Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition ~ Max Ernst
Welcome to Week Two of Strange Containers: Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities, our 4-Week Intensive For The Kind of Writing You Might Never Do Otherwise!
Dear Amazing, Incredible, Brilliant WITD Community:
I am gobsmacked by your hermit crabs—the bright and broken shells, tin cans and match boxes and empty perfume bottles and rusty lockets filled with electrifying, heartbreaking, hair-raising, soul-soothing originality stretching toward story.
Strange containers, indeed! Ah, do you feel it already, the freedom, exhilaration, and adventure of swimming out into the deep water, beyond the familiar comfort of traditional chronological containers? (And, on that topic, by the way, Jillian Barnet just wrote a terrifically helpful Brevity craft piece called “From Chronological to Spiral Structure—Why & How” in which she speaks lovingly of The Part That Burns, thank you, Jillian!!).
It’s all so inventive and bizarre in the best way. I said this on Notes yesterday, but yours are among the best examples of the hermit crab form I’ve seen in the decade since I first started teaching hermits. Again, you can explore last week’s post here if you missed it (because you don’t want to miss it!).
This work is all such glowing proof of one of my tenets of writing, which is that if, in the writing, I ultimately say exactly what I set out to say, I have failed. Writing is about discovery, not recitation.
It’s going to be hard to live up to Week One, but try we must, And try we shall, with our next strange container of “juxtaposition of incongruity” in the shape of a braid. Bear with me a moment first, though—I have two more bits of front matter before we dive in.
One, I want to make sure you see yesterday’s post, What Does It Mean To Be Safe? It’s an important message for our community and I hope it reaches everyone, not just for what it describes about the underlying philosophy of WITD’s creative container, but also because it contains a call for submissions to a new anthology project (Root Cause: Stories of health, harm, and reclaiming our humanity in an epidemic of loneliness) as well as a link to my recent conversation with
on his fabulous new podcast, Some Things Considered. You can find it all here.Two, in response to yesterday’s conversation around WITD culture, creative safety, etc., I’d like to re-clarify something important:
This WITD newsletter is not a workshop or a space for direct critique or feedback on our work in progress. The work in progress that we share here is almost always written in direct response to the exercises in the posts, and is truly much too new for “feedback” in any traditional sense.
But, here are two more crucial points: first, the close reading we do of each other’s words, and the attentive, precise identification of what is working best—i.e., the pulling out of the phrases/images/lines that are most alive and leaping from the page— does more than any other method I know to improve our writing over time. And it does it not by telling us what to do differently here or there (which can quickly undermine our own artistic discernment) but by constantly bringing our attention back to what is working well, so that eventually we know how to see and hear and perceive more fully for ourselves the strengths and opportunities in our own work.
Besides that, in a very literal sense, there is no way you can not improve your own writing if you are carefully reading the many hundreds of short examples from other WITD writers. As one writer said this morning about the hermits, “Thanks...after reading other people's contributions in containers, I feel like I understand the idea better.”
And so it always goes.
In a future post, based on an incredibly astute question from another writer last week about whether or not it is truly possible to close read our own work, I am going to write about the necessity of being able to close read our own work, despite how difficult it is to do so! So, watch for that.
Meanwhile, you can be reassured that this persistent training of the eye and ear we engage in through identifying the strongest elements of each other’s snippets is transformative over time, if engaged in with diligence. Note, close reading and precise observations of what works best are not the same as saying, “Good job! I love this!” which is general praise, but lacks the concrete specificity of close observation. Of course you are welcome to say, “I love this!” But precise identification of the most interesting, feral, and moving parts of a work in progress is something different. Such observation is a tremendous service not only to the writers who receive it but also to the writers who take the time to do it. Imagine how this practice, over time, develops your eye, your ear, and your own fierce original (and elastic, flexible, ever evolving) voice. Nothing else can do so as well. Nothing—including and maybe especially any amount of what we think of as “feedback.”
That said, for those of you who have works in progress that are ready for a more rigorous process (taking the next steps of close reading to identify questions and areas of opportunity) that’s something you can look for in WITD: THE SCHOOL, where we will be matching writers with groups of other writers who want to use the WITD close reading method to advance their already developed work in significant ways. Registration for SCHOOL closes soon, so if you have questions, please reach out.
And now for the juxtaposition of incongruities, a natural method of creating meaning, surprise, and satisfaction. Or, as Max Ernst put it:
Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.
Max Ernst is an artist and writer “noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages,” and the Ernst quote I pulled for today’s headline really captures my own feelings about juxtaposition of incongruities—the way we “draw a spark” from these odd placements, a spark which in turn ignites our ever churning pull toward meaning.
You see, whenever we find two or more things next to each other, the seeds of story take root in our minds. Just think about it, and you will intuitively feel what I am saying.
Better yet, read these examples and see where your mind jumps to:
Apple — Cinnamon
Cedar Plank — Saw
Sidewalk — Broken Phone
Maybe your mind reached for apple pies, fences, and accidents (or fights). Maybe your mind reached for other explanations. But inevitably, something began to form in the space between each pairing. This pull toward meaning—this way in which our brains are wired to draw inference and narrative from objects and patterns, no matter how random—has been addressed by nearly every field of study. I like this quote from Robert Burton’s essay in Nautilus: Our Brains Tell Stories So We Can Live: Without Inner Narratives We Would Be Lost In A Chaotic World.
Burton writes:
But when we use data of the physical world to explain phenomena that cannot be reduced to physical facts, or when we extend incomplete data to draw general conclusions, we are telling stories. Knowing the atomic weight of carbon and oxygen cannot tell us what life is. There are no naked facts that completely explain why animals sacrifice themselves for the good of their kin, why we fall in love, the meaning and purpose of existence, or why we kill each other.
Science is not at fault. On the contrary, science can save us from false stories. It is an irreplaceable means of understanding our world. But despite the verities of science, many of our most important questions compel us to tell stories that venture beyond the facts. For all of the sophisticated methodologies in science, we have not moved beyond the story as the primary way that we make sense of our lives.
What does all this have to do with our work this week? Well, we’re going to play around with this meaning-making drive in our natural wiring, and the way in which this can bring us great pleasure as writers and readers—by creating some braided narratives. Those of you who did our epic Essay in 12 Steps Challenge might recall the super intense, incredibly involved, dizzyingly high-level and complicated braiding exercise we undertook back then—and if you want at some point to go deep with braiding, you can find that week’s post here—it was called, Tension and Shape: How Incongruous Things Press Against Each Other to Make Meaning.
This time, though, we’re going to keep it simple, concrete, and (comparatively) short. That’s the best way for us to get under the skin of this thing and really get a feel for braiding. Again, it’s going to be tough to live up to last week, but if anyone can do it, you all can.
Below the paywall this week you’ll find:
Complete instructions for the structured braiding exercise, including a playful but powerful interactive warm-up to help us really metabolize the concept of incongruity and meaning making. This part is going to be fun and make your experience of braiding much more inventive, strange, and—I believe—productively brilliant.
A brief but important mini-essay on the legitimate fear of “gimmicky” work emerging from experimental containers like hermits and braids (I even dug up an “famous” viral example for your amusement), and my thoughts on how to navigate that fear and why we should use these containers anyway—and benefit from them!
My favorite, clearest craft resources on the braided form including some of my favorite braided essays and a 790-word craft essay that is also a crystal clear example of the form itself.
Let’s get going. I honestly cannot wait to see you in the comments!