In Daughter’s Keeper, a novel by Ayelet Waldman, the main characters are Elaine and her daughter Olivia. The novel succeeds as a portrayal of love redeemed between a mother and daughter against the backdrop of the United States’ drug enforcement system.

Currently a Berkeley resident, author Ayelet Waldman is a graduate of Harvard Law School and clerked for a federal judge before becoming a criminal defense attorney for the Los Angeles Federal Public Defender’s office.  It is not surprising that with a background like hers, she takes on political messages about the unintended consequences of government anti-drug policy; however, that her novel breathes with the reality of characters whose lives are fully developed comes as an extraordinary and delightful surprise.

Here’s an example of the way Waldman engages her readers in the lives of Elaine and Olivia.  In one scene, Elaine has just entered the pharmacy she owns and operates. She comes in, coffee in hand, a half-hour before opening time.  She drives a deep sense of satisfaction from starting the day with a clean desk, “all the previous evening’s prescriptions filled and ready for pickup, the paperwork filed, and the claim forms sent out to the insurance companies.”  She contentedly sips her coffee and “looks out over the clean-swept aisles and tidied display cases.”  Then the phone rings.  The caller is a pretrial services officer of the United States Federal Court, who declares, “Your daughter was arrested for conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.”  As the caller tells Elaine the situation about Olivia’s arrest and requests information about the mother’s willingness to take a lien against her home to insure bond, Elaine:

felt her legs give way under her.  “One moment,” she whispered.  She pressed the hold button on the phone and gently placed the receiver in its cradle.  She set her paper cup of coffee on the counter with a shaking hand.  A wavelet jumped over the side of the cup.  For a moment she stared at the small pool of pale brown liquid. Then the bells on the front door jangled, and she raised her head.

This description of Elaine’s reaction involves our understanding of how her body is behaving:  we feel with her legs giving way and her shaking hands; we listen as she talks and then places the receiver in its cradle.  The gentle way she places the receiver indicates the way she is trying hard to keep control.  Then she sees the wavelet jump over the side of the cup and knows her shaking hand belies a sense of control, of shutting out the horror.    We realize that this is a visual metaphor — Elaine is suffering an earthquake in her life.

Just then, when we are most centered on Elaine’s body response to the call, the bells involve our sense of hearing and jar us out Elaine’s understanding that she is in distress:

“Good morning!” her assistant, Warren, called out, as he unlocked the door and flipped the CLOSED sign around.

 “I’ll be in the back,” she said, wincing at the tremor in her voice.  She walked quickly to the storage area in the back of the store, sat down on a stool, and took a long, unsteady breath before she picked up the telephone again.

And as Elaine greets Warren saying she’ll be in the back, we hold our heightened awareness that this is no normal day.  We return to Elaine’s body sensations, the wince at the tremor in her voice, the long, unsteady breath.

If we hadn’t been introduced to Elaine as someone who takes great pride in getting tasks done, keeping order and being a proprietor, we might not have experienced her shaking legs and hands as uncomfortable for her because she can’t ignore them.  Knowing about the delight order and the proper flow of work afford Elaine, we read into her response to Warren, who is certainly part of that order and flow.  She will be in the back, she says.  That might be a normal morning thing for her to day, but then again, we know this is not a normal morning. So if she is trying to keep order even with Warren, we are privy to the fact that it is a false order and so some tension builds.

In the privacy of the backroom, Elaine continues her phone conversation with the preservices officer.  Elaine finds herself unable to say she will put her house up as collateral for her daughter’s bond money.  The pretrial services officer says she will tell the court that Elaine is “willing to act as surety for her daughter” but “will not put up her house as security.” Extremely rattled and guilt ridden, as she hears this, Elaine calls her fiancé Arthur, with whom she was going to buy a condo. She feels as if she has done something very wrong in trying not to risk their future.
She wonders if another mother would have simply said yes to the preservices officer whether or not using the house for bond security would compromise her condo buying.  Her quandaries belie the way she is trapped between her life as a mother and her life as Arthur’s fiancé.  She leaves Arthur a message and only then realizes that she never asked the officer where her daughter was being held and how she could see her. All morning each time a call comes in, Elaine rushes to the storage room to answer and is relieved when a man identifying himself as her daughter’s court-appointed lawyer calls. Now she can find out if she can see her daughter.   Once she agrees to show up at the pretrial hearing, the events of the mother-daughter love redemption are set up. At the moment when the author has had Elaine’s world begin to fall apart, the author has also planted the start of deep mending. Over the length of the novel, Elaine will address the reasons she has always had a difficult time being there for Olivia, and she will ultimately deepen her understanding of motherhood.

The scene I describe is one that you can use to economically portray character and build reader engagement while opening up a deep emotional path for your piece of writing.  If you accomplish what Waldman does with your scene, you will get to the heart of your material, and your readers will accept your urgency and eagerly follow your story with emotional engagement.

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Try this:

Put yourself or a character you are working with in a typical situation for them — in a kitchen, at a desk or entering a classroom, for instance. Use habits of attention as well as obsessions about the environment to describe how life is when it is going well. There has to be a “before” to make the earthquake matter.  Write what the character finds enjoyable and gratifying about the place using specific details. Elaine likes the filled prescriptions, the filed forms and the orderly display shelves. She comes early because she likes that sense of order to and she likes being at her pharmacy.  She is a prepared person who has created a world she enjoys in that pharmacy.

If you (or your character) are a mother in the kitchen after the kids have gone to school and you have cleaned up, you might be taking pleasure in the way the dishes are stacked in the dish drain and the cabinet doors are all closed, glasses lined up behind some of them like dancers behind stage curtains.  If you (or your character) are a teacher in a classroom, you may notice drawings the children did a week ago still striking on the bulletin board against a deep magenta construction paper background.  You might enjoy the way the classroom books are set into bookshelves with their worn spines facing the room.  You might smile at the smudges of action figure pencil doodles on desktops. Wherever and whoever you (or your character) are, fully imagine the setting and detail. Does the person have something in hand as Elaine has her coffee?  Perhaps the mother whose kids have gone to school has her fingers on a radio dial or perhaps she is taking toast from the toaster for herself or eating an apple slice left on a plate from her kids’ breakfast.  Perhaps the teacher is holding a stack of spelling quizzes to grade or marking a calendar or wiping yesterday’s lesson off the black board.

Now, let the phone ring or the doorbell ring or a voice come over the intercom or the newspaper be opened or someone come into view.

Next, let something intrude into the satisfaction of the previous moment.  (How many times has disturbing news entered your life while you stood in an ordinary place enjoying the world you created?)

Use dialog here: What does the person on the phone or at the door say? Or use quotes: What is the information in the newspaper that you or the character find disturbing?

Think about how the news or dialog registers in the body.  Show this — shaking hands, wobbly legs, ringing in the ears, chills along the spine, a step on the cat’s tail by mistake, bathrobe sleeves catching in the refrigerator.

Think about what the body response tells you about the way the intrusion is experienced?  Write about that.  (In Daughter’s Keeper, Elaine begins questioning her response as a mother.) Write down what you or your character say or do next after the body sensations from the intrusion have registered.  How do you or the character feel about what is said or done?  What do you or the character wonder? What do you or the character wait for?

This kind of scene sets the reader in the moment that a speaker or character’s world breaks apart or spins in a new direction. That’s the point at which almost any reader becomes hooked — we all want to know how it is that any of us get into and out of the path of life’s curveballs and what we do when we can’t jump to the side. Whatever the reason your character or essay’s speaker is jolted from the “surety” of the world she has created, if you start a piece of writing with the pleasure taken in that world and locate the trauma of having it disrupted in the body of the character or speaker, you will not only hook your readers but will set up a conflict to explore. You will be surprised as you write from the moment of the earthquake and examine the issues it tosses up.  I believe that you, like Elaine, will find the strong stuff of mending and write about it.