Kindle Notes & Highlights
Every child must think some variation on this: that the parent’s childhood home was merely a rehearsal for this, the genuine family experience.
‘Writing’s a partnership,’ I added. ‘The author shouldn’t do all the work or the reader loses interest.’
Some tutors fed that need by encouraging their groups to explore terrible things that had happened to them, instead of writing about the more mundane aspects of life – the difficulty of walking a powerful dog, of administering a bed bath, of climbing up a broken escalator with no loss of dignity.
But beginner writers often want to bypass the factory floor, the ball game and jump straight to the soul, without seeing that souls don’t float free; they’re anchored in bodies doing everyday things.
The nurse hands him a chisel. He positions it on the edge of the jaw and places the flat tip between the tooth and the gum. He pushes down, straining so hard that his smile becomes a grimace. Presently he stands to improve his leverage. He uses both hands; he stands on tiptoe, bearing down with shaking arms. The tooth resists and resists, and when at last it gives way it does so too easily, so that the chisel spends its force upwards, hitting the teeth above.
The idea that we can write about the events that shape us and not hurt other people in the process was appealing – I couldn’t see a way to do it, though.
‘The way the story is told is more important than the story itself.’
Some of the people who came to the writing school hoped to address a grievance or to salve a hurt and, as they told their story, their truth, during the course of the week it could seem that the grievance – often concerning a less than perfect parent – was disproportionate to the crime.
