L is for Labyrinth

I spent four hours working on a table of contents for my book yesterday morning. I'm struggling to find the right structure, the right voice, and a proper container for what seems to be an excess of material about my chosen subject.

I'm lost. Kind of. But not really, because I have an inkling of an idea that will turn into a decent third draft as soon as . . . as soon as I rewrite everything I've written and tell these stories in a different way. Which brings me to the idea of the labyrinth.

A friend of mine from writer school just wrote a charming essay about her experience of getting out of a funk by walking a labyrinth buried in the snow. My only real-life experience walking an outdoor maze like the one she describes was when I spent a few days working on the first draft of this same memoir. I went to a convent, thinking that a retreat from my daily life would be just the thing to help me focus on my work. What I discovered was the location pushed all my old nun buttons, the food was terrible, and I'm capable of distracting myself no matter where I'm sleeping. I left early, within an hour of finishing a working outline for the first draft.

Then, I spent the next three years alternately wrestling with and ignoring this material and I still haven't finished. But I know what this book doesn't want to be. So that's something.

The labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral is laid in the stone floor, centered perfectly. It's said that the monks used to travel the length of the path on their knees while they prayed. When I visited, the church was filled with chairs, so you couldn't walk the path -- but the size of it brought to mind the incredible humility one must have had to actually want to scootch along a stone floor à genou while praying to an often inaccessible God.

I'm beginning to understand that the story I'm telling is finite -- I was in a relationship that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. There was a lot of drama, which is why I believe there's a book in there. But there have been a lot of twists and turns in my process of learning how to tell it -- riding overly-emotional roller coasters, excessive self-examination, and my need to be heard have all gotten in the way of the storytelling. My attitude about each of the events that I want to include has changed dramatically, as has my choice of form for the book I want to have out in the world with my name on it. I'm getting closer and closer to the center of my own labyrinth -- realizing that it has taken a lot of back and forth for me to understand what is most important to the book doesn't necessarily have to be what is most important to me.

Getting to the center, I realize that I really prefer the story when it's not about me, but instead about the audience. It's a lot easier to write that way.