Here's my first paragraph of chapter one of my memoir, as I submitted it to my editor in December,

2011.

Echo Park, California, where I was born, raised and lived for eighteen years, was in the 1970s a
fragile tapestry left to deteriorate in a sun so bright it'd crease your corneas.
It was an area with a history awash in silver nitrate.
Mack Sennett built Keystone Studios here, and many of those studios' early Keystone cop comedy
shorts were shot in Echo Park's sloping Irish green hills and valleys.
Its silent era stars migrated west.
Wealth always moves west out here, to the ocean.
But the land stayed behind, its colors bleeding into a Kodachrome Instamatic patina of terra cotta
roof tiles, tall open fields of weeds bleached to a white wine finish, and palm trees whose fronds
beckoned in the strong Santa Ana winds, with a kissing, hissing, campfire sizzle.
In a documentary about Sunset Boulevard, whose beginnings run through the neighborhood, Echo
Park was pronounced the most beautiful ghetto in America.

Now, think about everything I said a scene needs.

My grandmother's breath.
Racing across my baby shoulders like western clouds.
I'm propped against the sofa between my grandmother's thick varicose calves dressed just in
toddler shorts, like an oversized stuffed bear.
A phalanx of whirring plastic fans don't cool the soupy air as much as shuffle it in a circle
around us.
Shhh, Grandma says and blows on my hot neck, rustling the pouty tips of my shoulder length
hair off my back.
Some days, my grandmother's breath blots out the violent heat.
Some days, it blows the storms ashore.
My mother's voice forms over our mountain range of a couch.
It could shower a loving rain, tickle me with a sing along for the summer ants crawling up my
legs, or change the air above into a run home to mama sky, like a russet storm.
Where's my pappas, Mom asks, shovels me into her arms and blows a raspberry on my
tummy.
Pappas means potatoes in Spanish.
Shhh, be quiet, my grandmother says, and hold him like a mother.
My grandmother's breath.
My mother's voice.
My whole world.
My every happiness.
First, this scene opens with an action.
My grandmother blowing across my back to keep me cool.
Next, there's dialogue from both my grandmother and my mother.
Next, there's specific intimate details, the fans that shuffle air around, my grandmother's
varicose calves, and there's also an inner voice that reveals and reflects about this earliest
memory of my mother and my grandmother.
Finally, there's a definite starting and stopping point.
The starting point is my grandmother's breath and the stopping point is explaining how
happy my grandmother's breath made me as a child.
Now let's look at another example.
This here is the first paragraph of my rough draft of chapter four where I talk about my first live in
stepfather, Robert.
I can see my first live in stepfather Robert if I slow down time enough in my memory.
He's hard to spot because he reveled in the thrill of being in motion.
He demonstrated this to me one smog crusted afternoon after a backyard game of catch, hanging
me over the neighbor's fence by my ankles over a gully filled with broken glass.
I swung in the breeze like a pendulum, the tips of my hair standing on end as if electrified by a
current, while they grazed shards of busted mirrors.
I swayed aloft in midair laughing and screaming, watching my reflection dangle from an unseen force
that could cut me to pieces.
That crash never came for me.
I was lifted back over the wall.
It didn't come for Robert either.
That was the thrill he ran after, to always be one step ahead of the crash.
Now, let's take a look at that same opening from my finished book,
published three years later.
You want to play catch, son, Robert asked.
My first live in step father Robert took me into the backyard with a baseball and a pair of
gloves, one smog crusted afternoon when I was ten years old.
Bored with the repetitive play, he roughhoused me atop my shoulders, and then hoisted me
over the neighbor's fence, dangling me by my ankles, above a gully filled with broken glass.
Say catch, he said.
Catch, I said.
I can't hear you, he said, and dropped me down a couple of inches.
I swayed aloft in midair like a pendulum, the tips of my hair grazing shards of cracked
windows, and howled with equal doses of giddy joy and shrieking terror.
My arm's feeling tired son, say catch.
Catch, I screamed.
Catch, catch, catch, I was lifted back over the wall.
He handed me my baseball, boring game he said and ran in the house.
Robert was a lightning flash.
Hot, blinding, and gone before the thunder came.
Okay, let's look at the differences between those two openings.
Now, unlike the last excerpt, these two openings cover the same material, which is my first real
memory of my first live in step father.
But look at how the first excerpt tells you what's happening.
I can see my first live in stepfather Robert if I slow down time enough in my memory, versus
how I show you using dialogue and setting in the second excerpt.
Also note how dialogue in the second excerpt creates rising tension, a concept I discussed in
an earlier module, by building the moment, and stretching it out, as opposed to simply telling
you how the moment ends.