It's just a story, right?

At work today, I received another email from the magazine Narrative announcing a writing contest with various categories for short fiction, memoir, essays, etc. I would never dream of entering such a contest; in the past, it's been won by writers like Sherman Alexie and Joyce Carol Oates. Yeah...a little out of my league.

But the invitation reminded me of a story I'm longing to write, and yet every time I sit down to hash it out and get it rolling, I get scared. I haven't typed a single word. Even NaNoWriMo couldn't wring it out of me. I roll this story around in my head, twisting it and folding it like biscuit dough, but I can't bring myself to actually do anything with it. By this point, I've wallowed it to death.

"Come on, it's just a story," you say. "Certainly you can just write it and then go back and fix it, right?"

Sure, I guess it could work that way. But this particular story carries such freight with it, and it's so heavy and meaningful to me that I'm sure I won't do it justice. Not only that, it's a true story from my family's history, so I feel a certain amount responsibility to all those folks to get it right if I'm going to do it. *sigh*

Okay, here are the basics...I can do at least that, right?

My great-grandmother was a short, vibrant woman named Ella (though folks called her Ellie). From what we have left of her keepsakes, she loved poetry, she was highly social (especially as a young woman - she was constantly mentioned in the local paper's tellings of ice cream socials and hay rides), and she fell in love with a romantic man who wrote her love letters for several years before their marriage and even after they were married. Her husband, John, was a steadfast man, set in his ways, and convinced that he was put on earth to preach the Gospel (which he did, both spoken and written in the local paper). After they had been married a short while (and had four children - the youngest of which was my grandfather, Jack), John was found dead in the barn with his throat slashed. Family lore says that Ella found him with the knife next to him; she picked up the knife and took it to the outhouse where she tossed it into the dark, stinking hole. From then on, family would speak of the incident in hushed tones; Ella never spoke of it. The story told around town was that it was a suicide. Family members, though, had and still have another theory - murder. John was a member of the KKK, and, it is said, that after his death, the only black man in the small town of Clinchburg was never seen again. He left town with no word of where he was going or why. So there was Ella, left alone on a farm with four young children in 1920s Southern Appalachia.

I want to tell her story so badly. Yet, I think it's that very want that makes the story scary to tell. She's the main character in my mind - she's the one confronting such huge crises that no one would blame her if she broke into a million pieces - she's the one who shouldered the yoke and made it through. And I'm scared to death that I won't get it right, that I won't do her justice.

Maybe the words will come some day - certain images have stuck in my mind and I've hastily scribbled them on scraps of notebook paper that I've tucked into my family genealogy book - images of a sunrise over the hills that takes hours to get to the valley floor - images of the mule's breath, cold and frosty in winter - images of the barn, the outhouse, Ella's rocking chair (where she sat to rock my mother when Mom was a child).

I suppose I need a certain distance, a forced objectivity in order to start this story. I'm just not sure how to find that.