Scrip-scraps, Ron Carlson

Years ago, probably around 1991 or 92, I was at a family cabin in the mountains of Utah on a fresh cold morning in the summer and I had my notebook and I wrote a bit of dialogue between two men about something that had been tugging at me for some time. The two men would become Darwin and Arthur, when I would finally turn my full attention to the book more than ten years later. I had the one man ask the other: Did you ever build anything that lasted? Or was it all temporary? And the other man answers: Once in Aspen for a film we had enough time to put a deck on the directors house and that’s still there. The section was a kind of curiosity for me and I kept it in my note folder, along with all of the odd notes I keep. That folder is two inches thick and full of scrip-scraps of phrases, ideas, and the like. I could see from my dialogue that I wanted to write about work, the idea of work, but I didn’t know how to do it. I’d been writing stories and I saw the notion of work was bigger than might fit in a story. Then later I wrote the night three men are driving a truck in the snow and the book started to open up for me. ~ Ron Carlson