Zero Drafts and Mass Confusion

I have come to know certain truths: children are so lost in the 'way to do' things that they cannot do for themselves without the restriction of rules and lengths.  Bummer.

Yesterday students began writing and reflecting on thier names.
I showed five exerpts from different memoirs that in some way dealt with an individuals name. They were all very, very different. One was an excerpt from a book that is the gospel according to a kid named Levi who goes by Biff. Yes, that's right: the gospel according to Biff. The other was rather sentimental, from Rick Bragg remembering his southern roots. As the students brainstormed I projected my computer screen on the wall so that they may see what it looks like when I brainstorm. It was very scary for me as this is an emotional time and thinking on my names usually pulls out some raw emotion anyway. I began anyway thinking that they would learn from me, see how I was just allowing thoughts to explode in no particular order on my paper, but nah. They didn't. They think so literally. So objectively...how horribly boring!!!

Today they requested that I share my drafts. I wrote two zero drafts. The idea behind calling them zero drafts is that they really don't matter at all. They really, truly are the first attempts at creating something with your brand new thoughts. After today I will file these away and not return to them for a week and half. Then I may choose to spend time working more with it or simply keep it filed in the "nice try" folder. My zero drafts, what I was using as examples for my kids, are below. I hope they break themselves of thinking in terms of length and empty words. You will notice the similarities in these pieces, but also how very different they ended up being. Involving many family names and nicknames that are emotionally charged. I didn't simply tell the story of where my name came from. Any suggestions on how to teach kids to write this way? How to show not tell?

Zero Draft One

When Boston meets Dothan and Cochran falls apart the baby dreams in a child’s eye of rusty trampolines and dogs named “Rocky” dissipate as quickly as ‘daddy’ can just become a man, a stranger.

Cook forced me to grow up. Real fast, too fast. Fast like I rode on the green Huffy I got at my first split Christmas. My only split Christmas. Fast like he left, fast like she rushed home, fast like worlds flip-flopped and the log cabin became a brick mansion. A dwelling that upheld a name, not a family; aesthetically appealing, but coming “home” felt more like a punch in the gut.

Courtney means nothing really, comes from nowhere…I once heard it means “short nose,” but I think that is just a lie. A sweet lie, but nonetheless a lie. I try not to favor one lie over the other. That’s the Doyle in me. The honesty - residual Catholic guilt. The Doyle is overweight pea coats, crying during books, my passions that my mother cannot understand today even though it came from her. I think we are all guilty of forgetting where we come from.

She came from a Saint, like Saint Dominique but more determined, more willing: Great Grampy Doyle.

Harbor winters didn’t keep him away from his love. The hands of history had gripped his heart too tightly; daily he would pray and he would weep in that graveyard, on that hill, where perpetual care resides. Sister Dorothy eventually invited him in for prayer and an offering of friendship.


I am not sure what good man actually means, it is something I am troubled with often. What does it mean to be good?

The Doyle in me is good, the half that I get to keep is worth keeping.

Zero Draft Two

It seems the freshest memories, the ones that still burn, always provide us with more. It was years ago, years before I existed that Boston met Dothan, that those careless young lovers raised a ruckus together. Not many years after I existed, after the villain and the princess wrote a new-age love story and made me: the little girl, the baby girl, the runt of the litter; that Cook disappeared. Hallmark cards arrived in the mail; the insides told stories of love; little limericks that sung sweet songs of growing pains and embarrassing stories. I must have missed these years. We didn’t have those stories to share.

When I reached the stage for my name to disappear from the class list and reappear on a name tag I thought I knew me. I was half lady, half mystery.
Dothan, Alabama. That is what I get. That’s all: Dothan and Hallmark define that mysterious half.

So I learned Massachusetts. I learned of Catholic loves, lost loves, love stories, graveside weeping, and the Doyles of the past and an ideal of perpetual care. I learned that even when love is good, it ends, and life continues. I learned what Irish Catholic meant and became more acquainted with Catholic guilt. I tried anyway. I tried hard.

The train came and went, winter passed, and Nuthatch boarded the plane. That little bird that lived in us both. That idea that sometimes life allows for ideas greater than ourselves to survive and reason and passion can thrive together? That’s unreasonable.

The new leaver, the new taker:

Sailboats in the harbor and cannoli in the snow.
Lilies in a mason jar from the cheese factory; history supporting the present.
99 Union Street, the history again, rising up to meet us. Greeting us as we walked through the yard where Grampy Doyle kicked a can, or whatever kids did back then.
Little trifles floating, like confetti wishes, from the plane window. When thoughts of me were thriving.
Dream charms chasing away the madness of sleep with a grasshopper on a cycle.

Again it seems history has risen to the occasion. To show me and us that it doesn’t work. Cook left, Doyle left, and most of them usually take.

I wonder if Margaret, as a child, knew that Edward would weep daily for her, knew that the nuns would love him in her absence. I wonder which she, great grandmother, believed in: reason or divinity, in both spirituality and love.