Lee Martin's Blog, page 62

The Children We Are Inside

A few days ago, I made the following post on Facebook:

One of my boyhood friends died yesterday (here we are in the middle row of this photo: I, on the far left with my arm over my eyes, and he, on the far right wearing a white T-shirt).  Although I hadn’t seen him or talked to him in many, many years, the news saddens me because once upon a time we were pals who looked forward to seeing each other. When you grow up in the country, your circle of friends is small, and the absence of one can be deeply felt, as it is now. We rode our bikes over the gravel roads between our two farmhouses. We explored haymows and woodlands, shot BB guns, played “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button” at each other’s birthday parties. When I heard that he’d died, I remembered him the way he was when he was a boy and the way I was when I was a boy. I remember calling him on the phone. “Can you come over?” I asked, and he said, “Hold on. I’ll ask my mom.” I waited. Like me, he was an only child; we were eager for companionship. “She said yes,” he told me when he came back to the phone. “Hurry,” I said. Then I went to stand in my front yard so I could look down our lane, my heart thrilling at the first sign of him bent over the handlebars of his bicycle, pedaling fast, both of us ready for our day’s adventures to begin.

I was touched by the responses to this post and the expressions of sympathy, perhaps guiltily so because as I made plain I’d had no contact with this boyhood friend for many, many years. In fact, I can’t claim to know the man he became, only the boy that I remember from childhood. It’s that boy for whom I grieve. One response to my post, this from the poet, Cathryn Essinger, seems particularly relevant. “At any given moment we are all of the people we have ever been,” she wrote, “but mostly we are forever children.”

Cathy’s thoughts about the eternal children inside us make me think of the importance of that awareness, not only to the people we are but to the writers we are as well. As we age and hone our craft, we often develop a vision that’s more ironic, worldlier, more sophisticated, and we can use that vision toward good effect as we explore more fully in our work the nuances of the lived life. Still, we shouldn’t forget the raw emotions of childhood—those fears, joys, disappointments, sorrows that showed us that we could feel and feel intensely, that our tears, our dreads, our shouts of glee, were valid responses to the world around us. Sometimes real life comes along, as it did for me a few days ago, and reminds us of that.

Do you remember your public displays of emotion from your childhoods? The times you cried, the times you went silly with joy, the times you got unreasonably angry and lashed out or threw a tantrum? If you’re like me, it embarrasses you just a tad to recall the specifics. Discomfort is good for a writer. Don’t be afraid of the children you were. Don’t be afraid to feel what you felt then. I bet you weren’t embarrassed by your emotions at the time; you were too busy feeling what you felt. Now as a writer, if you can tap into those raw emotions from childhood, even if not replicating the events that sparked them, you can create a more genuine experience for your reader. Sometimes we’re tempted to run away from these emotions in our writing. Sometimes we rely on tricks of language to substitute for authentic feeling, but we can wade into that messy emotional territory while still having the aesthetic distance necessary to shape it, as Robert Hayden does in his poem, “Those Winter Sundays”:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

 

Notice the direct gathering of facts—the cold, the cracked hands, the banked fires, the polishing of the good shoes. Notice how those details wouldn’t resonate if Hayden didn’t allow the expression of emotion when the speaker says, “No one ever thanked him.” That and “What did I know, what did I know.” In the caesura, we hear the catching of the breath, the choked emotion, the hard thing felt.

I fear that when we come to the page as more experienced writers, we sometimes forget what it was to feel the hard emotions in our childhoods. Maybe we need to daydream more, to travel back into the past, to revisit those uncomfortable moments, to feel again, as Cathy points out,  the children we are inside.

 

 

More Revision Activities

My MFA in Creative Nonfiction workshop at Ohio State went through some activities last week to help them with revising their essays. Two of the people in the workshop, Cait Weiss and Jody Gerbig Todd, have been kind enough to allow me to share the activities that they devised. I hope you’ll find them as useful as I did. Revision is often a matter of thinking more deeply about our material. Sometimes it’s helpful to do that thinking from perspectives we usually wouldn’t consider, as in the brainstorming activity that Cait gives us. The deepening of our thinking can also occur, as Jody points out, when we’re invited to consider how a particular craft choice such as the white space between sections provides us an opportunity to consider where the tension lies in a piece.

From Cate Weiss:

Boardroom brainstorming is not about coming up with a solution, at least not directly. Instead, the experience is about unlocking new, unexpected, often entirely crazy ways of unhinging and re-assembling old, worrisome things. Speaking of old, worrisome things : a CNF essay, multiple drafts in, that just won’t do what I want it to. Here’s one brainstorm strategy teased from Corporate America that Lee let me try out in class:

The Worst Idea, the Weirdest Idea, and the Idiot Question

1.         Write the most painfully obvious “topic sentence” or “thesis” to the essay you’re  tackling.  This is the sentence you want to roll your eyes whilst uttering, the one that you swear to yourself will never make it into your piece.

2.         Write the weirdest, fringe-wild sentence your essay inspires. This is the sentence your inner child/spirit animal/hippie aunt with thirty cats (the one who scarf dances to bongos) might take away as the moral of your story.

3.         Write the most obnoxious “What If?” question possible, considering the             situations/anxieties/possibilities your essay discusses. This is the question that aims to be so profound it’s absurd, or so basic it should go beyond saying.

This exercise might change how you’ve been looking at things. That’s the hope, at least. Once you let yourself say the painfully obvious, bizarre or basic thing, you’ve incorporate your whole self into the writing process and onto the page, ideally leading to a more cohesive, honest narrative.

If you can, share these sentences with others who have read your work. They might be surprised,  and their surprise might help you realize what you thought was so obvious/weird/stupid actually needs further illumination or nurturing in your piece. Or they may just learn your mind’s an endless, absurd little trove of surprises. Either way, give it a try and good luck!

 

From Jody Gerbig Todd

White Space Revision

In our creative nonfiction workshop, we assign one another names according to particular skills: Dialogue Diva, Detail Guru, White Space Queen. These names affectionately identify our adeptness in—and our seemingly natural ability to tighten, intensify, and empower—one component of our writing. But many writers also struggle in a particular area, making the process of revision daunting. As you try to revise this weaker area of your manuscripts, you might think, as one of my classmates did recently, “I’m in hate with this piece right now. I just sit there, staring at the screen, not knowing what to do with it.” We’ve all been there.

When feeling this way, it might be helpful to use a revision exercise designed specifically for that weakness. Thus (in my attempt to overthrow our current White Space Queen) I have devised five revision exercises to help you think about what happens in the space in between, also known as white space, the double drop, or the section break. Writers can use white space to denote a time jump, a scene change, or a new topic. But that space can become so much more. It can become the silence between notes, the pause between beats, the thing left unsaid. In other words, the tension in your piece.

Below are five exercises, which can be applied to fiction or nonfiction, revision or drafting, in combination or alone. Choose one or several, follow the directions, and see what happens.

1.         Give each segment denoted by the double-drop, hashtag, or white space a subtitle,   including a gerund and a prepositional phrase or its concrete object (“Crying in my             Cheerios”; “Seeing the Shades,” etc.). Using gerunds might help you understand your piece’s development (even if it’s lyrical). If gerunds don’t help, try creating other kinds of phrases. Regardless, try to keep the phrases concrete and specific. After you label each section, evaluate whether it shows narrative progression. Does the speaker grow, develop or realize something in a sequence? Do the subtitles tell you something about the essay’s subject matter?

2.         (You can try this one as a drafting exercise, as well, especially if you’ve found yourself blocked at the end of a scene.) In each white space, write out the following statement and fill in the blanks, or have someone fill them in for you: “You just read about ___________, which will reveal __________ about the next part on ____________.” Try using the first blank’s word in the end of the early segment and starting the next section with a sentence using the words in the last two blanks. What happens? (You might find this helpful in combination with #3.)

3.         Identify what is at stake in each section. In other words, what does your narrator have to lose? Is it internal/emotional? Is it external/physical? Once you identify these stakes, make sure that the lines surrounding the white space reveal that tension. (Kate Walbert once taught me that the first line of any novel or story should reveal all the tension contained in the entire story following, so that if a writer is blocked, all she must do is to   go back to that tension in the first line and write about it in a new way. You might think of the first line after your white space this way.)

4.         Find the last image you give in a segment. Imagine you cross off everything after and end it there. What happens to it and the first line of the following segment? Do you land on a powerful and symbolic image that resonates more than the telling of it does? (This might be particularly helpful as a final revision exercise, after you’ve already figured out and drafted what the piece is centrally about. It also might be particularly helpful for the very last lines of your piece, where writers have a tendency to over-tell.)

5.         Take a line highlighted by a workshopper, or a line that you feel is meaningful in the  piece, and move it to before or after a white space. What does that change do for the  tension around it? Does it work as a particularly insightful conclusive or introductory    statement?

 

 

 

Felt Sense: Focusing on Revision

Often the thing we’ve come to say in an essay hovers just at the periphery of our first drafts and in us as well. There are places in those drafts where we can almost bring our most important thoughts to full articulation via reflection, narration, or the artful arrangement of images. Subsequent drafts are usually necessary to more fully integrate what we carry inside us with what we say on the page. Since the MFA students in my creative nonfiction workshop will soon be turning their attention to revision, I’ve promised them an exercise to help them along. I’m happy, of course, to share that exercise with you and with the assumption that it could work equally as well with other genres.

But first some background. Beginning in 1953, the psychotherapist, Eugene Gendlin, spent fifteen years analyzing what made psychotherapy successful. His conclusion was that success depended on how well the patient was able to focus on a subtle and vague internal awareness during therapy. Gendlin called this internal awareness, “felt sense.” Sondra Perl’s book of the same name locates felt sense within the field of composition studies in an attempt to better understand what happens in a successful composing process. I’m interested in how this might also be useful in the revision process. My prompts for this exercise, then, borrow from Perl with certain subtractions and additions. It’s my hope that the exercise will be a means of discovery for writers who want to find deeper emotional and intellectual connections to the hearts of the drafts that they’ve written. The exercise is designed to help us say more, think more, and feel more as we connect our drafts to what we carry inside us.

1.         Identify a place in your draft that makes you feel uncomfortable, or a place that seems too vague but also important. Spend some time writing from this prompt: “I don’t want to say anything more about this because if I do. . . .” Your objective here is to articulate the fears that keep you from fully exploring your material.

2.         From your response to prompt #1, admit what attracts you. What have you said that you can’t look away from? Begin writing with the prompt, “I know intimately. . . .” Don’t stop writing for whatever period of time you’d like to set for yourself. There are no rules to how you might approach this step. Images, lists, stream of consciousness writing, notes to yourself—whatever keeps your pen moving and keeps you moving more deeply into your material.

3.         Stop writing and give these questions some thought:  “What makes this material interesting to me?”  “What’s the heart of the material?” What’s important about the material that I haven’t yet explored?” Wait quietly for a word, image, or phrase to arise from your “felt sense” of the topic. Write whatever comes.

4.         Now step back and think about what you’ve written. Ask yourself what it’s all about. Describe the feeling that you get when you think about it. Where in your body is this feeling centered? Write about what you’re feeling inside you right now as you continue to write. Ask yourself whether you’re getting closer to what you really want to say. See if you feel yourself getting closer. See if you feel something click into place inside you when you get close and you can say, “Oh, yes, this is it. This is what I’ve come to say.”

5.         If you reach a dead end, ask yourself why the material is so hard for you. Spend a few minutes writing about what’s keeping you from writing more deeply into the material.

6.         Ask yourself what’s missing. What have you yet to get down on paper?

7.         Ask yourself where this is leading. Where does the essay want to go?

You should feel free to take liberties with the prompts in order to best suit your revision process. The important thing is to attend to the physical feeling or the image that stands for what you want to say so you can have a genuine sense of what you’re trying to get at in your essay. You can then check any passage of the essay against your “felt sense” to make sure that everything is in service of what first brought you to the page, brought you there before you were aware of why you were writing and before you even had words for what was inside you that made you want to speak. Sometimes we need a revision process that requires us to consider our purpose for writing and to locate that purpose within our visceral reaction to the material.

 

 

 

Proverbs for Revising a Novel

Sitting peacefully, doing nothing

spring comes

and the grass grows all by itself.

 —Lao Tzu

I’m nearing the end of the first draft of a new novel. Maybe a scene or two more, and I’ll have it. Already, I know what my first revision strategy will be. Put that sucker away. Put it out of my mind. Write that short story I’ve been meaning to write. Live in a world other than the one of the novel. Forget, forget, forget, so I can finally read the novel with fresh eyes, so I can see clearly and analytically, so it’ll seem as if someone else wrote this book, so I’ll know what needs to be done.

 *

The quieter you become,

the more you are able to hear.

—Lao Tzu

I usually know it’s time to return to the draft when I find myself thinking about it without planning to. Maybe I’ll be running, and I’ll hear one of my characters say something. Maybe it’ll be something they wanted to say in the draft, but I didn’t give them a chance. Or maybe I’ll be drifting off to sleep, and I’ll suddenly see the shape of the book in a way I’ve not been able to previously see it. When the book starts talking to me without my invitation, I know it’s close to time for me to read through it, taking notes as I go.

 *

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything;

it is open to everything.  In the beginner’s mind there are

many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.

 —Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi

 Waiting allows me to empty my mind. When I read through my draft, I start with the last chapter, the last scene, just to remind myself of where the narrative finally arrives. Then I go back to the beginning, and, as I read, I try to stay open to possibilities that are clearer to me now that I know what my novel is. Bernard Malamud said, “First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.” Reading through the draft reminds me of what brought me to the material in the first place. It makes the center of the book clear to me, and I’m not just talking about plot here. I’m also talking about how the characters rub together in interesting ways. Most important, I’m talking about the thing in the material that’s virtually unknowable, that mystery of the human heart that required my efforts with storytelling to try to know it better.

 *

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

—Ts’ai Ken T’an

Once I know the novel’s heart and the place toward which the narrative is headed, I can think about each chapter, each scene, and the work they’re doing to contribute to the novel’s final moves. I can make sure that things are happening when they’re supposed to be happening. I can consider the causal chain of events, brushing away what’s too dry and without heft, or polishing a particular facet or maybe even creating a new one, until the significance to the whole is clear.

 *

Water which is too pure has no fish.

—Ts’ai Ken T’an

I also read with an eye for conflict. I want to make sure that I’ve given the tensions between characters thorough dramatization and expression. I keep my eye out for the scenes of conflict that cause the characters’ positions to shift. Again, I want to know how these scenes are preparing the way for the novel’s end.

 *

Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.

After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.

—Zen Proverb

Novels are made a word at a time, both in the first draft and in all the drafts that follow. Once I’ve taken care of issues of character and structure, I want to make sure that the language is in the service of what the novel has come to say. I want to make sure that each sentence works the way it should until I’m certain I’ve created a voice out of the world of the novel that’s true to its experience. When the Paris Review asked Bernard Malamud how many drafts of a novel he usually did, he had this to say:  “Many more than I call three. Usually the last of the first puts it in place. The second focuses, develops, subtilizes. By the third most of the dross is gone. I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.” Like Malamud, I love arriving at the place where I know what I need to know. Then I can pay attention to the music the language makes on the page, but to get there I first have to admit I know nothing. I have to ask the draft to teach me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Tips for Choosing an MFA Program

Last week’s entry featured my advice that undergraduates delay their applications for MFA programs, but if those undergraduates are still intent on making their applications, it’s time to think about how to choose where to apply. Of course, this advice will work for any applicant, no matter his or her age.

Follow the Money

There are plenty of programs (like the one here at Ohio State, for example) that will fully fund you during your graduate study through fellowships, teaching assistantships, or a combination of the two. You’ll receive a monthly stipend and a tuition waiver. Your only cost will usually be a nominal student activity fee. If you’re on a teaching assistantship, you’ll of course teach each term in exchange for your stipend and tuition waiver. At Ohio State, our MFA students teach one class each semester; at other schools, GTAs teach two classes each term. One or two classes a semester in exchange for free tuition with a monthly stipend thrown in? It’s a great deal, no matter how many classes you end up teaching. It’s possible to get the MFA without accruing a burdensome debt. So unless you just have a burning desire to be a member of a certain program that doesn’t fully fund all of its students, why not follow the money to a program that will?

Follow the Faculty

It’s a good idea to do your homework. Read the work of the faculty at the schools you’re considering. How do their aesthetics match up with your own? These are the people who will be reading and evaluating your work for the next two or three years. Imagine how uncomfortable you’ll be if you’re an experimentalist, let’s say, and the faculty are all dyed-in-the-wool realists. You want to feel as if the faculty will be a good match for you. If you’re excited about what you read, there’s a good bet that you and those faculty members share a sense of what a good story, novel, essay, poem should be. It’s also a good bet that those faculty members have traveled the same aesthetic landscape that you want to travel. They’ve gone on before you, and they have some shortcuts to share to help you be the writer that you want to be. A shared aesthetic doesn’t guarantee, however, that a faculty member will be a good teacher for you. That’s why the next tip is particularly important.

Follow the Community

You want to end up in a program that has a mutually supportive community of writers, a place where all the students have one another’s best interests at heart. Imagine how painful it would be to spend those two or three years in a program filled with jealousies, resentments, and just plain low-down meanness. All of those things zap your energies as a writer. It’s much better to be in a place where students root for one another and take pride in one another’s accomplishments. Get to know a few folks in the programs where you’re thinking about making application. Ask them what it’s like there. While you’re at it, ask them about the faculty members and how involved they are with their students. Find out where the good folks are.

I know there are personal factors such as geographical location that are unique to the individual. Once you decide on location, your knowledge of student funding, faculty compatibility, and the community of the program should be key in your decision-making process.

When I was Director of Creative Writing here at Ohio State, the last thing I told the candidates I was trying to recruit was, “I think we have a good deal to offer you, but the most important thing to me is that you end up in the program that will allow you to do your best work. I hope you’ll decide that program is ours, but, if you decide to go somewhere else, I’ll stay your fan from afar, and I’ll be thrilled to see your published work and to know that you were able to succeed in the program that you chose.” I meant what I said. I still do. So I offer my three tips in hopes that they’ll help you find the program that will best allow you to thrive. Good luck with all your applications!

Applying for an MFA Program? Whoa! Not So Fast

‘Tis the season when undergraduates’ thoughts turn toward applying for admission to an MFA program, which has me thinking of how different the culture is these days than it was when I got my B.A. in 1978. Although I knew I wanted to write, I also knew I needed a bit more seasoning. In those days, it was assumed that some much necessary time would pass between that undergraduate degree and the attempt to enter an MFA program. It was also very clear that the competition was fierce and admission wasn’t guaranteed. When I finally thought I was ready to try four years after that B.A., I wrote to the Associated Writing Programs and asked them for a list of MFA programs. When it arrived, it was a single sheet of 8 1/2” by 11” paper. The list from the front side continued on the back and stopped about half-way down the page.

Now, thanks in part to the proliferation of MFA programs, many undergraduate students believe not only that they’re ready to apply, they’re also convinced that they’re entitled to admission. Entering an MFA program seems to them as logical of a progression as it was from high school to college.

As a teacher of creative writing, I have to take some of the responsibility for creating this new culture. I find some degree of talent in all of my students and I commend them for it while also trying to make clear that they still need to work on their craft. I try to build their esteem because I happen to think that students do better work when they know that you have confidence in them. They also work harder to improve their weaknesses if you make them want to please you. It’s a tough balancing act between nurture and criticism, but it’s one that I’m convinced pays off for the student in the long run. It’s true, however, that in the process one might become unrealistic about the level of one’s skills.

Last week, one of my talented undergraduates asked me if I thought she was ready to apply for MFA programs. I admire her for asking that question and being willing to listen to my answer and to take it for what it was, an honest assessment of where she is at this point in her career. I told her she had talent and potential, but I thought her talent was young. I thought she needed to work on creating more textured pieces, more resonant with significance, the sort of pieces that come from a wiser, more experienced perspective. I listed three things she’d gain by not rushing to apply for an MFA program. Here they are, along with my thoughts and advice:

1.         More life experience.  Let’s face it, four years in college doesn’t exactly open the world to you. Why not take some time after graduation to work and to travel? You’ll expose yourself to a variety of people, and it’s a good thing for a writer to have to imagine the world from the point of view of someone very different. You’ll also probably find yourself in some uncomfortable situations, and that’s a good thing, too. A writer needs to feel the pressure that comes down on him or her in those moments of discomfort, contradiction, choice, and consequence. It all comes down to this: Live a little longer and make your art a little deeper.

2.         More time. I know that after my undergraduate degree, I needed more time to hone my craft. To read the writers I needed to know, to read craft books, to write and write and write and write. I needed time to identify my weaknesses and to start working to correct them. Most of all, I needed time to create the best writing sample that I could to accompany my MFA application. I was twenty-six when I entered my MFA program, and I was glad I gave myself that additional time.

3.         More challenge.  It’s easy to convince yourself that you’ve accurately charted your life’s course—Oh, to be a writer!—when you’re still an undergrad caught up in the excitement and esprit de corps of the creative writing workshop. You need time to test your commitment. How will you fare once you’re out there on your own, probably working a job that drains your energy, and trying to find time to do the things a writer does? I worked a lot of jobs after graduation and before my MFA application; some of them were mind-numbing, some of them were physically demanding and wearying. I kept writing. I kept reading. I started to see that this wasn’t just a fling I was having with the writer’s life. It had something to do with the way I chose to interact with the world and the way I chose to see myself. It wasn’t just something I did. It was who I was.

Writing is a life-long apprenticeship. Make sure it’s the apprenticeship that you want. Make sure it matters enough to you to go through all the challenges and disappointments that are sure to come your way. Before you apply for an MFA program, make sure you’re in this writer thing all the way and for the duration, come what may. Work steadily to improve your knowledge, your vision, and your craft. Be patient with yourself the way your teachers have been. Give yourself all the time you need.

Telling Stories: Tips for Fiction and Nonfiction Writers

After years of writing both fiction and nonfiction, I’ve come to believe that the term, “storyteller,” best fits what I do. Sometimes I tell stories about things that really happened in my life, sometimes I tell stories about things that really happened but with a healthy dose of invention added to the tale, and sometimes I make everything up by using my imagination. The point is that no matter the approach I take to the material at hand, I’m always relying on the tools of the storyteller to construct an interesting narrative. If I do it well, the story will also take me to a place in which I know something I didn’t before the telling began.

I’d like to look, then, at a few tools in that storyteller’s toolbox that he or she can’t do without. Whether you like to think of yourself as a writer of fiction or nonfiction, here are some techniques that should serve you well.

The Art of the Scene

Your first task as a storyteller is to persuade a reader. In both fiction and nonfiction, we have to convince readers that what’s happening on the page is authentic. We do that through the well-constructed scene. String enough well-constructed scenes together in a causal sequence and you’ll invite your readers to exist within that realm. What sort of material deserves the space that a scene allows? Moments made up of contradictions and turns, moments unlike other moments, moments that shake a character in some way or the other until they’re slightly different at the end than they were at the beginning.

The Art of the Detail

A combination of sensory details can fully immerse readers in a scene and establish a writer’s authority. Readers are more willing to trust and follow a writer when they feel that the writer has a great deal of confidence in what he or she is portraying on the page. Scenes need to happen in specific locales; otherwise they can seem not to have happened at all. Sensory details are the tools of the trade that the writer uses to convince us that something really happened. A carefully chosen detail can also provide an indirect path toward what the writer has come to say. Don’t say, “I’m going to write a story of the loss of faith.” Instead, ala Flannery O’Connor, in “Good Country People,” say, “I’m going to write about a woman with a wooden leg. I’m going to see where that leg might take me.”

The Art of Characterization

Characters are interesting when they’re made up of contradictions. It’s those contradictions and the writer who recognizes them that create the most memorable characters in works of fiction and nonfiction. If we give our characters’ free will—if we don’t fully know them too soon—they can take us to some interesting places that can either illuminate or complicate, or do both things at once, the thrust of the our exploration of any particular subject. Our characters have to be able to surprise us, and the plot of a good story usually puts enough pressure on them until they can’t help but reveal who they really are. “The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy,” Chekhov writes in “The Lady with the Pet Dog.” A good story doesn’t allow that secrecy to stand. A good story strips it away and leaves the character, to borrow from Woody Allen, without feathers.

The Art of Point of View

A good story locates itself within a particular consciousness. The interior journey of a point of view character provides an arc that co-exists with the arc of the narrative. Readers want to not only know what happened but to also know the person who lived through the experience. It’s the combination of the two that lends the narrative its significance.

The Art of Language

Mavis Gallant, in her brief essay about style in writing, says, “The only question worth asking about a story—or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall—is, “Is it dead or alive.” A piece breathes life, in part, from the style in which the writer has chosen to bring it to the page.  As Gallant goes on to point out, “If a work of the imagination needs to be coaxed into life, it is better scrapped and forgotten.” Style, she says, should never be separate from structure, by which I take it to mean that the manner of telling should always be in the service of what’s being told. Put another way, style is part of the form, and the form and the content and the meaning must be part of the same whole in order for the writer to say what he or she has come to the page to say. Style has always seemed like an instinctual matter to me. A voice emanating from the world of the work, a world the writer knows so well, he or she can’t help but speak its language. It’s amazing how an intimate knowledge of that world can make all sorts of decisions for a writer. Know your worlds and everything falls into place, including the style of the writing. Prose writers, don’t think that language is only the domain of the poets. Pay attention to sentence variety, word choice, prose rhythm, the sounds of words, metaphor, pacing, and the next thing you know, you’ll be stylin’!

To sum up, we tell stories because narrative allows us to make the lived life vivid to the readers, thereby convincing them that they share in the human experience being portrayed. We tell stories as a way of thinking through dramatization. From biblical parables, through Aesop’s fables, to Grimm’s fairy tales and beyond, people have hungered for narrative, not only as entertainment or a record of events, but also because it is through story that we often explore what we don’t know and find what we didn’t know we were seeking. A teacher of mine used to say that a good short story led to a moment of surprise, which he defined as “more truth than we think we have a right to know.” The same holds true for a good piece of nonfiction. As we read, we participate in the writer’s attempt to find what he or she didn’t know when first coming to the page. Narrative is the art of constructing visual images, scenes if you will, that make a dream world for the readers and that require those readers’ participation in the intellectual and emotional life of the story. A good story, then, dramatizes, explores, illuminates. Characters move through time and space, and are profoundly changed because of the journey.

 

Ordinary Details in Memoir

My mother, when she was in her last years, had a habit of sitting in her chair, her hands on the arms, her fingers lifting and pressing down, one by one, as if she were playing scales on the piano. She’d never played a piano. In fact, she had no musical talent at all.

She was a soft-spoken sort, long on patience and kindness and compassion. She believed in the Golden Rule. She was a Christian woman who endured my father’s temper and my battles with him until finally both he and I saw how wrong we were and became the sort of men she deserved to have in her house.

But I was telling you about her fingers and the way they went back and forth, up and down, as she sat quietly in her chair. Upon first glance, at least the way I’ve presented this detail so far, it’s an ordinary moment that I’m describing: my mother sitting in her chair, looking at the television, the lamplight falling over her. How many times had I seen her like that, enjoying a moment of rest? She was a third-grade teacher for thirty-eight years, and after her retirement she worked in the laundry and the kitchen of a nursing home. Somehow she managed to help my father on our farm, and to keep house, and to raise a son. Why should I remember this particular moment?

Those fingers and the way they moved. Such a small detail, ordinary, barely worth noticing, unless you’re her son and all this happens on one of the last days your mother will know you.

Her dementia had worsened after a series of small strokes, and she wasn’t able to live by herself any longer. I was her only child, and I’d had to make the decision nobody wants to make, that she should live in a nursing home. I’d seen her move her fingers like that before and never thought a thing about it. It was just a habit she had, the same way she knelt by her bed each night and prayed before going to bed, or the odd way she had of accenting the syllables of certain words: Ca-SHEW, Il-LUS-trated, To-FU. Or the unique way she answered the phone with a rousing, “Yello.”

Those fingers, up and down and back and forth. Suddenly, though I’d seen her move her fingers that way countless times, I understood that she knew this was one of the last nights she’d spend in her home. Something was at war within her, something most likely that had to do with her belief in civility and the fear she felt. She worked those fingers to keep from saying something she’d regret.

On the night I’m recalling, the mail carrier had mistakenly delivered a parcel meant for someone down the street. My mother insisted on taking the parcel to her neighbor. By this time, it was dark. I told her not to worry about the parcel; I’d make sure it got to the rightful recipient the next day.

That’s when she clapped her hands together. The noise startled me. “All right, then,” she said. “If it doesn’t get to where it’s supposed to go, I won’t be the one to blame.”

I remember how her voice shook with anger, how tears came to her eyes. There we were at one of the extraordinary moments that will be with me as long as I live. I can’t forget it. I can’t ever forget how my mother insisted on doing the right thing at a time when she must have felt so wronged and wounded. I can’t forget the jumble of emotions that rose up at me when she clapped her hands and said what she did.

Memoirs are made from moments like this, those moments that shake us, perplex us, change us, or give us opportunities that we don’t take and they go shooting past us forever, never to come again. But memoirs are also made from the commonplace, from ordinary details that provide a backdrop from which the unforgettable moments emerge. My mother’s fingers, the clapping of her hands, the accusation that she made: all of that exists alongside the crossword puzzles she liked to do, the shopping lists she made on the backs of calendar pages, the Halls cough drops she kept in her purse, the deliberate way she shuffled a deck of cards, the Dear Abby advice columns she liked to read. Every ordinary detail of the lived life is necessary to the extraordinary moments that we remember, that haunt us perhaps, the ones that demand our attention when we set out to tell the tale. We have to pay attention to the commonplace so we’ll better recognize the variations within it. Sometimes a simple action signifies everything if we’re watching closely enough.

 

 

 

 

Two Characters, a Premise: Proceed with Confidence and Caution

My elderly aunt has a neighbor who doesn’t like the way “the college kids” speed by his house with their cd players blasting and thumping. He’s ready to take action. One day, my aunt and her friend saw this man sitting in a lawn chair in his driveway. As usual, he was grousing about those “college kids.” He had a pistol. He pointed it toward the street. “I’m going to shoot someone’s tires out,” he said.

“You don’t want to do that,” my aunt said.

Her friend added, “You might miss and hit someone, or you might cause an accident. You don’t know what might happen.

“I won’t miss,” the neighbor said, and with that he moved his hand from beneath his leg and showed them that pistol

Such confidence can move a man forward; it can also lead to a heap of trouble, make him feel like he’s eight-feet tall and made of steel, make him oblivious to the dangers that possibly lie in wait.

Of course, if nothing happens with the neighbor’s pistol, we really don’t have a story. Action makes a narrative—significant action, I should say, as in action that matters, that means something, that shows us what it is to be that man at that time. If the neighbor never fires that pistol, we have, instead, an anecdote, a brief story about the cranky neighbor who keeps threatening to shoot the tires on the fast and noisy cars driven by those “college kids.”

An anecdote is much safer than a story that matters. We can listen to it, be amused by it, or troubled by it, perhaps, but we’re also distanced from it because the lack of significant action absolves us from identifying with the characters and keeps us from wondering what we’d do if we were in their place.

I hope that my aunt’s neighbor is just talking big. But there’s that pistol, and as Chekhov wrote in a letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, dated 1 November 1889, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” A lesson in making sure that everything is relevant to the action of the narrative.

So here’s a little test for all of us. Given the facts of the premise—my widowed aunt who lives next door to a man who has a pistol and threatens to use it on those kids—who do you choose as your point of view character? Whose interior life do you choose to imagine? My aunt’s, or her neighbor’s? And what do you do with the pistol in the narrative that you’re now free to construct?

You can probably guess my choice when I say that a more eccentric character sometimes needs to be seen through the lens provided by a more rational character. And that pistol? It can “go off” in an unexpected way without even being fired. This isn’t to say that a story couldn’t be made from the neighbor’s point of view with a pistol firing by the end of the story. I’m inviting all of us to walk around our first ideas in an attempt to see them from a different perspective other than the predictable one.

It seems to me that things get written because writers proceed with confidence and caution, with just enough belief in their talents to start off on a sure path, and just enough uncertainty to leave them open to whatever might diverge from that path. Our first ideas aren’t always our best ones. Here’s hoping that my aunt’s neighbor finally realizes that.

 

 

 

More, Please

The farmers are picking corn here in the Midwest. I drove along I-70 today, past corn fields ready for the harvest, and I thought about my father. It’s impossible for me to see dry cornstalks in the fields without thinking of him on Election Day in November, 1956, when he tried to unclog the shucking box of his picker without first shutting down the power take-off. The spinning snapping rollers caught one of his hands between them. He tried to free that hand with his other one, and the rollers caught it, too. I find myself thinking of that moment when he could have made the smart choice to shut down that PTO, that moment when his life and mine could have turned out very differently, that moment when grace was still possible.

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A year ago today, a blood clot traveled to my brain, and for a while, I lost my vision, my speech, and the use of my right arm and leg. All is well now. No impairments outside of a penchant for corny jokes, which one friend jokingly says must be a result of the stroke. Not true. As another friend points out, I’ve always been corny.

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Like my father, I know how life can divide into before and after.

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I spotted a food truck recently called “Egg Rolls and More.” It was doing quite the business. Someone had made a hand-written sign on a piece of notebook paper and taped it to the glass behind which the workers worked. It said, “No More Egg Rolls.” For some reason, that really amused me. I guess all they were serving was the “More.”

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More, please.

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More life, more love, more time, more everything.

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Lose something, or someone, dear to you, or come close, and you’ll never stop wanting.

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Harvest what’s yours for the picking. Don’t delay. Nothing about the future is guaranteed. Live in the moment. Celebrate the love that surrounds you. My friends, you bless me every day.