Dear Too Raw: Yes, You Can Make That Terrible Story Bearable—Here’s How

Lit Salon addresses the question of how to make our harder stories easier for readers to bear + our wildly inspiring first Live Salon + "Half Finished," a sneak-peak at an essay I started today

Before answering this week’s question—“How do you know, when writing hard stories, how to tell if they are ready, or still too raw?”—which came straight from our Sunday Live Salon, I have to say a few more words about that incredible experience.

Friends, so many people have reached out to tell me how blown away they were by the 12 readings shared during the Salon (where we celebrated, in part, the work that emerged during our Essay Challenge and also our spring Creativity Challenge, so the readings came from those exercises).

Those readings were frankly incredible. And it’s not just me (and Billie) saying so. Of the heartfelt notes I’ve received in the last 24 hours, the one that might mean the most to those of you who read your work (and those of you considering the effort of a WITD seasonal challenge and wondering about the possibilities therein), here’s what Jill Swenson of Swenson Book Development had to say. Jill, who also teaches writing (including classes for Elephant Rock) and coaches writers, has helped countless writers bring their books from idea to manuscript to publication, and she observed this about the Salon:

Yesterday’s readings blew me away. While participating in the essay challenge—I have by no means completed it and kept most of my engagement to the handwritten pages in my notebook—I have observed how gifted you are in communicating processes and methods to elicit the best writing from writers. I love learning from you and the writing community you create. Thank you!

All I can say is thank you, all of you who’ve been participating in these seasonal intensives, trusting these exercises, and journeying into corners of your writing you weren’t expecting. I’m awed by you all, and by the power of your words. Yes, this is what doing language sounds like.

And now for this week’s Lit Salon.

Lit Salon

Dear Too Raw: Yes, You Can Make That Terrible Story Bearable—Here’s How

Dear Jeannine,

How do you know when it’s no longer too raw, when it’s no longer too hot to hold, when it’s no longer just a box of darkness?

Love,

Too Raw

Dear Too Raw,

I appreciate this question so, so much. During Sunday’s Salon when you asked this question, I told you one strategy right on the spot, which was to pay unwavering attention to your shimmers and shards practice: never let it go. (For readers not familiar with shimmering and sharding, it’s about paying attention, capturing the exterior world to reveal the interior world, and tending to the senses and the sense body; you can learn more throughout the WITD archives but especially here and here and here).  And I truly felt the shimmer/sharding in your work, the sawing and sawing and sawing, the clear-eyed capturing of exteriority. Shimmering and sharding is like being a camera and a microphone, like having antennae that feel the contours of things, like crawling through the grass on your hands and knees, blindfolded, and smelling and tasting the green.

It's also about telling the truth at a slant (thank you, Emily Dickenson, for that unendingly wise advice) and finding the story five degrees to the left of the one you think you know (for that profoundly useful gem, I thank Nick Flynn).

Now let me tell you a story.

I am writing this just for you.

It is not complete—instead it is the beginning of something. I chose a topic that is extremely hard for me to write about. One of the darkest experiences of my childhood. I touch very briefly and lightly on this topic in The Part That Burns, but do not delve. Someday maybe I’ll write a whole essay or story about it. Maybe this thing I just wrote for you is the starter for that dough, which will someday rise and become something more. I’m not sure. And I’m not sharing it because I think it’s good yet, or anywhere near done. I am sharing it because I thought it might be easier to try to show how I might use shimmer/sharding, slanting, and edging five degrees to the left of the story I think I know (combined with a lot of emotional restraint) to transform a moldy box of darkness into a thing that might eventually, if I keep working on it, hold a drop of light.

Please post your comments/questions about all this under this post—let’s have a conversation!—and, meanwhile, thank you for this rich and provocative question.

And by the way, the image with this post is the ranch house (well, not exactly, it is a mirror image of it, but actually the house across the street, taken from the ranch house) that I mention in the work-in-progress below.

Love,
Jeannine

Half-Finished

(*a working title for a sort-of braided essay, with some sections only very lightly adapted from Wikipedia’s page on basements)

A basement is the floor of a building found partly or entirely below the ground. It can be little more than a cellar, or a section of a building containing rooms and spaces similar to those of the rest of the structure.

When I was ten years old, my family moved out of our small, new-construction ranch-style house near the foothills of Casper Mountain—made from cardboard and string, my mom used to say—to a larger and slightly more stately old house near the edge of downtown Casper.

I really loved the new house—at first.

Downstairs, the house had a front porch with glass windows and, in the back of the house, an actual family room with sliding doors that opened onto a wooden deck overlooking the alley. The living room was just behind the front porch, and along the side of the living room was an open staircase that led to the three bedrooms up there, plus a bathroom (which meant we had two bathrooms in this house, although the one downstairs was inside a strange bedroom off the dining room, which would very soon, once my stepfather left, become one of our borders’ rooms, and therefore not available for our use except for when border Mark wasn’t home, in which case my sister and I snooped around in Mark’s things and pilfered his bacon crackers to stave off our cravings for salt).

Unfinished basements are common throughout the U.S. and Canada. Things found in unfinished basements include water heaters, various other mechanical equipment, and possibly a workbench or freezer or refrigerator or a washer/dryer set. Boxes of various materials and objects unneeded in the rest of the house are also often stored there.  

Anyway, like I said, I loved the new house. It felt huge to me, and also solid in a way our house in the foothills never had. The one big problem was the basement, which was terrifying and home to a legitimate monster with groping arms and a giant belching belly. I now know and vaguely understood then that the monster was some