Of Heat & Need & What It Takes
A fiery step-by-step process for turning the heat of desire into concrete imagery leading to a piece of flash or scene for a work-in-progress or new work or new angle on an existing work
📝 Writing in the Dark: THE SCHOOL is registering now. SCHOOL is our new 9-month slow-writing program for people serious about advancing their craft and joyful about "doing language better.” Starts September 19. ALL LEVELS, no application. Sign-up here.
📝 Wednesday, August 7 begins Strange Containers: Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities, a fun, four-week immersion in short, weird work to break you into some exciting new material before summer ends. Write with us!!
Today’s essay + writing exercise (Of Heat & Need & What It Takes) is an archival post from November of 2023—an elastic, alive, desire-mining exercise you can use again and again and again (infinitely) to find the pulse of your writing, and of your life. I figured today was a good time to resurface this exercise, because we’ve been speaking of desire again this week.
I hope we never stop speaking of desire, either.
It’s the engine of our art and of our lives.
But, before I segue into the archival post, I want to share a link to an extraordinary and breathtaking essay I just read in The Sun. This gorgeous piece of writing by Erin Wood feels like a story whose shape I know by heart, except with different colors and textures, different timelines and characters, different little shapes inside the big shapes. It’s so powerful.
Erin’s essay illuminates how the stories we tell ourselves shape us, and how the stories we revise can free us. Also, how much time it can take to unearth our truths, the blocks we face in ourselves (often put there by society and others) on the way, and the profound healing we can sometimes find in writing.
Read “Athens, Revised_ by Erin Wood in The Sun.
And, now, here’s the archival post. I hope you try the exercise. It’s a doozie and I’d love to talk about it with all of you.
I used to be afraid of want. Resistant to feeling it, naming it, acting on it. Shy of letting myself want anything openly. Don’t get your hopes up was a frequent refrain in my childhood—and for a long time I took that to heart. But these days, I’m a student of want. A champion of desire. I write about the power of wanting often, and in fact touched on it as the end of November in my post that I recently updated: What Do You Actually Want and How Bad Do You Want It?
As I wrote then—so please bear with a couple of paragraphs of summary if you already read those posts—I’m fascinated by desire not just for its electricity on the page, but for its force in our lives. I’m not speaking of cheap wants here—though those can be plenty of fun. What I’m speaking of now is the kind of desire that shapes the person I will become.
On this topic, Octavia Butler wrote some of the most prescient, potent words I’ve ever read:
All prayers are to Self
And, in one way or another,
All prayers are answered.
Pray,
But beware.
Your desires,
Whether or not you achieve them
Will determine who you become.
I was introduced to Butler’s writings on desire by Maria Papova in her brilliant newsletter The Marginalian. Papova writes: “Butler’s sentiment is only magnified by knowing that the word desire derives from the Latin for ‘without a star,’ radiating a longing for direction. It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming.”
This explains a lot about how desire can work in literature (all genres): when someone wants something, we as readers might feel that want for ourselves, might feel the heat of the flame of that want. Consider Jane Hirshfield’s incredible poem “Heat,” which we close read during The Visceral Self, and which I’ve also parsed out for a few other exercises (including this one, “Desire: A Detailed Three-Part Exercise With Delicious Little Subparts”).
In “Heat,” the speaker says of her mare:
I’d envy her then,
to be so restlessly sure
of heat, and need, and what it takes
to feed the wanting that we are—
But in many manuscripts I review, it’s unclear what the protagonist (or speaker of the narrative poem) wants, if anything. That fuzziness can block the pulse of the writing. As Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “Make your characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water.”
When that want is palpable, it excites. And of all the opening paragraphs I’ve read, perhaps the ones that stand out most in my memory for establishing the protagonist’s driving desire come from the autobiographical novel We The Animals by Justin Torres. Here’s how that book opens:
We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.
When it was cold, we fought over blankets until the cloth tore down the middle. When it was really cold, when our breath came out in frosty clouds, Manny crawled into bed with Joel and me.
“Body heat,” he said.
“Body heat,” we agreed.
We wanted more flesh, more blood, more warmth.
When we fought, we fought with boots and garage tools, snapping pliers—we grabbed at whatever was nearest and we hurled it through the air; we wanted more broken dishes, more shattered glass. We wanted more crashes.
And when our Paps came home, we got spankings. Our little round butt cheeks were tore up: red, raw, leather-whipped. We knew there was something on the other side of pain, on the other side of the sting. Prickly heat radiated upward from our thighs and backsides, fire consumed our brains, but we knew that there was something more, someplace our Paps was taking us with all this. We knew, because he was meticulous, because he was precise, because he took his time. He was awakening us; he was leading us somewhere beyond burning and ripping, and you couldn’t get there in a hurry.
You can read the rest of the excerpt here in the journal Blackbird, and you can order Torres’s stunner of a book here. I highly recommend We The Animals to anyone interested in a luminous, heartbreaking story, but also for the opportunity to learn from Torres’s breathtaking work with concrete exterior details to shape meaning. You’ll notice in the excerpt I’ve shared how specific, concrete, and real the objects of Torres’s desire are—sure, he starts with “more,” which one could argue is abstract, but he swiftly quantifies that “more” in strikingly specific ways (more muscles on our skinny arms, more shattered glass, more crashes, etc.)
Other elements of craft that make the excerpt so propulsive include sentence structure (lots of long, clause-heavy sentences that roll and move and contain within them lists of images), overall structure (the movement from "we wanted more" to "we wanted less" to "we wanted just this"), dynamics (the movement/musicality within the sentences), and restraint (Torres's ability to communicate harsh things without crossing the line toward gratuitous violence or "shock value").
In these paragraphs Torres skillfully applies the principle that "desire drives plot" to craft a first chapter that not only establishes this family and its culture, but also solidifies the stakes of the whole book in just a few paragraphs: this narrator wants more. And the full novel does in fact deliver on the questions raised by the particular "what's at stake" premise of the opening. Ultimately, Torres’s unabashed expressions of desire not only drive the narrative forward, but deepen and complicate his protagonist’s character and context.
This week’s writing prompt offers a chance to try this and see how it brings your work to life and/or opens up new portals to insight. It’s almost guaranteed you’ll discover something, because desire is just that powerful. As Butler said:
“If you want a thing—truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.”
So, the writing exercise will guide you through a clear, craft-explicit step-by-step process to explore desire, and by the time you’re finished, you’ll have either: a piece of flash to work on and revise into something wholly your own; a scene to revise for a work in progress; an opening of a new work; or some fertile soil to till for future ideas.
Here’s the writing prompt—let’s harness the power of desire.