i am applicant, matt smith
i am applicant, matt smith
i am applicant, matt smith
i am applicant, matt smith
This book started in a drastically different place from where it ended up.
Originally, I wanted to give homebuilders a handbook that served as a fairly technical guide for how to (or not to) remodel a house in Sausalito, CA. I would explain what to expect with the Planning Commission and what sorts of things the Building Division would be interested in. I had even planned on having a glossary of terms used by Planning, such as “variance,” “findings” and “FAR.” It would also include terms that a structural engineer or the building department would use, such as “floating slab,” “helical piers” and “tie-backs.”
I had examples from the Sausalito Municipal Code, zoning laws, Southern Marin Fire Department standards, etc. I pulled data from Sausalito.gov and ran some analyses on what factors could predict a positive design review: which architects were the most successful, which commissioners tended to approve, continue, or deny projects. Pretty technical. I had some technology and housing ideas as well, mostly taking advantage of new California housing laws coming out of Sacramento in 2018.
It was meant to be a guide to getting your house built without going bankrupt, getting divorced, or being otherwise maimed. It was acidic and snarky (because I was bitter), but that didn’t mean it wasn’t pragmatic.
That was my writing in year one.
I also wanted to document our experience with these planning commissioners, how the design review hearings worked. I had never seen anything like it before. I worked in a corporate environment, where meetings could sometimes get a little testy, but they were nowhere near this bare-knuckled and brutal. When you ask people what the review process is like, if they’ve gone through it, they shake their heads and vaguely describe it as horrible. I wanted to provide people like my wife and me with specifics. With details. Our hearings had been recorded, and so I went on Sausalito.gov and rewatched our meetings, transcribing all of them, reliving the experiences and how I’d felt. I wrote down direct quotes and added my impressions, sometimes recognizing things I hadn’t noticed at the time.
This took me another year.
So now I had a “book” full of how-to ideas as well as a documentation of our time in design review. But I realized I needed to begin the book with some explanation of what initially drew my wife and me to this town. I saw that this was critical to making the reader understand why we’d even bothered to build a new house here. I jog a lot, and so I decided to write an introduction about the history of the town, which is truly fascinating, in the context of a jog through its waterfront area.
I was toying with a format that would allow me to introduce my technology and housing ideas alongside the experience of going through design review. What I had in mind was the format used in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” In that book, Robert Pirsig alternates between the story of a motorcycle road trip he is taking from Bozeman to San Francisco and his heavily philosophical analysis of the nature of quality, as well as the differences between a romantic and classical understanding of the world. It goes back and forth, back and forth between these two subjects. And so did I, shuffling my two sets of content like a deck of cards.
I thought I was more or less done at this point.
I knew I needed to have the work edited, so I researched the editing process. I discovered that there were different types of editors — developmental, line, and copy editors. Then a proofreader, and a formatter. So, I started with a developmental editor, a freelancer, and sent her my word document. She wrote me a note not too long after.
“I just finished the first section, your writing is lovely.”
Aw, shucks. I liked hearing that. And then a few weeks went by. I received my word document back, with comments and edits, and the feedback on the main document was not so glowing. Then we talked on the phone. She started in on it.
“Most of this book is committee meetings — it’s boring. The reader is going to feel like they’re just going along with you to all of these meetings. You need to put yourself in the book.”
I am a private person. I told her, “I am not putting myself or my family in this book.”
“Then you will have a very small audience for your book.”
Dammit.
Over the next year, I started to add myself into the book, along with my family. I had another conversation with my editor. I asked her a question, something that had been bothering me.
“Am I trying to do too much with this book? Between my story and trying to put these how-to ideas out there?”
“Yes, you are. You need to focus.”
Dammit.
So then I carved out all of these analyses, basically essays. I was left with an introduction about the history of Sausalito, followed by accounts of our committee meetings. This was now three years into writing the book.
I started to dislike the tone of it, which was sarcastic and bitter. I began to think about the reader differently, more like a dinner party guest, and would you ever serve up a heaping pile of rancid bitterness to your dinner guest? No.
I scrubbed the book as clean of all that bad energy as I could, while still retaining the true feelings I had of rage, bewilderment, defeat. Those were real feelings. And it was also at that point that I became interested in the craft of how to write a memoir. I read Mary Karr, George Saunders, Tobias Wolff and others. I read their how-to books on memoir writing (I found these more engaging than their actual memoirs). I was looking for things I could steal, or learn, and I did both. I started really reaching into myself, searching for the genuine. I was starting to develop a memoir.
I sent over the latest version and again asked my editor, “What do you think?”
She told me that as long as I was respecting the reader, I’d get to a good place. And that I had to answer the question “Was it worth it?” I really didn’t know, but knew I had to address it somehow. I put a placeholder where I thought this question should be answered and left it there awhile, until it occurred to me (much later) how I could address it.
About this time is when I decided I wanted to add lyricism to the book, to play with artistry, to add as much poetry to the language as I could.
When I was in sixth grade, I remember our teacher explaining the tools poets and writers sometimes use to link their narrative to something more vivid and universally understood. He started with similes, which are statements with linkers like “as” or “like” that connect the writer’s statement to something like ice, fear, furriness, or whatever. The class (and I) generally got it. Then he went on to describe what a metaphor was, what symbolism was, and used the example of a flag. How when the reader encountered an object such as a flag, placed in a certain context, that flag could be a symbol for patriotism. The class (and I) generally did not understand this. Here he frowned, shook his head and smiled (as I remember it), and he made some remark about this being an advanced concept and moved on. He knew we wouldn’t get it. But this “symbolism” he was trying to explain stuck in my mind, a mystery to unpack in the future.
A few years later, I was watching the movie “Dances with Wolves” when something clicked. There is one scene in that movie where our protagonist, a Union soldier played by Kevin Costner, is riding a horse across the plains, American flag in hand. As he crests a small hill, he spots a Native American woman in the near distance, crouching, washing her hands. He is struck by her, a moment of fascination and infatuation. Then the wind changes, and his flag flies right into his face. Suddenly, I got it. The importance of the flag. Why else would the creator of the film put that little bit in? It was foreshadowing. Our protagonist would be faced with a challenge in the future: would his allegiance be to his army — his country — or his new love?
After that, I started seeing symbolism everywhere in film and literature.
So, while pruning and honing my story’s structure, I decided that I wanted to play with metaphors, foreshadowing, symbols. I love how they can add depth and meaning to a story.
I was lucky to have friends and family read early versions of the book. A piece of feedback I received was that it wasn’t cohesive, along with a helpful quote from a favorite movie of mine, “The Big Lebowski”: “You need a rug, you know? Something to really tie the room together.”
I also had the book professionally reviewed and received some devastating feedback — “reads more like a series of anecdotes than a story.” I went through the five stages of grief before accepting all of this feedback in a constructive way. Then, angrily, I went to work. I ferociously set about cutting, slicing, rearranging, and building connective tissue into the book’s fabric. I cut about a fifth of the book out.
My last editor, a copy editor, continued to push me — “more transitions would really make this book a more immersive experience.” I had originally wanted the sections to be a bit jarring, making the reader jump from stone to stone, but I trusted my editor. The reader didn’t want that. The reader wanted a nice path to walk down. I realized I needed to make it as comfortable and engaging and clear as possible for them. A goal of mine emerged — I needed to get as many readers as I could to actually finish the book. To have a reader start and abandon it would be a failure.
So, I parsed the book into three sections to force some structure on the story. Like a simple three-act play. The first section was setting the stage, the second was the conflict and the height of tension for the protagonist, the third was the story’s resolution. I had to really cut a lot out of the second section to make it more balanced with the first and third, since most of the original book was about these design review meetings. I chopped out entire stories that weren’t totally relevant to the main storyline — like my wife’s experience with the local school system or my oldest son’s experience going from day care to the local public school for pre-K.
With the book now neatly cleaved into three sections, I realized I could place an instance of each of my symbols in each of the three sections.
I track local housing stories in the news very closely, especially those centered around the nefarious activities of that corrupt den of rats that is the San Francisco Building Department. So, when I read a story about the disgraced former director of public works, Mohamed Neru, and how he accepted a bribe of a $2,000 bottle of wine from a Chinese developer in exchange for preferential treatment, I knew I had stumbled upon a golden symbol. I decided to introduce wine into my book, as a symbol of a bribe. While the book is a memoir, and thus more rooted in fact than fiction, I couldn’t (or shouldn’t) really introduce symbols that weren’t present in my experience. But in this case, fact and symbolism matched up perfectly — as it turned out, in my experience, every time wine was offered or poured, a bribe was about to be offered.
George Saunders describes the writing process like this: the writer, on one side of a river, is trying to have a conversation with another person (the reader) on the other side of the river. So there I am, on one side of the river, placing this image of wine before them and yelling “Hey — look here! Get ready! A bribe is about to take place!”
I wanted to make some of my symbols dynamic, make them change to mirror the course of the story. The Cohen brothers are experts at this sort of thing. In “Fargo,” for example, we are introduced to a huge statue of Paul Bunyan, his axe, and his blue ox in the town of Brainerd, MN. The first time we see them, it is almost comical. Bright colors. Funny and harmless. Sunny. But as the movie progresses, and gets darker and darker as our characters devolve amid horrible acts of violence, we see shots of Paul and his ox that aren’t so harmless-looking. The perspective changes from overhead to upward-looking. Paul and his ox become menacing and frightening. It is now night, not day. The transformation of the statue adds another dimension to the story, making it richer, compelling and emotionally immersive.
The biggest symbol I wanted to introduce was that of water. In the beginning, the view of water is what captivates our protagonist (by this point in the writing, I began to see “Matt” as a character). Water is beautiful, alluring. However, as he moves to the second part of the book, facing conflict and despair, I wanted water to take on a menacing tone. So, when the protagonist suffers in Part 2, I use words like “drowning” and “drenched.” At one point, when our protagonist’s neighbor scores a huge political point in the midst of a design review hearing, I try to introduce water as violent and angry — “I could feel and hear the dopamine flooding Bhodi’s synapses, as deafening as if I had suddenly been dunked in the plunge pools of Niagara Falls.”
At one point, thinking of the Cohen brothers’ Paul Bunyan, I wanted to add pictures of Richardson’s Bay in Sausalito into the book — starting with a clear, beautiful shot from the highest point in Sausalito, and then, descending down the hillside, having the photos grow more and more distorted and menacing the closer to the water the viewer got. I wanted to use a crooked frame, like how in the old “Batman” TV series, they tilted the camera diagonally whenever we saw the Joker or some other villain in control of the scene, mirroring the reader’s experience as our protagonist starts to unravel. I actually took my camera with me on a hike down through the winding streets of Sausalito, taking pictures to capture this sequence of images. My last picture was a grainy, muddy, indecipherable image that I shot at the water’s edge.
When I told my editor about my water-imagery idea, the increasingly distorted images spread throughout the course of the book, she let me know just how expensive this would be. So I abandoned the idea (but that walk down the winding Sausalito hillside did inspire me to write the prologue).
Besides water, the other theme I really wanted to play with was the idea of birth and death taking place inside a room. The reason I place Matt in an emergency room with two recently deceased patients in Part 1 is to contrast that with Matt a bit later in the maternity ward of a hospital, in the presence of two newly born people — his two sons. I also liked the idea of the house design as a spirit, not yet real and physical, as the presence of a conceptual house in the story changes into the reality of a physical house. I also tried to play with the idea of spirits in the material world, of the flow between ghosts and the abstract into the real and tangible, back and forth, back and forth.
I have no idea how poets, writers, film makers do this. In films I’ve seen that make great use of symbols, you never see reviews call out any of it. Like, “Coppola’s symbolic use of oranges in ‘The Godfather’ in portending an awful, violent event and subsequent shift in power is masterfully rendered.” I don’t know why. And I didn’t know where to go to learn how to do it. But I wanted to try.
So, I took a data-driven approach. I created a matrix.
| Part I: Introduction and Set-up | Part II: Conflict, despair and action | Part III: Resolution and acceptance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Water | Water as enchanting and hypnotic, a siren song, deceptively beautiful. | Water as dangerous and threatening, drowning, fickle. | Water as fluidity, adaptability, powerful. |
| 2. Birth and death in the context of a physical room | Old 1910 house as a corpse needing to be revived. Matt present in the ER when two physical people come in, die, and turn into spirits — Matt bags them. Hospital rooms as a place of death. Body -> spirit. | Spirit -> body: architect’s plans to actual construction; Planning Commission meetings: from ghost of a project to approved plans. Story poles as a skeleton of future corporal manifestation. Hospital as a place of birth: Jay and Buddy are born; two people (Matt and Kat) become four. How societies give birth to something, or kill it, starts with a conversation in a room — a person’s innocence in court, the holy spirit in church, or a nascent house in the room of the Planning Commission. | House fully built; inhabited with new soul (our family). Matt sits in middle of house, its center, and tries to meditate as if concentrating on his physical core; tries to himself float in the middle of the room in the same way that his project floated in the middle of the room in front of the planning commission. |
| 3. Wine as a bribe | Matt pours Kat a glass of wine while trying to persuade her to buy the house. | Matt tries to bribe the Elusive Jungian by leaving a bottle of wine on his doorstep, hoping he’ll send in a note of support for their project. | Bhodi tries to bribe Matt by pouring him a glass of wine and having him change his design to benefit Bhodi. |
| 4. Shapes as confusing for Matt, but he gets better | Matt does poorly in organic chemistry, eventually fails because he can’t rotate shapes in his head. | Matt is increasingly stressed, having trouble with neighbors and the project. Texts Carol he “can’t make the shapes work.” But Matt increasingly able to rotate the proposed house in his head, learns how to read designs better, can now render abstract into reality. | Matt can now move through the entire house in his head. |
| 5. Eyes open or shut | Matt closes his eyes when he hears the new news from Roger on the house — we have another year to go. | Matt closes his eyes during panic attack during city council meeting. | Matt opens his eyes at end, with city chambers in the far background, moves his gaze to the chessboard in the midground, finally to his two boys eating ice cream in the foreground, Kat by his side . |
And so on. I had about 35 of these themes. I then deliberately went through each section and placed my symbols — static as well as dynamic — in each of the three sections. If each section was a room, I walked into each one and stapled an instance of each of my symbols inside. And then I trimmed some more.
Everything in a book has to have a reason to be there. Why do we have our protagonist notice the rusty old barbecue when he first tours the open house? It’s because that barbecue plays a role later, in Part 2 — a darker role. When he first sees that barbecue, he doesn’t realize what it represents, or its importance, because he is naïve at that point in the story. But like the statue of Paul Bunyan and his ox, that barbecue will soon return, this time in a more menacing way.
I’m not sure how well or poorly I pulled any of this off. I tried as best I could. It’s humbling to look at something you’ve created and realize that it is the best you can do.
And that is the story of how I wrote my memoir. Kind of a winding road. But writing the book is only part of the process, there’s the marketing of it as well, which I thought I had done well. So when I read this review on Amazon, below, about the book, it was bittersweet:
“5.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly gripping story about a family trying to build a house in California
Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2023
“I was initially hesitant to read the book as the topic felt mundane (the process of getting approvals for and building a house), but it ended up being a soulful, emotional page turner I couldn’t put down.
It’s the story of a husband & wife trying to upgrade a dilapidated house in Sausalito, California for their young family to live in, encountering an (almost comically) sad, never-ending barrage of resistance from crazy neighbors, local politicians and kafkaesque commissions and procedures.
It works well as a gripping story, while also providing a front-row seat to the reality of local housing politics in California.”
My gut sense is that I’ve lost quite a few would-be readers because I didn’t convey (quickly!) what the book was really about.
Next entry: lessons learned from publishing and marketing the book.
Thanks for reading!
Matt
