The Moment After Which Everything Changed
On thresholds and the line between what happens and what doesn't + the one thing that will always, always make the writing harder (so, don't do it unless you absolutely must!)
This week (including earlier today!) I’ve been talking nonstop about my new essay “The Cost” because it was a big doorway for me. That’s because it was a very charged, difficult essay, both to write and to publish. One of the reasons “The Cost” was so difficult is because it explores several pivotal, life-changing moments that take place over the span of 50 years, all in a short space of under about 3,800 words. For the new writers here, let me tell you something I say to students and mentees frequently: covering more time and more events is always harder, from a craft perspective, than covering fewer events and less time, full stop.
There is simply no question about that.
Accurately, lovingly, achingly capturing and amplifying one moment on the page in order to point toward a whole universe is something we can practice and become quite good at if we are patient and devoted. But laying out several or many such pivotal moments over a very long timespan in a relatively small container is, well, it’s a daunting and even breathtaking challenge, and that’s what I was tasked to do in “The Cost.” It exhausted me, frankly, because not only was it emotional, but it asked me to operate at the very ceiling of my skill level, and then some.
Here are just a handful of the pivotal moments I sought to connect in one short, 3800-word essay that spans fifty years:
I was three or four when my stepfather, Mafia, first sexually molested me. He continued until he abandoned our family—“like a thief in the night,” my mother always said—when I was ten.
Not long after this moment, the narrator does tell her mom, who tells the narrator’s dad. The narrator remains mostly sure the abuse is not a big deal. At thirteen going on fourteen, things that happened at ten and younger seem forever ago.
Maybe that’s why the narrator so drastically underestimates the cost of telling.
So what did it cost me to tell, again?
Maybe that’s why I said yes when, six months after my book launch, I received an email from a writer acquaintance who was curating an anthology on father loss, lack, and legacy. The editors at her academic press had requested “one more essay, specifically on surviving incest.” The acquaintance thought of me. I didn’t want to write about incest again. Writing about incest is grueling. Besides, as noted, most people don’t want to hear about it.
On September 28, Hurricane Ian made landfall first on Cayo Costa then south of Punta Gorda, becoming the first Category 4 hurricane to impact Southwest Florida since Charley in 2004. Also the deadliest hurricane to strike Florida since the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. My father lives 100 miles from Punta Gorda.
This selection is not all inclusive, but to excerpt more seems silly because you can just skim the essay if you want a deeper dive. Suffice it to say, it was a grueling task. And I guess that’s just one reason I am looking forward to backtracking now, and offering you a prompt in which we will look very closely at one moment rather than many moments. However, this week, we’re not selecting from any array of ordinary moments, as we’ve done in the past. This week, we’re going to guide ourselves (well, I’ll be helping guide you with the detailed prompt!) through a process of exploring “the moment after which everything changed.”
Certainly, you might have lived through more than one such moment. I have, without a doubt. So now that you have a hint where we will be heading, let that percolate, let those moments rise to the surface in your back brain while we, in our front brains, continue speaking of craft for a moment before diving into the prompt.
And to get closer to the craft of something, I sometimes like to explore definitions, because, after all, we ply in words. And in my mind, the “moment after which everything changed” signifies the crossing over of a threshold of some sort. So, what, precisely, is a threshold?
Here’s what Merriam-Webster has to say:
I love the instability of this definition, the way it acknowledges both endings and beginnings, physical space and psychological space. And what about this amazing definition:
A level or point or value above which something is true or will take place, and below which it is not or will not. [emphasis mine]
So much richness to tease apart there!
Meanwhile, I’ve pointed to this before, but Jane Hamilton wrote one of my favorite “threshold” passages in her opening to her novel, A Map of The World:
I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.
Such lovely, complex interiority—a feat in itself, given how much more powerful exterior details can be to establish mood and impact in our creative writing. As is what happens in FR Martinez’s award-winning flash fiction, “That Place on Daniel Island,” which knocks me out every time I read it.
So … we’ll experiment with both, interiority and exteriority, as we enter into this week’s two-part, multi-step prompt on “the moment after which everything changed.”
You will have the opportunity to attend closely to the concept of a threshold—hopefully closely enough to raise your awareness of thresholds in the rest of your work and any manuscripts in progress! And you will also have the opportunity to add some commands in order to shape a complete flash piece from this exercise. So, with that, welcome! I’m excited to hear your stories about working with this prompt in the comments and the chat.