Candle in the Wind

Dec 10

A night in a small theatre. Black curtains line the stage. One spotlight lights up a living room setting containing a couch, a chair, a rug, and a fake plant, the other one casts a white circle around the microphone stand. I’m at the ceremony for the Graduation Prize that graduating writers from the Netherlands and Belgium get to send in their work for. I’m one of the six nominees and the next one to do a short reading from my work. I had sent in my work months ago and then totally forgotten about it, getting the email that said I was one of the nominees was a complete shock and a wonderful acknowledgment. I decided that whatever would happen that night wouldn’t matter; it was a big enough honor to be nominated. And, of course, secretly I wanted nothing more than to win that prize. I didn’t go through five and a half years of studying Creative Writing for nothing.

The presenter of the night is one of my former classmates, who graduated six months earlier. It took me a little longer to get there. He’s wearing a dark blue suit and looks at me proudly as he announces me. ‘She wrote a novella inspired by an Elton John song,’ he blares through the theatre. ‘It’s Eline van Wieren!’

The first thing I do when I get behind the microphone is apologize to the audience. No, I’m sorry, I will not be reading anything about Elton John tonight.

I had such a clear vision in my mind of what my graduation piece was going to be. A cover based on the album that I remember from my youth. Dark blue cardboard with a thin red band and a light pink, almost white rose in the middle. At the presentation, I would get all the attendees to sing the song with me. Lights dimmed, lighters in the air.

This was the plan: writing a story inspired by the song that Elton John originally wrote for Marilyn Monroe, ‘Goodbye Norma Jean’, and years later rewrote for Princess Diana’s funeral, ‘Candle in the Wind’. I watched the video of him walking into the chapel, getting behind the piano, and singing it countless times. Apparently, he had only written those lyrics a few hours before getting up there. And yet, his delivery was spotless. Not a trace of the old lyrics to be found.

I would watch every obscure documentary on YouTube and search every thrift store for books, magazines, mugs, and tins about either one of my three subjects. And then, in the end, I would tie it all together with the scratchy, beige carpet in the living room of the house that I grew up in.

The carpet that carved grooves into the skin of my knees while I pressed ‘play’ again. The walk we made every year again to the cemetery on the other side of the village. At the entrance, we would fill a watering can. When we had arrived at the right stone, we wiped away fallen leaves, cut down the lavender sticks that coved the letters, and lit tea lights. A story in which three lives would come together: the lives of Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, and the sister that never really was my sister. Lives that carried expectations none of them could ever live up to.

When the moment was there to start writing it, nothing happened. I tried to start with an image from one of the YouTube videos. Prince Harry walks hand in hand with his older brother William behind a black coach that carries their mother’s coffin. A sea of people that almost floods over metal fences, screams at him: ‘We love you, Harry!’

Nothing. I write down three words and then backspace all of them. I make myself another cup of tea I don’t drink. I get lost in twitter discussions. I text back all the people who sent me messages weeks ago. But I don’t write.

I found a different starting point. A memory from when I was about ten years old and home alone with the flu. Curled up in a sleeping bag on the couch while my parents had left for work. I changed the TV channels and flew by Tell Sell shows and toddler tv until I found a documentary on the Discovery Channel about Marilyn Monroe. At that point, I only knew her from that one iconic moment, with her white dress being blown up above her knees, hands protecting her crotch. Now I saw her being carried out of her home on a stretcher after having overdosed. A perfect example of how there are always two stories. The first one is the polished story that likes to be told. It’s the ‘I’m good, how are you?’ that follows the ‘how are you?’ like an uncontrollable reflex. The second story is the story that scours, the nail of the painful truth that is driven into the wall that makes the beautifully framed picture stick.

When I started writing that scene, the same thing happened. I described the old-fashioned pattern of the sleeping bag and my sweaty feet and after that, I didn’t know how to proceed. I sit behind my desk with my hands in my lap feeling the fog fill up my body.

I still sometimes think of this story and when I do, fireworks in the form of possible scenes go off in my head. But when my fingers are hanging above the keyboard, the fog rises again. Fog in the form of doubt. The first story, the ‘I’m good, how are you?’ that’s the story I know like no other. But the second story, did I see that right? Is that really what happened? And even if I remembered it right, is it my story to tell?

While writing my graduation piece, I took a yoga class every Tuesday night. Those classes consisted mostly of doing a sun salutation, a really slow one. Most nights it took us about an hour to get through it. With every exhalation I sunk a little further into the pose, looking for the boundary layer where I wasn’t forcing myself too deep into the pose, but also wasn’t making it too easy on myself. Every week, my legs started to tremble when I was in the forward fold. According to my yoga teacher, I should just let that happen. Nothing that I wasn’t ready for would tremble loose.

Apparently, I wasn’t ready for this story and I decided to pick a different approach. Together with a friend, I wrote an hour every day, without premeditation, and everything that happened in that hour was what was supposed to happen. I gathered a mountain of scenes, made up an order for those scenes, threw a bunch of them out, wrote a few new ones until a coherent story started to form and that’s what I graduated with.

If I think about why I couldn’t make my Elton John story work, I remember a story that the head of our department told us during the first year of my Creative Writing studies. About a Dutch writer, Erik Jan Harmens, who wanted to write a book about his alcoholism, but soaked in fiction sauce with aliens. When he realized that he needed the sauce to make the story that he could barely look at digestible, he decided to start over again. The book he wrote became an incredibly vulnerable and honest work: Hello Wall.

Despite having made a really good sauce (hello, here’s a carefully put together mix of Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe on a bed of Elton John, who doesn’t want that?), the idea that one way or another I’d had to add carefully chopped up pieces of my own story into the recipe was paralyzing enough to stop writing altogether. Never mind having to write it without any sauce.

The story that I ended up writing contained a lot of autobiographical elements, covered in surprisingly little sauce. Apparently, I was able to do that with this story. The first drafts of every chapter, I wrote with pen and paper, staying as far away from my laptop as possible. When backspacing was no longer an option, I had to resign myself to the stumbling sentences that came out of my pen. The scenes I ended up with, often corresponded exactly with the feeling that my memories of that time awakened in my stomach but didn’t completely correspond with what had actually happened. That’s also something I had to learn to allow myself.

Three different Eline’s started to develop. Eline, the human being that had experienced things. Eline, the writer grubbing through the memories to find the right details. Eline, who only existed in words and who, with a new name, became a character.

All three of those Elines are being thrown back into one body when I’m on stage that night for the Graduation Prize ceremony. Because of one and a half years of lockdown, this is the first time that I’m on a stage, reading part of this story out loud to an audience. My partner and a few of my best friends are there. I can feel my stomach tighten up as I utter the first words. Writing them down, it turns out, is a completely different thing than having to speak them out loud. Writing allows a comfortable distance that having to let the story pass through your throat doesn’t. I hear myself read my story with an elation that doesn’t fit the words I’m saying. I dissociate. I look at myself with a helicopter view. I see my feet planted firmly and hip-width apart on the stage. My right hand that’s holding the novella I wrote, the left softly giving rhythm to my reading. It does not compete with the complete error that’s going on inside of me. I’m the two stories come to life on a stage and I long for sauce.

But sauce or no sauce, I didn’t win the graduation prize. I do get interviewed after my reading by the presenter. About my writing process, what I’m going to be doing next, and if there’s a possibility that at some point, I’ll return to the story about Elton John, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana. Who knows, I answer, and I think of the document with the long list of links to all the video essays and YouTube documentaries about any one of the three that is still in the right corner of my desktop.

Wide Open Writing

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