Pulling Threads, Making Clay

Essay in 12 Steps | FIVE | The job of the ... writer is to say, Here I am world, and here is the world, and out of this oxymoronic writing, we are here to make each other. ~Nicole Walker

I really appreciate the nuances around fear and how it can actually be helpful. I wasn't sure why I decided to do the Essay Challenge. It was a whim, when the first post came out, and I had no topic in mind at all. Now I realize it's giving me an on ramp back to writing after a long fallow period. Just enough structure to provide stability. A very different approach than I've done before.

~ Peg Conway, writer

This comment from Peg during the first Essay in Twelve Steps intensive made my day and exemplifies the grand and glorious challenge we are tackling together now. Those of you engaging are brave, devoted, curious, and honest. You are attentive, clear, and willing. You are writers.

This week’s structured prompt will lead you across a major milestone with your essay, a milestone that takes you from prewriting to essay writing (even while still acknowledging that you will inevitably continue writing words, sentences, paragraphs, and scenes that do not make the final cut into your essay—writing is inefficient and unruly, and most working writers acknowledge that they usually write at least two to three times as many words as end up in a final draft. First we make the granite, then we carve it!).

Before we jump in with Step Five (we’re almost halfway through the intensive!), I want to let you know a couple of things:

1. First, Writing in the Dark (Live Workshop)!

   On Monday, February 24 we’ll open registration for the next live, synchronous (virtual on Zoom) session of Writing in the Dark: The WORKSHOP themed: “The Art of Subtext,” and in it we’ll explore a range of craft elements we can use to deepen (and heighten!) our writing, regardless of genre or length, such as writing around the thing, objects as emotional proxies, gesture, habit, and avoidance, interior subtext without interior monologue, silence, white space, and implication, and revision to heighten what isn’t said.

   If you haven’t joined the waitlist for Writing in the Dark | The WORKSHOP yet, you still can do so here (joining the waitlist does not guarantee a spot in the workshop, but it does ensure you will get a direct email a few days before general registration opens; this workshop is capped at 20 and always sells out).

2. Second, my Paris Writers memoir masterclass is filling quickly—I received an email this morning that it has already passed viability, meaning no chance of cancellation! There are a few spots left, so, if you are considering signing up, here is the link. Again, despite the masterclass designation, my workshop is for all levels, whether you are published or just beginning. I engage with craft in a way that rigorously challenges more experienced writers while still being accessible and supportive for beginners. I promise. If you have any questions, please ask! I am happy to help you decide if this one is right for you! Early bird pricing goes through March 2.

3. Third, the comments section on these Essay in Twelve Step posts is on fire! So let’s talk for a minute about the comments.

Friends, I’m in awe of the comment sections on these posts. The comments offer a masters-level class on literary writing, including your and my responses to questions, challenges, frustrations, and breakthroughs in the writing. I highly encourage you to take a look, even if you are not working the essay prompts in real time. Which, by the way, is fine—you are never late and always enough at Writing in the Dark, and it is always fine to work at your own pace.

Meanwhile, the conversation taking place in the comments is more than just inspiring. It’s real. In fact I’m most grateful to those who’ve been willing to take a risk and say “this is confusing” or “I don’t know what I’m doing” or “can you talk through this sticking point” or even “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this,” or even “I’m feeling totally lost.” Each honest, revelatory question provides an opportunity for richer, more complex discussion of this thing we love—this intersection of words, truth, meaning, and beauty that is the essay. What a tender honor to have these conversations out loud, together, among other people who, as Toni Morrison says, “do language” and want, as Wendell Berry says, to make “language capable of telling the truth again.”

And here’s the thing about jumping into these conversations: it accelerates our development as writers exponentially. This is not just an opinion of mine. It is research-based fact: when we express ourselves “out loud,” we learn and grow more than when we think silently. There are a number of brain-science reasons for this, which I won’t go into today, but suffice it to say cognitive researchers have demonstrated this principle again and again. The old saying, two minds are better than one? Turns out, it’s true.

That doesn’t mean you can’t work through this, or any other challenge, entirely on your own. You can—and I know it can be intimidating to jump into the fray. But if and when you can take a chance and do so, the payoff can be wonderful.

The truth is, writing—or any creative endeavor, but perhaps especially writing—can be intensely lonely. Indeed, I wonder if the deep loneliness if writing is in part why we tend to, in first drafts, at least, fill pages with words that are too interior, too stifled, too claustrophobic to have the effects we would wish, the effects that allow someone else to feel something, to experience something, to enter into a universe of our making as if it were real and alive, because it is real and alive.

What we want, I believe, is to write in a way that brings us closer to discovering who we are meant to become is an act of courage and vulnerability, regardless of our genre, or even our medium. This is the way of art, as eloquently expressed by Anne Truit in Turn: The Journal of an Artist:

I am always, and will always be, vulnerable to my own work, because by making visible what is most intimate to me I endow it with the objectivity that forces me to see it with utter, distinct clarity. A strange fate. I make a home for myself in my work, yet when I enter that home I know how flimsy a shelter I have wrought for my spirit. My vulnerability to my own life is irrefutable. Nor do I wish it to be otherwise, as vulnerability is a guardian of integrity.

And yes, we have writing strategies, devices, and approaches that can help us to create work that invites, startles, embraces, warms. We call this craft, and craft is powerful.

But we also have at least two other concrete and well-proven tools for overcoming the smallness of the writing life and the way that smallness can leak quietly onto the page:

First, we can go out into the world and look closely at it (yes, that’s a craft tool, and also a crucial life tool).

Second, we can seek, build, and participate in a writing community. Becoming actively involved in an artistic, creative writing community can help us to not only write more and write better, but also grow as artists and humans. What a thing, that we can do this virtually, learn one another and each other’s work in a true enough way to see our writing from new angles and in different lights. To see ourselves from new angles and in different lights.

Watching this community continually deepen brings me joy—and it is wholly due to the courage and generosity of those of you who have been willing to share snippets of your work, yes, and also to ask questions, including and especially those hard questions, questions that reveal the vulnerability of the artistic process and the deep discomfort of “dwelling in uncertainty” as I have been encouraging us all to do.

I bow to you all.

As for dwelling in uncertainty, the steps in this intensive are more literary and thoughtful than many ordinary writing “prompts.” They require you to engage with language on a less stable, more dynamic level than, say, prompts that ask you to “think about a time when,” or similar. The steps/exercises we work on here are constrained, complex, and challenging (while also being alive, fun, exhilarating, and, for some writers, life-changing).

For those of you who feel unsure as you work these steps, good job! That’s the whole point. It’s supposed to feel new, strange, and uncharted. We’re not supposed to know if we are “doing it right” because there is no “right.” Yes, there is something specific I’m asking you to do (it’s not a free write, because you could just do that on your own). As you ask clarifying questions, I am of course grateful to answer them as best I can toward the direction in which I am pointing you. I also know you might find a different route, because there is no wrong way to do this other than to be rigid and uncurious. As long as we are open, curious, and willing to explore, we are doing it “right.” For our purposes, the notion of “right” is malleable and expansive enough to accommodate tweaks and left turns. Anything more directive and formulaic would be like a “paint-by-number” essay, which is decidedly not what we have set out to do.

What we have set out to do is immerse ourselves in words, play with them, turn them in our hands like stones—some sun-warmed, some jagged, some moss covered, some muddy, some too heavy to hold—and make something new from them. As part of that, we’ve committed to immersing ourselves in the words of others, too—others who’ve written lyric essays that are powerful, strange, beautiful, wild. Getting under the skin of those essays until we find ourselves all the way inside them.

As we start building out the real essay this week, I encourage you to take a look at four exemplary lyric essays—two that most closely resemble a braid, by Lidia Yuknavitch (Woven) and Eula Biss (Time and Distance Overcome, a heartbreaking and intense essay that addresses the history of lynching), and two that most closely resemble collage-style work, by Sejal Shah (Curriculum) and Emilia Phillips (Lodge: A Lyric Essay)—that each, in their own way, offer us a path forward, while also, when taken together as a collective, showing us the unequivocal truth of multiplicity: we have many paths forward. Next week, we’ll look at even more options.

But for now, specifically, you’ll see that Biss’s braided essay uses two objective strands with only a very brief, breathtaking, devastating, sublime subjective flash at the end, while Yuknavitch’s braid uses two subjective strands, one of which is in the distant past (and does weave in objective/researched material), and one that is closer to the present.

A note on objective and subjective threads in braiding: the way I am using these terms is specific and, based on some of the comments and snippets I am seeing, I want to define these terms once again:

Objective: This thread deals with anything that is wholly outside the self—it could be the history of tea, or the art of furniture restoration, or the ins and outs of dog training, or the process of dying silk. Anything that describes and/or delineates something factual and entirely outside of the self. This thread generally does not include the narrator. It is removed from the “I,” and more journalistic in nature.

Subjective: This thread is a personal story, something that includes the narrator, that is told from the perspective of the “I.” This thread generally focuses on an important personal experience, like an important situation within an important relationship, e.g. a divorce or a health episode or a loss or milestone of some kind. Or it could be an important personal milestone, such as climbing Mount Everest or releasing a personal grief or building a house or tearing apart a piano that belonged to your father (a writer I once coached wrote a gorgeous braided essay in which that last example, the piano, was the subjective thread!).

Back to our example essays, the two collage-style essays I mentioned also demonstrate multiplicity, with Shah’s being clearly segmented and organized under an almost hermit-crab-like title and subheadings, and Phillips’s showing definite experimentation with formatting and visual effects (among other elements).

The point is, above all else, to give you permission. Permission to love words and revere their power in general, first and foremost. But also, specifically, to be elastic and playful with your words. To be free and experimental and unattached, meaning you are willing to make little mountains of words that you might not use, and you can celebrate the mountain-building for its own sake, before the eventual shaping and carving begins, as it always must.

And yes, I know we’re mixing up weaving and sculpting language here. As we do when we are feeling our way in the dark.

With that, let’s make an essay!!

Note: the steps this week are quite intricate, so I recommend reading through the entire process a couple of times before getting started. It will make the whole process easier and more fun.

Essay in 12 Steps | Week Five

This week’s step work is about kneading and pulling, molding, stretching. I want you to envision the piles of words you written so far, your notecards &scraps, shimmers and shards, as a few different things. Think of them first as