From The Archives | To Have, Give All to All, or What It Means to Write (& Live) Generously

Hacking paths through the bramble of craft to write "The Greatest [Something Something] Ever" + risks & rewards of sharing "trade secrets" + elevating the ordinary to holy through meticulous attention

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This post is the first of a new feature: From The Archives.

In From The Archives I’ll share posts and prompts from the WITD archive every Friday—and on the third Friday of the month, these posts will be free and comments section will be will be open to all subscribers.

My hope is to spark engaged discussion, welcome new subscribers to our community, and get to know each of you a little bit better. With that in mind, please feel free to share your thoughts, questions, and experiences in the comments below—if the prompt makes magic for you, let me know! If the prompt frustrates you, I love to hear that too (since I wholeheartedly embrace frustration and resistance as part of a healthy creative practice). And, as always, snippets that come from the prompt are highly encouraged! I’ll be hanging out in the comments to read what you share.

Today’s post was originally published on July 12, 2023.

As always, thank you for being here.

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I’ve been thinking about generosity. What it means to live with a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity. What happens when we soften and open to the world around us. What happens when we allow ourselves to be of rather than apart.

This question of generosity is the inspiration for our writing prompt this week, which you’ll find several paragraphs down, under the bolded header, Writing Prompt: The Greatest [Something Something] Ever. If you’re a paid subscriber and want to skip straight to the prompt, you can—and free subscribers can read the following craft essay in full (as always) and leave it there, or choose to upgrade for the six-step structured writing assignment. [Edited 10-20-23 to add: this full post + prompt is free for all today.]

I’ll be the first to say, this week’s prompt is zany, strange, highly specific, challenging, and fun. It’s also likely to help you generate something interesting and potentially exceptional. I can attest that some of the seedlings that grew from this prompt from writers in our synchronous Writing in the Dark workshop this week lifted me right up off the ground (though we never bank on that, do we?).

The catalyst for this prompt, once again, was the idea of generosity, perhaps best expressed by Annie Dillard when she said:

“… spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

And if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, or if you’ve studied with me in the past, you’ve probably heard me talk about the value of being a generous writer. A writer who doesn’t withhold from or tease the reader (intentional foreshadowing not withstanding). A writer who doesn’t string together pretty words that leave a reader hungry and perhaps even a bit tricked by a lack of “aboutness”—which, by the way, does not require a traditional narrative approach. Aboutness can be a feeling as much as a story, and clarity of aboutness can emerge kaleidoscopically from fragments and flashes as much as from any linear beginning, middle, and end. Those journeys to aboutness differ in nature, yes, but the sensation of “aha” occurs either way.

Incidentally, writing generously is not about how much of yourself you reveal. In fact, it has nothing, really, to do with self-revelation—although sometimes self-revelation is involved, obviously. But, at heart, writing generously is about writing in a way that considers and respects and values (even treasures) the experience of the reader.  

The truth? It takes courage to write generously.

It also takes courage to teach generously. Recently, in another circle of writers talking about writing, someone asked, “Whenever someone asks, ‘how’d you do that?’ I’m always a bit torn on how much to give away. I mean, I’ve worked at this. Should I really just offer up everything I know?”

I think any writer can empathize with this sentiment, considering all the energy we put into our work, the countless hours of struggling to breathe life onto a page. It does not surprise me that some writers might feel trepidation and even resistance when asked to hand out keys to the kingdom, to pull back the veil, to open the portal to the mystery school itself. And I can’t say that I’ve never, not even once, felt the tension of that internal battle myself—or at least faint twinges of it.

But, mostly, I am blessed to be free of this tension. Perhaps because I am and seem to have been born into (as a student and friend recently pointed out) the “teacher archetype.” It’s just how I am wired. As much as I live in the world as a writer, I live in the world as a teacher. These two shapes within me are as intertwined as my lungs and heart. I wouldn’t know how to separate them if I tried, and the joy each brings me is also inextricably tied to the challenge each presents. As a result, I’ve learned I need to give it all away. To not hold back. To teach and share generously. This is what makes my life feel vivid, wild, adventurous, and real.

Also, in an “enlightened self-interest” sort of way—I’ve found that teaching generously makes me a better writer. I think of a phrase I learned from my dear friend Tyler (a writer and a Buddhist)—“to have, give all to all.” Tyler learned this first during his childhood, when his grandfather became involved in A Course for Miracles. Ever since Tyler introduced me to this phrase—”to have, give all to all”—it has been ringing in my ears, even though I myself have never dabbled even a tiny bit in A Course in Miracles and have no intention of doing so (nothing against miracles). Still, I resonate with the wisdom that to have, we must give. This tenet appears in the teachings of virtually every spiritual tradition around the world since the dawn of time. And for me personally—at least with regard to writing—I find that every time I give all the wisdom I have, I receive exponentially more in return.

Specifically, the practice of carefully unpacking exactly what it was that I did (or another writer did) on the page, then sharing it with students, has given me a much more precise and effective vocabulary with which to think and speak about writing. And since thinking and speaking and doing are so closely linked, the clearer my thinking and speaking, the more agency I acquire when it comes to the doing part of my writing. Which is cool, because so often I really don’t know what I am doing until after I’ve done it. That’s a phenomenon that’s not just fine, but essential (writing should be a discovery, not a recitation). But if we don’t go back and figure out what we discovered, we’re short-changing ourselves. And it’s possible that if we don’t share our discoveries generously, we short-changing ourselves even more.

There’s enough everything for everyone, if only we stop hoarding and start sharing.

What got me thinking on this whole generosity thing recently was the experience of reading and teaching the essay, “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” by the late Brian Doyle (you will definitely want to read it before attempting his week’s prompt). Doyle was a wholly generous and prolific writer himself, and in this particular essay (which we will use as the backbone of our writing prompt this week), Doyle writes in meticulous detail about exactly how to craft “the greatest nature essay ever.” As usual, Doyle’s writing is artful and moving in and of itself, but what struck me most after reading his essay was the degree to which it actually gives usable and practical guidance for anyone writing not just a nature essay, but any essay at all.  

In this work, along with many of his other works, Doyle illuminates the ordinary and, with his devoted and precise attention, he elevates it to the level of holy. Perhaps I feel so connected and moved by Doyle’s writing because Doyle was, as the Iowa Review called him, “a writer’s writer, unknown to the best-seller or even the good-seller lists, a Townes Van Zandt of essayists, known by those in the know.” In other words, Brian Doyle’s work didn’t necessarily make him wealthy or earn him much recognition beyond the confines of the literary world, but that didn’t stop him from giving all to all and basking in the ecstasy of doing so.

Doyle wrote in a way that spoke to everyone, yes, but maybe his words seemed to ring especially true to writers because writers could see and deeply appreciate what he was doing on the page. In fact, Doyle cultivated such an ardent following that after his unexpected death in 2017 his dedicated readers gathered his unpublished works and best-loved essays to be published in the beautiful posthumous collection One Long River of Song, which I highly recommend. If you haven’t read it yet, you should probably go do that the first chance you get.

So, anyway, all of this to say in your writing this week, I challenge you to be generous. To give it all away. To leave it on the page. To be brave enough to say what you mean. To believe Annie Dillard’s sage, unforgettable advice.

And with that—here is this week’s prompt, which is not guaranteed to help you write the greatest nature essay or the greatest anything ever … but which very well could help you write a crackerjack 750-word [something something]. This prompt contains multiple concrete examples to illustrate its instructions, as well as excerpts from some writers who are already doing it.

Good luck! I can’t wait to hear how it goes!

Writing Prompt: The Greatest [Something Something] Ever

This week I have built on and adapted the instructions given in Brian Doyle’s "The Greatest Nature Essay Ever" so, prior to beginning this exercise you’ll need to read that short essay (and you’ll also probably want access to it as you write this prompt).

To note, for our purposes, the subject need not be nature. Let the subject be whatever you want, as long as it is concrete (a person, a place, a thing) and not abstract (an idea). Yes, ideas will work their way in, but let’s start with something concrete so that we don’t get lost in the ether.

To produce your “greatest [something something] ever,” follow these instructions as closely as you possibly can.

Word limit: 750 firm.

For each step, be open to playing around with several different options (so for step one, this would mean several different images, and for step two, it would mean several different personal stories, etc.), instead of being married to your first idea. It’s good to be loose, stretchy, open, curious, inventive, adventurous, and exploratory!

1. Doyle tells us to start with “an image so startling, wondrous, lovely …”

But we’re going to take some of that pressure off, and, in so doing, likely get much better results (and possibly even achieve Doyle’s high aim). We’re going to start simply with a concrete specific image that is only itself, the thing itself (and not a comparison/metaphor). Let it be a close-up, plainly spoken but meticulously accurate observation of something real.

To help with this, here are some examples of images that are concrete/specific and  non-comparative:

A cedar tree growing horizontally over the lake

Dutchman’s pipe vines totally blocking the light from the north

A gaping fresh wound in the side of the oak tree from where the trunk-sized branch snapped under the weight of a spring snow

Here are some that are more abstract and comparative:

A sky as blue as my grandmother’s eyes

Wind full of song like my brother’s violin

Grass as soft and green as my mother’s velvet sofa

Here is are two lines from Pablo Neruda’s poem “I’m explaining a Few Things” that exemplify the power of the thing being just the thing that it is rather than a fancy comparison to something else:

… and the blood of children ran through the streets

 without fuss, like children's blood

Let this concrete, specific, non-comparative image go on for some time, several sentences or even a paragraph, but instead of going into story or comparison, cleave religiously and unwaveringly to the thing itself.

Here is one final example of this kind of literal, “cleaving to the real thing imagery” from Mary Oliver’s poem, “I Found a Dead Fox”:

I found a dead fox

beside the gravel road,

curled inside the big

iron wheel

of an old tractor

that has been standing,

for years,

in the vines at the edge

of the road

2. Doyle tells us next: “… the next two paragraphs would smoothly and gently move you into a story, seemingly a small story, a light tale, easily accessed, something personal but not self-indulgent or self-absorbed on the writer’s part, just sort of a cheerful nutty everyday story maybe starring an elk or a mink or a child …” and I think we can take his words exactly as they are!

To do this successfully, try to continue the plain, simple, concrete language of your starting image. I think of another of Doyle’s iconic essays, “Imagining Foxes”—nothing fancy to see there, just worker words marching a simple story forward to a profound ending.

3. Next Doyle tells us: “… but then there would suddenly be a sharp sentence where the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a skater, and you are plunged into waaay deeper water, you didn’t see it coming at all ….”

And I would encourage us to think of lines like that in other essays or stories, lines that have stolen our breath. In Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” we get, almost smack in the middle of a short poem, after a seemingly very simple little story of a grasshopper, this stunning sentence:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

Can you do that? Can I? If we can do that, we’re blazing hot. We’re everything.

4. Now Doyle instructs: “The next three paragraphs then walk inexorably toward a line of explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps. Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences. But there’s no opinion or commentary, just one line fitting into another, each one making plain inarguable sense, a goat or even a senator could easily understand the sentences and their implications, and there’s no shouting, no persuasion, no eloquent pirouetting, no pronouncements and accusations, no sermons or homilies, just calm clean clear statements one after another, fitting together like people holding hands.”

And I think here we can do exactly what Doyle says above, though you may not need (or be able to afford) three full paragraphs here since we’re keeping this to 750 words. See what you can do, but adhere to the word count (you can always expand trim back the words later if it gets bloated).

5. Next Doyle says (and, here again, we can follow exactly what he advises): “Then an odd paragraph, this is a most unusual and peculiar essay, for right here where you would normally expect those alpine Conclusions, some Advice, some Stern Instructions & Directions, there’s only the quiet murmur of the writer tiptoeing back to the story he or she was telling you in the second and third paragraphs. The story slips back into view gently, a little shy, holding its hat, nothing melodramatic, in fact it offers a few gnomic questions without answers, and then it gently slides away off the page and off the stage, it almost evanesces or dissolves, and it’s only later after you have read the essay three times with mounting amazement that you see quite how the writer managed the stagecraft there, but that’s the stuff of another essay for another time.”

6. Finally, if you can do this next thing, exactly as Doyle invites, I bow to you and bow again: “And finally the last paragraph. It turns out that the perfect nature essay is quite short, it’s a lean taut thing, an arrow and not a cannon, and here at the end there’s a flash of humor, and a hint or tone or subtext of sadness, a touch of rue, you can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s there, a dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly there’s no call to arms, no clarion brassy trumpet blast, no website to which you are directed, no hint that you, yes you, should be ashamed of how much water you use or the car you drive or the fact that you just turned the thermostat up to seventy, or that you actually have not voted in the past two elections despite what you told the kids and the goat. Nor is there a rimshot ending, a bang, a last twist of the dagger. Oddly, sweetly, the essay just ends with a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed.”

Take these words and run with them, dear writers! Be generous, and soft, and open to letting whatever may come. And maybe when you’re finished you will feel compelled to come back and share what you caught (or didn’t) in that wide open sea of creation.