I was recently revising a scene I workshopped during the Yale Writers Workshop. It’s an important scene and needed an equally-important place for it to take place. I decided to have it take place on a card table that had an enormous personal significance to the character’s father.
Instead of just saying it was important, I wanted to show it. I wasn’t sure how, so I just started writing some backstory. When I was done, the table had 445 words of its own.
My grandfather, who I never met but I’ve gathered would have been a pleasure to do so, was a coal miner. You don’t see a lot of mansions in those parts of the country because mining isn’t the best-paid of career tracks. The house we lived in would have been the biggest in the county there, but it wasn’t even the biggest house on our block.
To supplement his income, he used his hobby as a part-time job. He’d known woodworking since he was the age I first started ballet when he helped his dad build the modest house they lived in. He didn’t make much money at it because there wasn’t anyone with money around, but at the yearly county crafts fair he’d usually sell most of the stuff that had accumulated in the garage over the year and clear enough space to start creating more wood works of art disguised as chairs and tables and mirror frames and shelves and all the other things people plop down in their house and never notice again.
There was one piece he never sold. It was an oval poker table made of real mahogany. He’d started it when my dad was still in the womb, and he worked on it when he had the inspiration and the energy at the same time. It was his comfort project; the thing he worked on when he didn’t have to be working on something to sell. Over the years, the lipped edge around it became more and more ornate and the legs became a masterclass in scrolling. The scrolling developed scrolling of its own.
One day when he was twelve (or eleven or thirteen; the date varied when Dad would tell the story), he asked his dad when he was going to sell it. His dad told him that it was going to be his college fund. When Dad got into Stanford ROTC and ended up not needing college money, he told his dad that it was his retirement gift now.
He put felt on it and played on it for five years. He was working on a paneled, wooden table cover to match when black lung finally got him.
I hadn’t seen this table until it came out of storage when we moved here. I had been to the Palace of Versailles twice by then, but when I first saw this poker table, Versailles became less impressive. Even Louis XIV wouldn’t have deserved to play cards in its presence. I think the reason we never had a dog was so Dad wouldn’t have to make a choice of what he’d save in case the house caught on fire.
Does a card table need over 400 words to itself? No, it does not. Not even this one, which is the one I had in mind while I was writing:
What came out of all those words almost certainly won’t end up in the final draft. They won’t be wasted; they’ll be dropped in the cut folder and might make it into another story more suitable. The important thing is the last sentence, which is what I’d been panning for the whole time I was typing:
I think the reason we never had a dog was so Dad wouldn’t have to make a choice of what he’d save in case the house caught on fire.
I couldn’t have come up with that by sitting down and forcing it to come. It will probably be the only sentence that stays, but all that digging while I was writing is what led up to it. That was 416 words well wasted.
Don’t be afraid to let yourself dig. Dirt washes off, but the jewel stays forever.
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