The Trapdoor on Top of Your Skull

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

In his early years as a writer, Ray Bradbury made lists of nouns based on childhood memories. Things like: The Lake, The Night, The Crickets, The Ravine.

“These lists were the provocations,” he wrote in Zen in the Art of Writing, “that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.”

I love that metaphor of the trapdoor. We need to flip that door open and shine a light down where all the “better stuff” is.

What did Bradbury mean by that? I think he meant what comes from deep, emotional resonance. It’s what you can’t put into words to define it; but what you must put into words to create it—first for you, then for your reader.

I’ve written some scenes that I’ve gotten emails about. When I look at those I find inevitably they came to me after I opened the trapdoor.

How do you do that?

You make a list like Bradbury’s. Find some time to get alone, take a some deep breaths, and just start remembering….write down all the images and smells and sounds that come to mind. Don’t judge any of it. You’re recording, not fictionalizing. When you get tired, take a break, then come back and add to this list. Put it aside for awhile. Then read it over and highlight the words that generate the most emotion inside you.

I guarantee you’ll find story gold. You can transmute those feelings into your Lead character. You can create moments in your book that will connect with readers in a powerful way. You can also mine the list for short story subject matter. That’s what I like to do most with my own list. (Hat tip to Dale for yesterday’s post which prompted this one.)

I was looking at my list a few years ago when I stopped on The Cigar. That word was there because of my father. To this day when I get a whiff of cigar smoke, I think of Dad. This time when I read the word I flashed back to a scene from my own life, involving me, a liquor store, and a box of Dutch Masters. The emotion of what happened—embarrassment—gave me an idea for a short story called “My Father’s Birthday.”

I published it. And apparently that emotional resonance I mentioned above was there for many readers. If you’ll allow me two clips from the reviews:

Then, in only 12 pages, he ties all his plot threads together to impart an emotional impact that a lot of authors wouldn’t be able to do in a book-length memoir. Indeed, other writers could have turned the bares storyline of “My Father’s Birthday” into an entertaining short story. Few could produce one with the same lasting impact.

***

I’m telling you, this author has the power to take a person on an emotionally resonant trip down memory lane.

I show you those simply to demonstrate what opening the trapdoor on top of your skull can do for a story. If you’d like to read the story itself, I’ve made it free today for your Kindle or Kindle app. Click here. Outside the U.S., go to your Amazon site and search for: B081THHSYL

Try this: Right now, write down three nouns from your childhood, pictures under your trapdoor. Go ahead. I’ll wait. 

Now pick one of them and share it with us. Why that word? What’s the emotional resonance for you? Have you used it in one of your stories?

40 thoughts on “The Trapdoor on Top of Your Skull”

  1. How interesting you should bring this up since in the last few days in particular, I’ve been taking brief trips down memory lane thinking of special people in my life and just random memories of warm & fuzzy things.

    Thinking about this exercise, the first thing that came to me was “mentor”. It has been a l-o-n-g time since high school, but my English/Drama Teacher had a strong impact on me & I still think of him often. I’ll be in a store and they’ll play “The Longest Time” and it immediately makes me think of him because he loved to sing it. Great teacher and he was a lot of fun.

    In our growing up years, we don’t use the term ‘mentor’–it’s something we tend to use as adults, with formality in the realm of business. As kids, we feel free to hold someone in admiration–maybe even hero worship depending on the situation. As adults we tend to take the emotion out of mentorship.

    And that all made me think of my current WIP. My protag has a mentor who has been part of her life for several years, and this exercise reminds me that I can do more to show the emotion of that attachment.

    And thanks for the reminder about “My Father’s Birthday.” I hadn’t read it since original release and enjoyed reading it again. That and Dale’s post yesterday remind me of another goal–to master the art of writing short stories, as I haven’t spent much time writing short fiction yet.

  2. I read your story and loved it. Thank you.

    I love Ray Bradbury.

    The first thing that came up on my list was Piggy Wants a Wave, a game my cousins and I played at Aunt Jean’s on late summer nights out on Cedar Point in Gautier, Mississippi where you could go anywhere any time because the only ones who lives out there back then were family.

    I actually did write about this for my 6th grade “what I did last summer” essay except it took the form of a short story called The Saucer Caper where my cousin Billy got abducted by aliens during a game of Piggy Wants a Wave. British Columbia (where we were living at the time) was very different and I was homesick for family and warm weather. I thought for sure I’d get an F (Billy didn’t really get abducted but my Uncle Harry knew the guys from Gautier who did). , My teacher had me read it to the class and they wanted me to write more. Good times.

    • For me, the feedback/responses I got on my stories from teachers in grade school or high school was more valuable to me than any feedback i’ve gotten from critiquers as an adult. I’m not knocking critiquers or the substance of their feedback. I mean simply that those primary school teachers found great joy in students who wrote stories. They were so enthusiastic and encouraging.

      But we as adults, both writers and critiquers, tend to let adulting suck some of the fun out of writing and interacting as writers. I’m going to remind myself of that next time I do a crit for someone–and supercharge the experience with childlike enthusiasm for both of us. 😎 I think I’ll call it “The Mrs. Seese Method (MSM).”

    • Ah, comic books. Big part of my childhood, too. Classics Illustrated and Archie were my faves. Superman on occasion. Batman hardly ever, for some reason. I did enjoy the Adam West TV show…

  4. Excellent post, JSB. I have Zen in the Art of Writing on my TBR. Sounds like I need to get to it sooner rather than later.

    A book. It conjures betrayal. I haven’t used it yet in a story, but I will.

  5. Jim, thanks for the gift of time travel back to Southern CA in the ’50s and ’60s. I grew up 120 miles south in San Diego with different landmarks but the same essence.

    Neighborhood boys were always mimicking Edie Adams. “Why don’t you pick one up and smoke it sometime?” Did you have a crush on her, too? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XnTJTi6I0g

    Peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This is my earliest memory of an event, repeated day after day. All my friends were a year older and in kindergarten until noon. Time dragged as i sat on the concrete steps beside the driveway, waiting for them to come home. My adopted mother had a soft, soothing voice. Every day she would walk out to the steps and ask what I wanted for lunch.
    “Peanut butter and jelly sandwich, please.”
    Some days, her voice rose just the slightest bit. “Don’t you want something different today? Tuna? Ham?”
    “Peanut butter and jelly.”
    She always cut off the crusts.

  6. I went to download your story and Amazon told me I already owned it. Guess I’ll re-read it instead of reading it. When my parents died and I had to speak at their funerals, I was drawing up childhood memories.
    One that stuck with me for my dad was “Moorpark.” Because as we drove over to the valley, we’d always hit the red light at that intersection, and my dad would always say “Don’t you dare read that backward.”
    For my mom, it would be “Pound Cake.” Her native language was German, and although she came to the US when she was 12, some of the grammar stuck. After dinner one night, she said, “Look for me in the bottom drawer for the pound cake.”
    My brother opened the drawer and said, “Nope, you’re not in there.”
    Thanks for encouraging a trip down memory lane.

  7. Beach.

    When I was a child, my grampa owned two classic cars from the 30’s– a yellow Cord convertible and a black Cord sedan. Every summer, my parents, brother, and I would make the drive from Tucson to Morro Bay, CA with him and my gramma so he could show the Cords in a classic car show.

    The long trip through the desert was worth it for the sight of the Pacific Ocean on the horizon. Growing up in Arizona, I loved the beach. Morro Bay meant dinners out (usually at The Breakers restaurant, where I learned the delight of shrimp cocktail), time with my grandparents, walking on the beach to collect shells, visiting the shell shops, touring Hearst’s Castle, and taking in all the flowers around the hotel.

    I try to include the beach in any story I write.

  8. The River.
    We lived on New River in Virginia in The Round House, which was an octagon built into the side of a mountain. When it was very hot, we slept on the upper porch. I can still hear the deep whisper of the water lulling me to sleep. We learned to swim, fished, ice skated, and had a lot of adventures in and around that river. I wrote about one of them long ago, The Search for the Lost Indian Staircase. It involved an abandoned cabin, bootleggers with guns shouting at us and getting into a boat to come across the river, and stumbling through the dark getting ripped up by briars. Sobbing relief when we saw the spotlight my dad had on the upper porch, scanning slowly back and forth, the sound of a truck belonging to the father of one of the boys who had been with us crawling along the bank, the chattering and laughing when we piled into the truck bed because we were saved, the pride for having survived. We did find the staircase, but realized it only after we were home because we were running for our lives at the time. I was eight, the others at least four years older. Good memories.

  9. A whiff of Topps bubble gum as I open a new pack of baseball cards. Vada Pinson’s is on top.

    I’m dating myself, and this trapdoor memory won’t be relatable to most. But it’s still evocative for me.

    Thank you for this kernel of craft wisdom, Jim.

    • That gum was usually crunchy at first, remember? We had to work it a bit to get it chewy. I remember the powder it would leave on the top card. Thanks for the memory!

      I had a Vada Pinson. Reds.

  10. Great post, Jim. Wonderful idea.

    Thanks for My Father’s Birthday. I believe you gave that to us before. I’ll read it again.

    “Four Pairs of Pants and a Canoe” When I was in high school, one spring, and the Mad River was running full and cold, my father and I, a friend, and his father took a canoe trip down the river. My friend and his father dumped their canoe trying to navigate a cattle gate. We built a fire to dry their clothes. My dad took off two pairs of pants for my friend and his father. He still had on two pairs of pants.

    It’s 0 degrees here this morning. Our farewells often end with, “Stay warm.”

    • I didn’t realize the Mad River from your books was real, Steve, until we drove over it coming home from Virginia a couple of weeks ago.

      It was -18 here this morning, following 14” of snow and high winds. A friend wrote: Iowa is closed. Everything is closed. You can’t go anywhere so you might as well go back to bed.

  11. Old Dan.

    I spent many weekends of my childhood on my great uncle’s farm in rural Georgia. There were lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins who stayed in the huge farmhouse. The women spent most of their time cooking or shelling butter beans or doing other domestic stuff. The men were usually out hunting, fishing, or working on some tractor or other. Ah, but we children were left to our own devices to climb trees, run races on dirt roads, or sit on the end of the dock with our feet dangling in the water and fish.

    But my favorite pastime on the farm was when Uncle John would bring out his giant old gelding, Dan, and we kids would be allowed to ride. Dan was so old, he couldn’t move all that well, but to us he was a gallant steed that would take us on perilous adventures to save mankind.

    I remember the smell of the old horse one hot summer day, as my father lifted me up onto Dan’s back, and I was sandwiched between my cousin Billy in front and my cousin Joan in back. The three of us shouted “Giddyup” and “Go, Dan,” giggling and bouncing around until the old gelding finally lumbered forward. I think we saved the world that day.

    • Nice, Kay. I saved the world many times with my wooden sword.

      “Butter beans.” Haven’t heard that in years. That’s what my mom called them. As a girl she would visit her grandparents who had a farm in Virginia. No doubt that’s where she got it!

    • Kay, love that memory of Old Dan, not only for the memory as it relates to you, but also because as soon as I read the beginning of your post and the words “Old Dan” it threw me back into the awesome classic country I grew up with.

      If you’ve never heard it, I encourage you to look up the Jim Reeves’ classic “The Blizzard”.

      And your post gave me a two-for-the-price-of-one because it also reminded me of another classic “Giddy-Up Go” by Red Sovine.

      • Thanks for letting me know about “The Blizzard,” Brenda. I had never heard it before. Very moving, and amazing that the horse is Old Dan!

        The memories of Old Dan are powerful. Since we rode bareback, I remember the warmth of the old horse under me while Joan’s arms were wrapped tight around me and I was hanging onto Billy.

  12. Bicycle.

    Money was tight when I was young in the 1960s. I’m the oldest of four. When I turned five I desperately wanted a bike. My dad and two of his brothers found an old, beat-up kids bicycle. They stripped the rust off it, repainted it a light blue, put new tires on it, and attached a set of training wheels. I rode that bike down the hedge lined narrow lane named Eighth “Avenue” in North Seattle. The time came for the training wheels to come off, and I fell and fell but kept at me, with my parents patient encouragement, until I could ride on two wheels.

    I remember riding to the store a couple of blocks away with neighbor kids to buy a Rocky Road candy bar and an Orange Crush, and bring it back home in a paper sack, the sky so bright and clear, and the air so sweet.

    • Dale, thanks! I loved riding my bike to the store, and those Rocky Road candy bars were great. I favored the U-NO. Something about the not-too-hard, not-too-soft feel of it, and it was like eating a chocolate cloud.

  13. Crack. I still hear that sound.

    When I was 5 and my little sister was 2, she fell on the ice outside our home. I can still hear the sound of her tiny head hitting the concrete, and see her face as my 6 year old brother and I peered at her and wondered if she was dead. She wasn’t-just knocked out. Dad ran over, picked her up, and took her inside.

    I used (and still use) that memory when I talk or write about my sister, who did die 30 years later.

    Jim, may I use this content, or part of it for the workshop I’m teaching in April? It’ll be a perfect illustration for the topic of “Write What Scares You”! Of course, attributed to you and Ray . . . 🙂

    If it’s okay with you, thank you in advance!

  14. Blackberry jam. Dutch Masters. Yellow duckling.
    The first two are happy memories connected to my grandparents.
    The yellow duckling was an Easter present (when people gave these as pets). Tony, the mean boy on our street, shoved our duckling up a drain spout and suffocated it. I’ve often wondered what happened to him.

  15. Pinecone.

    The smell, the texture, the sound of one falling, all remind me of Sundays with Mom and my grandmother at a fried clam joint in Gloucester, MA. Even as an adult, just the sight of one fills me with warmth and love.

    I’ve used pine trees plenty of times in my books, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever focused in on a lone pinecone. Thanks, Jim. I will now.

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