to a T-intersection. Take a left…you know, it’s complicated.” A few more cars pulled into the parking lot diverting the sheriff’s attention. “I’m late for a town hall meeting, too.”

“At Dairy Queen?”

“You think we have a town hall? Look, I’d help you, even drive you out there, if it wasn’t such a big meeting. It’s our Third of May Celebration tonight. You should stick around. Bring your gun.”

“A gun?”

“Yeah. Everyone fires off at midnight.”

“Wouldn’t that be the fourth of May?” she asked. The sheriff began to slowly retreat toward the Dairy Queen, and Gabby wasn’t sure if he’d heard her snide question. “Listen,” he said. “If you’re looking for your author, just listen for water and head in that direction. You’ll probably find him in the river.” He backpedaled a little faster. “Sorry, I can’t help you more—”

Gabby stepped out of her car and called out, “I heard he has family in town. Do you know where I can find them?”

The sheriff laughed. “Everyone in this town is related in one way or another.” He pointed a finger pistol at Gabby and winked. “But try to make it tonight.” He disappeared inside the restaurant.

Suddenly, something prodded Gabby in the back.

She spun around and found a scraggy, one-legged man waving a crutch. His other arm was in a sling, propped up at a 90 degree angle. “You’re looking for Diego Salvador, aren’t you?” he said, falling hard back onto his crutch. “Do not let him see you or he will use you. He will, he will use you. You know, he did this to me.” His eyes were expressionless, but she quickly realized it was because he had no eyebrows. He was painfully lacking.

“You know where to find him?” she asked.

“Last time I went looking for him, this happened to me,” he said, nodding to his limp arm. “Here. Take this.” He held out the crutch. “I need to give you something. Hurry! Take it! Do you want me to help you or not!”

She put a hand on his shoulder and took the crutch.

He continued to hop around while he searched his pants. He yanked out a gun. Gabby recoiled, nearly making him fall in the process. “Gimme my crutch,” he said. He waved the gun wildly as he tried to balance himself. “Here. Take this,” he said, offering the gun. “Trade. Gimme my crutch. Quick! Before I fall and break my one good limb.”

She didn’t want it, but she she didn’t want to see him fall either. And she certainly didn’t want the gun to go off accidentally, so she took it. It felt warm and heavy in her hands.

“You seem like a nice girl.” the man said. “You have a name?”

“Gabby.”

“You’re a lucky one, I can tell. I just don’t want to see what happened to me happen to you. It ain’t easy being half a man.”

She tried to hand the gun back to him. “I’m sure he didn’t intentionally hurt you.”

He pushed it away. “Are you his mouthpiece now? He’s using you and you don’t even know it.”

“I don’t need a gun,” she said.

“Keep it. I really have no reason for carrying it. I guess I just had it for the celebration.” He smile widely. “But tonight, you’re the celebration.”

Gabby pulled the gun closer to her. “I don’t know what you want me to do with this.”

“You’ll need it. I’ll show you exactly how to get there, but first you have to promise to me to do something.”

She followed the directions, moving slowly down the path. She had been warned not to startle him. She had been warned not to step in his shadow or pass over his reflection. The one-legged man had warned of many things, but the consequences of ignoring the warnings were vague. As long as she beat the storm, which gathered strength at the edge of the tree line, she’d find him on the river, which would be the “safest place to confront him.”

It was when she felt the first twinge in her chest that she first turned around and assessed her progress, wondering if she’d be able to return the same way she came or if she’d even recognize the path from a flipped perspective. Why had she trusted the one-legged man over her own instincts? She closed her eyes and dampness closed in on her senses until it filled her body. Thunder just beyond the tree line. The natal smell of rain. Water. Water flowing. She opened her eyes and followed the sound. She hopped over prickly plants, trusting the stability of makeshift stepping stones.

Finally, a shallow stream swarmed around her ankles. She’d reached the outer nerves of the Oeeokee River. The little house was where she knew it would be, but she knew D.F. would not be inside. Upriver, a cluster of boulders parted the river, unleashing rapids on one side and a calm flow on the other. A small tree sprouted from the largest of the boulders.

She mapped her way there, choosing the flattest rocks and stones and imagining the occasional leaps and feats of balance that would be required to reach the cluster. She knew she’d find him there on the other side of the largest boulder.

She moved quickly but quietly. A few rays of sun broke through the clouds. Her shadow danced along the boulders until her shape took form in the reflection of the river. She was aware of her pounding heart as she climbed atop the boulder. She gave one final look at where she’d come from and she caught a glance of her reflection, full and colorful, in the river below. She felt more resolute than ever as she pulled herself atop the boulder.

There he was under the shade of the tree, his back to her, his journal in his hands. The rolling water obscured her footsteps as she crept up behind him. Before she did anything else, she had to see what he had written.

On the page were two sentences and his hand hovered above, prepared to add more. She moved closer to read what he had written.

The only way to get there is to pass through Griffin. No one wants nothing to do with Griffin.”

Then

Gabby arrived

Don’t Search My Bags

Posted on June 3, 2012 by dfsalvador

Don’t search my bags
I don’t know
I don’t know
what is in there
yes I packed
yes I packed my bags

lemme pass
take a chance
lemme pass
I’m in a hurry
to move on
I’m movin’ on

I’m dyin’
yes I am
but not a drug
for this man
just need a wave and a nod
to get me goin’ on

do you really wanna see
all the baggage in the bag
all the crap
that I have
and listen to my story
of how I got what I packed?

ain’t got the time
or the tissue
or the drops for the eyes
threw away
all the tears
‘cause I knew they had to go

where I go is where I go
do you really wanna know?
if you’d seen where I’d been
you’d zip it up again
and let me through
and let me through

here it is
see it all
do you wanna hold me?
grab my wrist
check your list
did you miss
anything
anything at all?

what I say is who I am and
what I am is what you’d say
is a mess of a man
with a bundle in his bag.
not a threat
just a mess

did we really need to check it?

DF Salvador

Confessions of a Writer

Tag Archives: writers

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I Confess. I Cheated.

Snitch

Meet the Author

Don’t Search My Bags

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