Writing Tip #19: Your Place in the Family

Writing about our family is hard. Here are some questions I hear all the time:

"What if they read what I write and they disagree?"
"What if I'm wrong?"
"What if I hurt someone I love?"
"What if I break our generation-long 'code of silence?'"

Here are a few ways to practice breaking into these fears and breaking out of the habituated ways you look at the people in your life. Your family members are not props on your stage, they are mysterious and complex. You don't have to figure anyone out, you just need to present them accurately and with a level of complexity. Good writing is being a great witness and also being able to describe people in such a way that you touch on the mystery of human beings and human interactions.

Prompt: Create a picture of your family based on some simple gesture: the way they sign, laugh, cry or kiss. Begin with a vivid, original description of these gestures, then describe your father, your mother, yourself, or any other family member. Try to see how examining these small gestures reveals larger details about the family. (Thank you to Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola from Tell it Slant for this prompt)

See an example of how to do this prompt by reading this excerpt from The Fine Art of Sighing by Bernard Cooper

[image error] You feel a gradual welling up of pleasure, or boredom, or melancholy. Whatever the emotion, it's more abundant than you ever dreamed. You can no more contain it than your hands can cup a lake. And so you surrender and suck the air. Your esophagus opens, diaphragm expands. Poised at the crest of an exhalation, your body is about to be unburdened, second by second, cell by cell. A kettle hisses. A balloon deflates. Your shoulders fall like two ripe pears, muscles slack at last.

My mother stared out the kitchen window, ashes from her cigarette dribbling into the sink. She'd turned her back on the rest of the house, guarding her own solitude. I'd tiptoe across the lino-leum and make my lunch without making a sound. Sometimes I saw her back expand, then heard her let loose one plummeting note, a sigh so long and weary it might have been her last. Beyond our backyard, above telephone poles and apartment buildings, rose the brown horizon of the city; across it glided an occasional bird, or the blimp that advertised Goodyear tires. She might have been drifting into the distance, or lamenting her separation from it. She might have been wishing she were somewhere else, or wishing she could be happy where she was, a middle-aged housewife dreaming at her sink.

My father's sighs were more melodic. What began as a somber sigh could abruptly change pitch, turn gusty and loose, and suggest by its very transformation that what begins in sorrow might end in relief. He could prolong the rounded vowel of OY, or let it ricochet like a echo, as if he were shouting in a tunnel or a cave. Where my mother sighed from ineffable sadness, my father sighed at simple things: the coldness of a drink, the softness of a pillow, or an itch that my mother, following the frantic map of his words, finally found on his back and scratched.

The Lesson: Cooper gives us a terrific sense of how to examine something as unique as the human sigh. I have seen other students take this lesson and apply it to eyebrows, hugs, the way men in the family cry and waistlines. You are only limited by your own imagination.

As you write, keep asking yourself where you fit in your family and if you can observe, with minute detail, your place and their place. Can you separate yourself out and make room for the largess of the others? Can you be the more complete witness?