Is It True That Anyone Can Write?
"Writing Prompt: One Shape, Several Stories" + thoughts on art and accessibility + + System 1 and System 2 of the brain and how the former works against us as artists (and what we can do about it)
You hear it said in different ways at different times in different settings, but the general sentiment that “anyone can write” gets thrown around a lot. And while sometimes that statement is meant to demean or belittle writing as an art form, the truth is that writing is a uniquely accessible art from, far more so than many other arts, and that’s something for which I thank my stars daily. If writing hadn’t been accessible, I’d have found myself excluded for the same reasons I missed out on things like music lessons, dance classes, and so forth.
You see, unlike many art forms, writing requires a material investment of next to nothing. We don’t need to go out and buy paints or canvas or rent or buy musical instruments to start writing. We need only a desire express something to someone combined with the right words to express it. This week’s prompt is about the latter portion of that equation: finding the right words. Which is not all about discipline and persistence, though of course those are helpful contributing factors, yes. But the real secret to finding the right words comes from getting out of our fast-thinking mind, which this week’s prompt will help us to do.
First, though, one more thought on the accessibility of writing, because I am especially reminded of this in my work with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. When I teach writing inside prison facilities, which I will be doing later tonight, I am gently confronted with the half-truths I tell myself when I make excuses, often logistical and time related, for not writing. My incarcerated students must overcome enormous logistical barriers in order to devote time to their writing—barriers that include lack of computer access, facility lockdowns, and minimal privacy, to name only a few. But when I show up to teach my flash class at Stillwater in a couple of hours, my students will have new work to share with me. They always do. And week after week, this humbles me.
However … there is a flip side to the amazing accessibility of creative writing. It’s that the mostly open access to writing is also what makes the work of creative writing feel so arduous and even, at times, almost impossible. Especially now, in the age of clickbait and phones and the “content economy,” readers are swimming in stories. We are bombarded by written words—too many of which are hollow half-stories that fail to meet any human need for connection or meaning or feeling. So, yes, “anyone can write,” but … there’s more to it than that.
Against a raging and ever-growing torrent of lazy and manipulative language, our first challenge as creative writers is to grab hold of a reader and pull them out of that relentless riptide. That is, our words must, like a life raft, offer readers something with enough strength, substance, and truth to prevent them from getting sucked away by the mass distraction all around them. That is no small feat. It will require attention, skill, and devotion. All of which take practice.
And even once we have a reader’s attention—or, to continue the metaphor, once we’ve pulled them out of the raging river—we must follow through and give them something true and real and unique. We must keep the promise we made when we threw that raft. Today’s prompt offers ways to practice both of these elusive tasks with the help of literary constraints.
As many of you know, I am a firm believer in the power of constraints as an elastic and necessary driving force in artistic writing. Constraints have been used in creative writing throughout history and across cultures for as long as we have records of artistic writing. The reason for this is simple: intentional constraints make us better writers.
Take a look, for example, at this excerpt from Neil Gaiman’s short story, Orange:
CONFIDENTIAL POLICE FILE
(Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire)
1.Jemma Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.
2.17 on June the 9th.
3.The last five years. Before that we lived in Leesburg (Florida). Before that, Kalamazoo (Michigan).
4.I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us anymore. The divorce was pretty bad and Mom wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get free of him.
5.An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin™, and started the Stuffed Muffin chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of stuffed muffins for every meal, especially because Mom used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Dinner Christmas Stuffed Muffin was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin chain five years ago, to start work on My Mom’s Colored Bubbles (not actually ™ yet).
We can identify multiple levels of constrain even in just this short excerpt of Gaiman’s incredible story. First, the structure of the questionnaire is, in itself, a constraint (as is any hermit crab structure, and if you want to know more about hermit crab structure for stories and essays, you can check out this brilliant Pank essay, Drug Facts, by Lauren Trembath-Neuberger, and/or through the fabulous craft book The Shell Game by Kim Adrian and also in this craft essay in Creative Nonfiction and also by Googling). A second constraint Gaiman imposes on this story is that of omitting the questions, and including only the narrator’s responses to them. Finally, even something as simple as choosing to write in a specific character’s voice and point of view (in this case a seventeen-year-old daughter of the inventor of the Stuffed Muffin™) serves as another form of constraint.
Constraints come in many shapes and sizes—word limits, structures, point-of-view, rhyming patterns, etc.—but on a whole all constraints are essentially high-level choices that determine the rules of how the story will be told.
Constraints are present in some form in any writing (even writing in a particular language is itself a constraint!), but the more we learn and practice using specific constraints on purpose, the better our writing gets. That’s because when used intentionally, constraints force us to downshift into “System 2” thinking. As Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, explains:
• System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
• System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
When writing something like a sonnet or haiku we are shuttled into System 2 to search for a word with the right syllable count or ending sound, and while we’re busy with that search, System 1 is quieted (we can’t operate in both systems at the same time). And the great thing about quieting System 1 is that it allows us to get beyond the “no effort” story and language that System 1 is so fond of coughing up for us (with “little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control”). Which, in turn, allows us to discover the much more interesting, vivid, and compelling stories and language lurking outside the margins of System I’s easy inventory.
Writing Prompt: One Shape, Several Stories
So, this week we’ll play with intentional constraints, and we’ll practice telling a complete story with incomplete information. By the time you finish the five steps, you will have a few partially written stories, one story draft, and, hopefully, new insights about the story you’re writing as well as your own tendencies as a writer. Plus you’ll have a bunch of material you can rework and revise using these same strategies.
Before we write we will choose a clear, constrained container, something inventive and, ideally, unexpected, so start thinking about possibilities. The “tighter” the container, the more friction it will have against the content of your story, and the more friction it has, the more interesting things get, and the more interesting things get, the better the writing becomes. Once you have your container, you will ultimately pour a story into it, and as you do, you will find yourself pressing and pulling at the intersection of form and meaning, which is where all of the most surprising things unfold.
Try to execute the following steps in order, and as closely to the spirit of the instructions as you can.
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