When did you begin writing “Plastic Box” and when did you finish this piece of fiction? I began brainstorming “Plastic Box” at the beginning of September 2020. It’s when notetaking began. I became a notetaking fool: in the car at red lights, on my daily walks, in line at the grocery store. This is when I inadvertently bought 2% milk instead of Fat-Free, hot salsa instead of mild and forget the toilet paper. When I write, I become obsessed with the people who will inhabit my pages. At the end of each day, I transferred the scrawled notes into my journal.
Toward the middle of September, I felt comfortable enough with the characters and story direction to begin outlining. This is when the real writing began.
I completed the story during the first week of October 2020.
The story is a bit over forty-two-hundred words.
Where did you do most of your writing and what were your writing habits for “Plastic Box”? It’s in the outline stage that most of my writing occurs. I believe it took me a little over two weeks to move the outline for “Plastic Box” from skeletal form to completion. The outlining occured in a local Mexican restaurant called Las Palmas Mexican Restaurant, Jacksonville, OR. This was during a time when indoor spaces were closed because of COVID. But outdoor dining was available; and this is where all the components of my story came together. In a Mexican restaurant. Outside. Sitting at a table next to a heater. Enjoying a Margarita or two. Incidentally, the setting for this story is a Mexican restaurant; it serves as the backdrop from which the backstory and several flashbacks come alive.
The restaurant opened at 11:00. A short morning walk around town was a wonderful way to ramp up my thinking prior to the opening. (Below) I wanted to be the first customer. I wanted the place to myself. I sat at the same table each time. I’d stay for hours. Fleshing out the outline. Getting to know these people gracing my story. Getting to know the story itself. The Mexican music drove me forward. I love Mexican music. I don’t remember how many times I went there. Enough to put on a few pounds that I have yet to get off.
Writing habits? I’m a stickler for process. In the restaurant, I transferred the handwritten notes in my journal to a Word document on my laptop. Each note goes into a bucket arranged by order of events. The buckets become story sections. Within each section I build bulleted sentences and ideas. I bullet-point the entire story, constantly rearranging and adding and subtracting line items, constantly adding dimension to each character and texture to the atmosphere, constantly deleting excessive and unnecessary rubbish, constantly searching for meaning within all this nonsense. I love outlines. I spent a sizable portion of my professional career as an industry analyst in the high-tech industry. Outlines were my friend. When I began writing fiction, I slid into the comfortable process of creating outlines.
I bullet-pointed until “Plastic Box” completely unfolded. What began as a story about a widow suffering in the aftermath of a neighborhood firestorm became something much larger. Something about aging. Something about friendship.
When the outline was solid, I moved from Mexican restaurant to my office (Above). Here I collapsed/moved the segments within the outline into loose paragraph-like segments. No more bullet-points. I started at the beginning and reworked the existing material, chopping loose paragraphs into tight paragraphs. No Alcohol. Constant meditative music, volume low. Lots of coffee. Frequently getting out of bed at 3 AM to write, to polish, smoothing the narrative into a natural flow. In terms of style, tightness was/is everything.
Please include on excerpt and include page numbers as reference. The below excerpt is from the story “Plastic Box,” pages 23 & 24.
Barbara leaned over the tabletop. “Have you been back there?” she asked in a consolatory tone. “I mean, have you checked out your old home?”
Eleanor nodded while running her tongue under her lips and across her teeth. “Lordy,” she blurted, “it looked like a war zone. Like watching some kind of documentary where the anger of war had swept through neighborhoods as far as the eye can see. Everything was completely ravaged except for the chimneys. The chimneys stuck up like dirty statues from the charred rubble. I haven’t been able to get a good night’s sleep since I went back.”
“Oh, you poor dear,” said Marcy, and she leaned over and put her fingertips on Eleanor’s arm and slowly stroked her skin.
Eleanor slurped on her second martini then said, “Honestly, it’s really hard for me to accept all of what’s happened. You never think this kind of thing can happen to you.”
She used a paper napkin, wiped her mouth. When she returned it to her lap, her mouth was still downturned. The three women waited in silence as Eleanor’s memory flashed back and re-rolled the horrible events for the thousandth time. It had been late afternoon. At first, she thought the smoky smell coming into her house was caused by someone in the neighborhood smoking some freshly caught steelhead. Then there had been the pounding at the front door. John, her neighbor, was there. Behind him, flames shot up from the houses across the street. One block over a propane tank exploded. Somewhere a woman was screaming fire-fire-fire. The street itself was crammed with traffic, terrified people fleeing in the same direction. It had taken her only a few moments to retrieve the plastic box Robert had put together—he had put the box in the entryway closet, easily accessible during a quick exit. Then John ushered her to the front lawn, where he had parked his car. His wife and two kids were waiting for them. Their eyes were choked with tears and the ash and embers billowing everywhere made them cough and cough. Thank you, John, she had said calmly from the back seat.
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? Writing “Plastic Box” was special to me because of recent events. September 8, 2020, Southern Oregon, I exited a local guitar shop to find plumes of black smoke rising quickly from an area not so far away. The fire bloomed into a monster that has become known as the Almeda Fire. In hours it destroyed more than 2,800 structures between Ashland and Phoenix.
https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/mapping/mapping-the-almeda-drive-fire/
I live in a rural area not so far away from where I first noticed the smoke. Later that same evening, our small neighborhood was put on a LEVEL 2 Alert—Significant danger; voluntarily relocate or be ready to evacuate at a moments notice. High winds and hot temperatures exacerbated the problem. We were on LEVEL 2 Alert for two days. Constantly watching the local news for up-to-date information. Our cars packed and ready to go. Waiting for that LEVEL 3 notice to leave ASAP.
Fortunately for us, the fire never reached our area. However, others were not so lucky. This catastrophic event changed the lives of many people. And relocating people from the devastated areas during COVID proved problematic.
Afterwards I went out and bought a plastic container for important documentation and family photos. And it wasn’t long before I began brainstorming a new story. And so again I became that notetaking fool. Scrawling on pieces of paper at stoplights.
Fast forward, a year later, to the time of this interview. Our valley here in Southern Oregon is again choked with the smoke of wildfires and COVID is worse than it was last year. Currently, the Caldor Fire is sweeping across El Dorado County, California, toward Lake Tahoe. And the Dixie fire is burning through Northern California.
What the hell?
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? No, not from this excerpt. However, initially, I had woven the impact of COVID throughout the story. Hostess and servers wearing masks. The issue of social distancing and such at areas of relocation for those that lost everything. Ultimately, I decided against this story layer. I came to view it as an unnecessary distraction for the reader. And in the end, the firestorm itself became a story layer, rather than the main event. I used it to support the story’s twin themes: societal views on aging and the importance of friendship.
Do you have a photo of your marked up rough draft where you reworked the COVID story layer? I don’t. After finishing a story, I jettison my drafts. This includes ripping pages from my journal and tossing them. It’s become a ritual. I’m not interested in saving old outlines and corrections. Any words or ideas of value I didn’t use in the current story is transferred to a Word document labeled Scrap. Perhaps they will be useful for a different project.
I’m now 60. I’m more interested in moving forward than looking back. That said, I do consider myself nostalgic. Stuff from yesteryear constantly ends up in my stories. Moving forward with one eye looking in the rearview. That’s where I am currently.
Ron D’Alena was born in San Francisco and earned an MBA at the University of San Francisco. He worked for several Bay Area technology research companies followed by a stint at Cisco Systems before moving to Southern Oregon. He now enjoys an outdoor lifestyle, his family, guitar hacking and writing. Over the years, his short stories have appeared in numerous journals and magazines.