Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook ... through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion. ~Sharon Olds
Creativity Prompt #17: Until It Rings Out Like A Chime | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
Street by Mikuláš Galanda
I love the Sharon Olds quote I used to title this post. Perhaps because I love Sharon Olds herself so much. She also said:
Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
This is just one reason I admire poets so much, and read poetry specifically in order to wake up my prose and make it more true. And it’s part of why I had such an incredible day yesterday being a conversation partner and host to the extraordinary writer Maggie Smith in celebration of her new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I was lucky enough to get several hours of one-on-one time with Maggie, including a leisurely dinner after the event, and every moment was inspiring. In fact, I’m going to say more about it in tomorrow’s prompt for this Creativity Challenge, so stay tuned!
But back to today: what I want is to upend a tendency I see very often in work-in-progress (including my own!)—which is when we try to cover too much territory in a single scene, essay, story, or whatever other unit of writing we’re working with. In other words, we try to put too much inside a container incapable of holding it all. What can and often does happen then is we end up diluting and obscuring the aboutness of our work—we end up papering over the central light of it, sometimes before we’ve even seen that light for ourselves.
Today’s prompt offers a possible solution to the tendency—a very detailed, actionable practice you can repeat an indefinite number of times to raise your awareness just how much you’re covering, in terms of both time and content (events), in a single unit of writing.
To note, one writer who with an unfailing and consistently gorgeous control of time and content in her work is Sharon Olds, and while I could select from a great many of Olds’s poems to exemplify what I mean, I most often lean on “The Clasp” for demonstrating the brilliant illumination of a single moment, and only a single moment, to express an oceanic truth.
Ostensibly, “The Clasp” very plainly and with an unflinching gaze examines a single moment between mother and young children. It begins:
She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely …
Here, Olds has brought us to the moment of “the clasp,” already using the poem’s one and only line of backstory (we had been in the apartment two weeks straight), You can click through to read this very short poem in its entirety to see how Olds goes from this close, plain, and meticulous examination of a moment to reveal a universal truth so searing it takes my breath away.
And this is what I will walk us through today: how to treat the mundane as miraculous, the ordinary as extraordinary. We will ask ourselves how a writer takes a "small" moment and amplifies it until it rings out like a chime.
I think the process, as always, starts with curiosity, with finding the "sticky" images/memories/moments in our lives and investigating them with a sort of ruthless sense of wonder, an insatiable curiosity to know why we are intrigued/captured by those moments. We must be determined to discover exactly what they contain. And I think part of the magic of Sharon Olds and other writers who do this well is how they focus with an unwavering devotion on “the thing itself” (remember our discussion of Marie Howe and attention and the thing itself several weeks ago?).
Another way to say this: these skillful writers focus on a single moment and exactly what happened in that moment with such a meticulous precision that we cannot help but feel deeply what the moment is really about. This distinction is a particular obsession of mine, to the point where I see a sort of sacred equation: A Clearly Defined Moment + Precise, Devoted Observation of What Happened in that Moment = Powerful Aboutness.
And not much has to happen in the moment, either. Olds herself has accomplished the task with life’s most common milestones: a sixth birthday party, a newborn bath, an anticipated thanksgiving visit from a college-aged daughter. But notice the clarity (and newness of expression) of the "what happened” in Olds’s work. We can talk about Olds’s work with ease because she writes it with crystalline detail and plain, accessible language studded with the occasional bright star of a word or image.
This week’s prompt will guide you through the process of similarly illuminating a single moment, with a bonus exercise for those who want to take this method to the next level.