Lee Martin's Blog, page 20

Collage Approach for Narrative

The short story, “Escapes,” by Joy Williams opens with what at first glance may seem to be a series of disconnected oddities: the narrator’s memory of her father telling her about her grandfather being alive just before he died, her memory of a twenty-foot tall champagne glass atop a nightclub, her father pretending to be lame in a gift shop, her mother’s story of seeing Harry Houdini make an elephant disappear, a newspaper article about a hunter who shot a bear who was carrying a woman’s pocketbook in its mouth. We’re five pages into the story before the central narrative begins. A trip to a magician’s show serves to illustrate the difficulty the narrator’s mother has with alcohol and how she couldn’t pull herself out of her drinking while the narrator is able to say in the last line of the story, “I got out of it, but it took me years.”

Often, we tell writers to open their stories as close to the end as possible. It’s good advice, particularly for those who are apt to wander in their narratives, but, as with anything when it comes to writing, there are always alternatives. This Joy Williams story presents us with what I’d call a collage strategy for opening a story. This collection of oddities is of course thematically relevant to the consideration of the mother/daughter relationship that stands at the center of the story. Escape, disappearance, pretense, entrapment—each oddity sets the stage for the central narrative while also being unforgettable itself.

I’ve always been a gatherer of strange or quirky events. Over the years, I’ve clipped countless newspaper articles, jotted down odd things I’ve seen, listened to my friends’ stories of the unusual, and generally kept myself open to the memorable, imagining that someday I might use these remarkable things in my work. I’ve always thought it my job to make the ordinary strange, and the strange familiar. That’s exactly what Joy Williams does in “Escapes.” The oddities dissolve toward the end of the story when the usher at the magic show counsels the drunk mother. “You can pull yourself through,” he tells her. The strange then drops out of the story, and we’re left with the mundane details of a life—a donut eaten with mitten-covered hands, a little girl pulling a sled, an old blue convertible traveling home in the dark. The strange has brought us to this familiar truth. Sometimes we can’t escape the harm we do ourselves, and sometimes our legacy lingers at a great cost to our loved ones who have to try to save themselves. “I got out of it, but it took me years.”

So, I offer this brief writing exercise to those who may want to try this collage approach for opening a narrative. Come up with at least three oddities—anything you witnessed, experienced, read about, heard about. Trust your intuition that these oddities will have a thematic connection. Then write a single sentence like, “I got out of it, but it took me years.” Feel free to change the pronoun to fit whatever point of view you’d like to use. This will be the last line of your story. Open the story by putting your three oddities on the page. Let them suggest a central narrative. Follow it to its end. I could see this exercise working equally well for fiction or creative nonfiction.

 

 

 

 

The post Collage Approach for Narrative appeared first on Lee Martin.

Questions That Lead to Action: A Story Starter

Due to the recent COVID surge, Cathy and I have been limiting our exposure by avoiding public places as much as possible. This past week, we went to a bookstore event where everyone was fully vaccinated and boosted and wore masks. It felt odd, but also nice, to be among people again. For those of you who don’t know, central Ohio can be a dark and gloomy place in January and February. The infrequent days of sunshine are causes for celebration. Add to the natural course of gray days the isolation brought on by this pandemic, and we’re looking at a rough stretch until spring finally arrives. Cathy and I are resigned, then, to our socialization, for the most part, coming from trips to the grocery store and the pharmacy.

If you’re working on a novel or a short story, you face the task of letting your characters move through the world. Whether they must face the challenges of the pandemic or no, they still have to move about, encountering people and facing the pressure of having to act. Active characters are interesting; passive ones rarely are. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat staring out a window, trying to answer the question of what my characters should do and where they might go that would give them an invitation to action.

So here’s a writing exercise for any fiction writer who may feel their narrative momentum lagging or stalled altogether.

Where does your main character go when they’re bored or in need of being around other people? What public place? Maybe it’s the grocery store, or the local bowling alley, or the movie theater, or an auction house. The place doesn’t matter as long as it’s a place where other people gather.

Put your character in that place. Have them walk through the door, or go down an aisle, or turn a corner where they come face to face with someone else. It can be a stranger, a casual acquaintance, or someone once dear to them whom they haven’t seen in quite some time. Maybe there’s a history between them (you’re often money ahead if that’s the case), or maybe there isn’t. Whatever the case, your main character shouldn’t be able to avoid contact with this other person. . . .

. . . . because that person is about to ask your main character a question. The question should be one that your main character can’t avoid answering. The question should require your main character’s action, thereby setting into motion a sequence of events. Maybe the other character says, “Why didn’t you ever come by to get your mother’s wedding ring?” Or maybe the other character says, “Will you come with me right now? Trust me, there’s not a moment to lose.” Or, “You look just like my first husband. Do you like coconut cream pie? I make the best coconut cream pie. Won’t you let me make you one?”

The objective is to let the second character want something and to express that desire in the form of a question that your main character can’t ignore. It’s your job to figure out why your main character can’t just walk away. What are they carrying with them that makes that impossible?

This pandemic has brought a degree of stasis to many of our lives. Our fictional characters, though, can’t afford to be stagnant. I hope this exercise helps you set a narrative into motion.

The post Questions That Lead to Action: A Story Starter appeared first on Lee Martin.

Releasing Yourself from the “I” in Memoir

It’s a snowy day here in central Ohio which has me thinking about the intricacies of the flakes. We all know that no two are alike, and so it is for the experiences we present in a memoir. Each moment has various aspects, angles, and patterns. Our hearts and minds convince us we’ve accurately recalled, and then dramatized, a single moment from our memory. We’ve presented the truth of the matter, but, alas, truth, as we also know, can be a slippery slope. There’s always something more to know. Releasing ourselves from the limits of the upright pronoun, “I,” can bring truths to light that we might otherwise miss.

Here’s a writing exercise, then, that invites you to examine a memory from a vantage point other than the first-person perspective that’s the default mode for most memoirs.

Identify a moment when you felt like you were under the microscope. Maybe you remember the frightening experience of speaking in class, or playing in your first band concert, or being the new kid at school, or standing along the road after your first car accident. Any moment when you felt like you were under the gaze of others will do. Dramatize that moment using the first-person. Then. . .

. . .change the perspective. Use one of the following strategies, or even try them all.

Use a second-person point of view.  Note what happens when you substitute “you” for “I.” What do you learn about the memory you’re recalling because of the slight remove the second-person gives you. Does it, perhaps, lead to an objectivity that may have been missing from the more subjective first-person point of view?

Use a third-person point of view. As with the second-person, see what happens when you write about yourself in the third-person. To increase the objectivity, try pairing the third-person with the present tense. Again, see what this strategy brings to your attention about the experience you’re presenting.

Switch your perspective. You can also find a different lens through which to view your past experience by writing about it from the point of view of someone other than you. Imagine someone from those observing you. This can be a singular person, or it can be the collective whole. What do you imagine they thought as they looked at you? Likewise, what do you imagine they didn’t know versus what they thought they knew?

The objective with this exercise is to deepen your understanding of a particular moment by taking yourself out of that moment, so you’ll have the distance you need to be able to see more clearly. Brenda Miller, in an article, “A Case Against Courage in Creative Nonfiction,” which appeared in the October/November issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, talks about what she calls “inadvertent revelations,” that emerge organically when a writer utilizes a preset form such as the hermit-crab essay, the braided essay, or the flash form. These “inadvertent revelations” are little grains of truth (or, in keeping with the central metaphor of this post, individual snowflakes) that might remain hidden if the writers hadn’t used form to adjust the lens through which they looked at specific moments from their pasts. The same is true for trying a different perspective as I’ve suggested above. Writers of memoir are always mining experience for what they didn’t know at the time. Finding a distance from the self or shifting the camera away from the
“I” can be useful tools for this work of excavation.

The post Releasing Yourself from the “I” in Memoir appeared first on Lee Martin.

Family Rituals and Flash Fiction

Here we are in the post-holiday time, and I’m thinking about family rituals. My father’s side of the family had a habit of gathering on New Year’s Eve for an oyster soup supper followed by a rousing game of cards—Rook usually or sometimes Pitch, both of them bidding games. The competition could get fierce, and from time to time someone would lose their temper. It made for a fascinating study of human nature for this young boy who would one day become a writer.

What are some of your family rituals? You can define “family” however you’d like. Maybe you’d like to think about your biological family, or maybe you’d like to think about one of the families you’ve made along your life’s journey. What customs, habits, rituals do you have?

Ritual sometimes becomes the impetus for a story as is the case with “Sticks” by George Saunders, reprinted here, in its entirety:

 

Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he’d built out of metal pole in the yard. Super Bowl week the pole was dressed in a jersey and Rod’s helmet and Rod had to clear it with Dad if he wanted to take the helmet off. On the Fourth of July the pole was Uncle Sam, on Veteran’s Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost. The pole was Dad’s only concession to glee. We were allowed a single Crayola from the box at a time. One Christmas Eve he shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice. He hovered over us as we poured ketchup saying: good enough good enough good enough. Birthday parties consisted of cupcakes, no ice cream. The first time I brought a date over she said: what’s with your dad and that pole? and I sat there blinking.

We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow. When an earthquake struck Chile he lay the pole on its side and spray painted a rift in the earth. Mom died and he dressed the pole as Death and hung from the crossbar photos of Mom as a baby. We’d stop by and find odd talismans from his youth arranged around the base: army medals, theater tickets, old sweatshirts, tubes of Mom’s makeup. One autumn he painted the pole bright yellow. He covered it with cotton swabs that winter for warmth and provided offspring by hammering in six crossed sticks around the yard. He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks, and taped to the string letters of apology, admissions of error, pleas for understanding, all written in a frantic hand on index cards. He painted a sign saying LOVE and hung it from the pole and another that said FORGIVE? and then he died in the hall with the radio on and we sold the house to a young couple who yanked out the pole and the sticks and left them by the road on garbage day.

 

Notice the way Saunders uses details—the pole, the father’s shrieking at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice, the cupcakes at birthday parties—to represent what it was like growing up in that family. Notice, too, the way Saunders so gracefully moves across a stretch of time with the line, “We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us.” That step into adulthood shows the father’s legacy pitted against his diminishment and his desire for love and forgiveness, a desire that eventually gets discarded along with the pole itself after the father’s death. The details do all the work, and there’s a great sadness at the end of the story that a life has come to this.

So here’s your assignment. Using a family ritual, write a piece of flash fiction (500 words or fewer) that relies on the details to tell us the story of a life. Feel free to imitate the Saunders story if you’d like, or to modify this prompt in any way that makes sense to you. The objective is to write a very small story that becomes large through the careful consideration of details.

The post Family Rituals and Flash Fiction appeared first on Lee Martin.

Beyond the Pain: A Writing Exercise

I’ve been teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Miami University here in Ohio the past few days, and one day I led a writing activity for people in our prose workshop. Both fiction and nonfiction writers went through the following steps to great success. They found genuine, strong voices while also developing a deeper understanding of character. I hope this exercise will have similar effects for you and your work.

 

Recall a moment from your past that caused you great emotional discomfort. Dramatize that moment on the page, using action, dialogue, setting, detail, etc. Make it something that the readers participate in rather than merely eavesdrop on. You could also do this for fictional characters, creating moments of discomfort for them.

Write a letter to a person who caused you this emotional pain or to your younger self. Feel free to choose from the following prompts: “I wish you’d known. . . .” “If only I’d known you (or your). . . .” “I wanted (or want) to tell you. . . .”  You can also do this for fictional characters by getting into their consciousnesses and letting them think about what they wish they’d known about themselves or someone else, or what they wish they’d said or done.

 

The objective of this exercise is to go deeper into character relationships by practicing the art of empathy. It may require you to put yourself into another person’s shoes—yours, perhaps, or those of the person who harmed you, or one of your fictional characters who must deal with whatever pain they’re carrying because of someone else. Empathy, when combined with vulnerability, often leads to a richer and more complicated treatment of human relationships.

 

 

 

The post Beyond the Pain: A Writing Exercise appeared first on Lee Martin.

The Joy of Work in the New Year

Cathy and I didn’t waste any time saying goodbye to Christmas. We took down the tree and all the decorations and stored everything neatly in our basement before New Year’s Eve. We rearranged the furniture in our living room and did a top to bottom house cleaning. We’ve made it through the holidays, and here we are at the start of a fresh year.

It’s only natural to have optimism when we turn the page of the calendar to January, but unfortunately a realist’s eye stares directly at what may turn out to be a perilous 2022. The pandemic continues, our climate is out of control, as is our political and cultural divide. We live in fraught times. It’s more important than ever, then, that we find things to sustain us, so we don’t forget the joys of our lives.

For the writers among us, this may mean new pages. A new project can make for deep and rewarding work. In the winter months ahead, what better way to spend our hours?

Be fearless. Don’t think too much about the completion of this new project. Instead, do your best to stay in the present moment of the writing, to think only of the work you’re doing for however many hours you’re doing it in a single day. It may help to make yourself curious and to write to satisfy that curiosity, but always stopping short so you’ll have a reason to continue the work the next day. For me, so much of writing a novel, for instance, is a matter of delaying the satisfaction of my curiosity. That’s what keeps me writing. Remember this anecdote Flannery O’Connor shared in her book, Mysteries and Manners:

I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,” and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there—showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.

Everything I write comes from my curiosity about “how some folks would do,” and lord knows we have no lack of intriguing behaviors around us right now to call us to the page. We can find curious events and narratives on the evening news, in our daily newspapers, in the gossip we hear, in the stories our friends tell, or in the family episodes we recount. Anything that makes us curious about people and their worlds—the secrets and mysteries of the human heart—should be enough to kickstart our imaginations. We can grab onto a single character who’s engaged with a particular event or detail and use that person’s action to put a narrative into motion. All we have to do after that is to follow that character through a sequence of significant events until we reach a point beyond which life will never be the same for that person. All of our dramatic requirements have been met—the Christmas tree has been taken down, the furniture has been rearranged, the house has been cleaned—and we’ve made the world of our novel/ story/ essay/poem complete. We’ve shut out the noise of the outside world for the hours we’ve spent at work, immersing ourselves in worlds of our making. What could be more sustaining and joyous than that?

 

 

The post The Joy of Work in the New Year appeared first on Lee Martin.

The Beauty of the Design: Some Thoughts at the End of the Year

Yesterday at our Christmas lunch, the conversation turned to movies we’d recently seen. I mentioned that Cathy and I had watched The Power of the Dog. “Was it grim?” one of our lunch companions asked, and I told her, yes, it was grim, but it was also beautiful. “Did it make you feel grim when it was over?” our friend asked.

That was a more difficult question to answer. I was tempted to say the film made me feel everything it hoped I would—sad, angry, mournful, but also uplifted. It’s a story of toxic masculinity and repression, but it’s also a story of courage and protection and love. Here’s what I told our friend:

Once the film was over, I couldn’t get it out of my head. The end swept me back through its scenes, and I started to recognize what had been there in plain view all along—everything I needed to prepare me for the end. The magic was in the fact that everything was pointing to that end but in such a subtle way it was nearly impossible to see it until the close of the film. In other words, I saw the beauty and the integrity of the way first the author (the film is based on a 1967 novel of the same name by Thomas Savage), and then the filmmaker, made their artistic choices.  “And how could I ever feel grim or hopeless,” I told my friend, “after seeing that aesthetic design.” There is nothing but beauty in the way an artist gives shape to experience, no matter how grim that experience might be.

The end of the year is an appropriate time to remind ourselves that often we write to give form to things that can seem so maddening or haphazard or overwhelming that we can think we have no chance at understanding. Even at those times when we may feel like our voices are irrelevant, we still have the capacity, through our art, to bring ourselves, and, if we’re lucky, our readers, to a point where everything makes sense.

In this same Christmas lunch conversation, something my friend said—some story she told, some thought that she had—made me realize why I’m always a little melancholy around the holidays. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you may recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about the fact that blue Christmas lights always make me sad. I admitted I didn’t know why. Now, thanks to my friend, I’m pretty sure the lights are merely conductors for the deeper sadness from my childhood. My parents were older parents, and I was their only child. The holidays, being the time markers they always are, made me ultra-aware of my biggest fear—that my parents would die while I was young, and then where would I be? I also recalled how my parents always tried their best to get me exactly what I wanted for Christmas, but often they fell short, buying a lesser quality knockoff of what I’d really hoped to get. I remembered how sad that made me feel and how embarrassed I was for my aging parents. Again, everything came back to the awareness of time passing.

So, my friends, our time has passed and we’ve reached the end of another year. We’ve done so amid uncertainty and fear. The one thing we can count on as artists is the process itself. May we cherish the hours we spend at work with whatever our medium happens to be. May we trust in the strength, or peace, or love our work gives us. May we have the courage to continue. May we reach at least one other person through the result of our creative process—one other person to say to us, Yes, you got it right. Yes, this is exactly the way it is. May we all have that gift.

The post The Beauty of the Design: Some Thoughts at the End of the Year appeared first on Lee Martin.

Making Room for Contradictions

The car, a luxury sports model, sat on the overgrown grass in front of a ramshackle house in my wife Cathy’s hometown. Ordinarily, I’d identify the specific make and model, but I want to protect the privacy of the owner. I couldn’t help but notice the car as I ran by because it was so out of place. Incongruous, I guess you’d say. An anomaly. Given the condition of the houses and the double-wide trailers in this neighborhood—a neighborhood in this small town in the Midwest—the car was something I never could have imagined finding, and for that reason alone it was memorable.

I spent this past week in my native southeastern Illinois. Each morning, I took Cathy to work—she works remotely for the county hospital and must be on site four days out of each month—and then I walked or ran the streets of her hometown. I saw houses that in their day had been grand—houses with leaded windows and wide porches with elaborate scroll work—but were now in disrepair. I saw one house that was leaning drastically and about to fall in on itself, but it had a brand-new mailbox in its front yard. Again, the contradiction was remarkable. To be fair, I also saw houses that were well-maintained, but for each one of those, it seemed there were four or five houses on the verge of ruin—houses with peeling paint, houses in need of new roofs, houses with pontoon boats parked on the front yards, houses with all manner of debris scattered around them, houses with old cars up on blocks. I grew up in an even smaller town five miles to the west of Cathy’s, and I can report that when it comes to the rundown state of things, my little town has fared no better than hers. This is an economically depressed area in farm and oil country. Another contradiction—the sight of oil wells pumping amidst so much poverty, drug addiction, and “just don’t have any more fucks to give.”

As you might guess, the politics are deep red in this county. The support for Donald Trump and his ilk remains. I passed one house with a sign out front that said, “God, Guns, Trump.” As you might also expect, the COVID vaccination rate is low with only 37.12 percent of the county’s population fully vaccinated. I watched kids going without masks into the local senior and junior high school in defiance of the governor’s mandate. A stroll through the local Walmart revealed only a handful of shoppers—three or four—who were wearing masks, and this during a high-volume time when the store was heavily patronized.

Then, just as I have every reason to resent the politics of the place—and every reason not to claim it as my own—a local police chief, along with some of the employees from the hospital where Cathy works, organizes a drive to collect and deliver much needed clothing and childcare items to the residents of western Kentucky who were devastated by the recent tornado. Cathy and I do our part. We purchase several hoodies and donate them. Later, we watch a video of three trucks hauling full trailers as they pull out and head south. The caravan includes several other vehicles carrying volunteers to help with the distribution of goods. These are the people I remember from the days I spent living in this county. People who despite their political differences banded together to help their neighbors when they were in need.

I can’t stop mourning the fact that, when it comes to getting vaccinated, something short- circuited people’s consideration for those around them, and I can’t help but notice the contradictions contained within people who can be quick to help those who have lost everything in the storm and yet refuse to protect their neighbors, and, yes, even their own family members, by getting vaccinated. I’m speaking in general terms here and not identifying these contradictions within any single person. I’m only questioning the stubborn disregard for what science tells us about this pandemic. There’s only one way for us to get through it, and that way involves vaccination, the wearing of masks, and social distancing.

It’s so easy to complain about those who refuse to do their part. Then a caravan of good Samaritans heads toward Kentucky, and everything gets complicated. We’re all a combination of contradictions. The good writer knows that. The good writer investigates what William Faulkner called “the old verities and truths of the heart.” We are mysterious creatures, endlessly fascinating for everything we hold in opposition. Here at Christmas, may we all make room for the complicated layers that comprise those around us, and for the writers, may we always strive to fully appreciate the human condition on the pages we write.

The post Making Room for Contradictions appeared first on Lee Martin.

I’m Mr. Blue: Thoughts on Writing Essays

It’s Christmas night, and I’m in the backseat of my parents’ Chevrolet Belair or the Ford that preceded it, or else riding between them in the cab of my father’s Chevy pickup, and I’m four, or five, or six, or seven, and we’re coming home from another Christmas spent with my mother’s side of the family. Maybe we’re coming from my grandmother’s house in Berryville, or from my aunt and uncle’s just a few miles from our farmhouse, and we’re driving over the gravel roads in the dark. Across the barren fields, I see Christmas lights at houses back up lanes, and when I see blue lights, I get. . .well, I get blue. A great sadness comes over me that I don’t understand. Why should I feel sad? It’s Christmas, and I’ve made a good haul of toys, and now we’re heading home where the oil stoves will be blazing, and while the cold night deepens, I’ll watch something on television, and later I’ll fall asleep with still another week to go before I’m back in school. But those blue lights. They hollow me out inside and continue to do so to this day. Whenever I see blue Christmas lights, I feel a melancholy that lays me low.

This is enough to begin an essay, these memories and the question of why blue Christmas lights have always made me sad.

I have nothing against blue; in fact, it’s my favorite color. Blue water, blue jeans, blue eyes. Nothing but blue skies from now on. A color of hope and renewal. A color that represents depth, trust, loyalty, sincerity, wisdom, confidence, stability, faith, and intelligence. A color for open spaces, freedom, intuition, imagination, inspiration, sensitivity. Who would object to any of these things?

Surely my sadness can’t be Elvis Presley’s fault because at that young age, I’d yet to hear him sing “Blue Christmas.” Nor had I heard, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” or “Blue Bayou,” or “Mr. Blue.” I didn’t know a thing about singing the blues. The closest I came was an old harmonica found in the drawer of our library table that I blew a few notes on from time to time, but that hardly qualified me for a slide guitar and the standard C, F, G chord progression telling everyone the troubles I’d seen. No, my blues came from somewhere deeper, somewhere popular music couldn’t help me uncover. But it was there, ready to overwhelm me whenever I saw those blue lights.

And from here, I could go on and on, following a trail of association as I investigate my reaction to those blue Christmas lights. Writing an essay should be a journey into the unknown, a journey that relies on narrative and association and the questions we dare to ask and the speculations we make. We may not come to answers, but the interrogation itself should bring us to a deeper awareness. Posing the question is the first step. Admitting what you don’t know moves you forward and takes you deeper into memory and experience and thought. The past collides with the present and the future, and you stand there in the light—blue or not—more fully engaged with the world around you.

So those blue lights bring me to this. This holiday season and beyond, we should be kind to one another. No one knows the sadness others carry with them. Often, we don’t even know our own miseries until something majestic—something like a holiday celebration—comes along to show us how far we are outside the circle of light, how our hearts can ache, and how blue we can be even if we don’t know why.

 

 

 

The post I’m Mr. Blue: Thoughts on Writing Essays appeared first on Lee Martin.

Where’s the Heat?

Now that cold weather has come here in central Ohio, our orange tabby, Stella the Cat, often hovers over a heat vent waiting for the furnace to kick on. She’s a heat seeker, our girl, and she knows the parts of the house that heat up the quickest. She’s patient, knowing from experience that sooner or later forced hot air will be warming her.

When we write, we may find ourselves passing over the parts of the fiction, nonfiction, or poetry that contain the most heat. What do I mean by heat in writing? Heat comes in the form of unspoken tensions finally articulated, in resonant images, or by way of making room for a depth of thought or emotion that brings us closer to the truth of something. Heat rises with the use of language, or the close observation of a character or a situation, or in the attention paid to detail or image. Heat always comes from writers who have the courage to fully engage with the worlds of their own making, and this often means the writers have located themselves—their secrets, their contradictions, their mysteries—in the work itself and haven’t looked away, choosing instead to run into the fire rather than away from it.

Here, then, are some prompts to help us do exactly that.

 

Think/Remember. If you’re a fiction writer, ask yourself what you share with your main character. Begin a free write by saying, “When I think of my character, I remember. . . .” Fill in the blank with something specific from your past. Zero in on memories that keep you up at night, things you did or said—or things you should have done or said—that still fill you with regret. Choose one memory and quickly tell that story. Then continue with a letter written to your past self, a letter of forgiveness: “I forgive you for. . . .” “You couldn’t have known. . . .” “You would have been a better person if only you’d. . . .” These are some examples to get you started or restarted if you get stuck. The objective is to practice empathy for your younger self as you admit the worst and the best parts of you. Doing this should give you a better appreciation of your main character’s contradictions as well as a more nuanced understanding of what led to their poor choices.

 

Hide/Reveal. If you’re a fiction writer or a writer of personal narratives, get comfortable with opposites co-existing in your characters and their situations. Start a free write with this prompt, “It was my habit (or the habit of one of your characters) to. . . .” Then offer a variation that at first seems unlikely. “But one day, I (or one of your characters). . . .” Look for a narrative event in which you or one of your characters acted out of character, doing or saying something surprising, something opposed to what we would expect from you or your character. The idea is to let heat emerge from the layers within characters.

 

Expand/Leap. If you’re a poet or a lyric essayist or a prose writer who believes in the power of the detail or image, start with something from the literal world—a peach, a cement block, a perfume, etc.—and offer a description that uses sensory details. Tell us how that detail makes you feel. Then leap to an association. Don’t say something is like the original detail. Let the reader do that work. Just jump to something else. Then return to the original detail and write it in slightly different terms, showing us how the associative leap has allowed the detail to evolve. Finish with a pivot to something more abstract, something you’ve been called to think about. Utilize the skills obtained from the previous two prompts—empathy and the acceptance of contradictions—as you write a few lines that show you thinking on the page. End with a return to the first image or the association with it or perhaps a new image altogether that connects to the first two. The objective is to start small with a detail and then to grow it into something rich and complex.

 

Emily Dickinson famously said, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry.” Exactly. The writing that resonates, that stays with us, is always the writing with the most heat. I hope the three prompts I’ve offered will help you find the sources of heat in your own writing, and within yourself.

The post Where’s the Heat? appeared first on Lee Martin.