This Writer Used WITD's Workshop Method To Get Into HuffPost Personal. You Can, Too.
From the Archive | We might say we don't write straight from A to B because we don't want to. But, maybe we don't know how? Here's how and why to be clearer.
Orig published June, 2024
Good morning, WITDers ❤️
Recently, I shared a gift link to a New York Times essay by Amy Stonestrom, who said she used “Jeannine Ouellette’s workshopping method” to help make it happen!
Here is exactly what Amy said:
Several [of my writing groups] started to use Jeannine Ouellette’s workshopping method which I highly recommend. It's a terrific way to get out of your head and see if things are resonating or making sense. It’s been a total game changer.
And now I’m delighted and moved to share with you an essay by
, just out in Huffington Post: “I Didn’t Know If I Was Ready for Kids. Then I Became A Single Foster Dad at 27.” (For those who don’t know, I’m Billie’s mom).Billie’s essay offers an intimate account of Z’s adoption as it unfolded over the past two years. It is tribute, prayer, and lullaby (as is their Trust Fall post today about being “aggressively not afraid”).
And here Billie and I share the process that helped them write their Huffington Post essay in a way I call “against the grain”—which means, against their own set style, and if you look at their Trust Fall post linked above, you’ll see the clear distinction between the two styles.
If you have ever studied with me, you know I encourage all writers to write against their own grain for a whole variety of reasons, including how it helps us grow as artists.
In Billie’s case—being an artsy Waldorf kid with a mom who teaches that “weird is good” and wrote a fragmented lyric hybrid memoir and teaches that some of the most essential aspects of writing are “defamiliarization” and the willingness to take risks and wake language up, the clarity of writing from point A to point B came as a struggle.
For a long time, Billie insisted that clear writing simply “wasn’t their style,” that fragments and nonlinearity were always better. And again, to be fair, this a subjective matter. I do love fragmented work dearly!
But also fair to say is that Billie favored fragmentation in part due to not knowing how to move a reader through time in a fluid and efficient and potent way, which is itself the kind of fuel that can take our writing—no matter how hybrid or weird—to the next level. To crack Huffington Post—where linearity rules—Billie had to also crack clarity. Today’s Lit Salon convo between Billie and me focuses on how they used Step 3 of the WITD workshopping method to make that happen.
The WITD workshopping method is something I’ve developed iteratively during my years of teaching Writing in the Dark synchronous workshops on Zoom and in person (through which countless pieces have been gone on to be published in esteemed journals, many also winning nominations and awards).
You can use this method as a pathway to attention and discovery, not recitation. If you want to write to unearth what you don’t know instead of telling us what already think you know. This method is deeply real, deeply embodied, deeply attentive, and profoundly respectful.
Ultimately, this method is how we write in the dark.
When you read the steps of the WITD workshop method, it’s important to know the spirit behind it. Because writing in the dark is more than writing—it’s writing as a way of living in the world and making our lives “particular and real,” a way of paying attention to cross through portals into new dimensions where the world really does “offer itself to our imaginations” and open itself into metaphor and meaning.1
To write in the dark is to let language become unfamiliar and even strange again, as it was when we were children, so that we can see the world and ourselves anew.
To “write in the dark”2 means seeing playfulness as a “portal to the profound,”3 and adopting John Keats’s invitation into Negative Capability—or becoming more “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
To write in the dark together is to collectively strive to get as close up to the words—and to the world—as we can, so we can get closer up to ourselves and each other.
With that in mind, here is my conversation with
about the tackling the challenge of writing clearly enough for Huffington Post, and the full-text of the detailed, 5-step Writing in the Dark workshopping method you can use on your own or with a group to make your writing more alive, more true, more effective, more affecting, and, if you aspire to publish, more publishable.In the rest of this post you’ll find:
My in-depth conversation with Billie Oh on how they used the WITD method, especially step 3, to write clearly enough for Huffington Post
The original craft essay detailing the full WITD method and a thorough explanation of how to use (or adapt) it for yourself
My Q & A With Billie Oh: How to Say “The Thing Itself’” Clearly Enough for HuffPost
Jeannine: Let’s start with a little backstory. Do you think clarity has been a particular challenge for you, and, if so, why?
Billie: Since you’ve read everything I’ve ever written, Mom, what would you say, haha? But also, in all seriousness, in the way your method distinguishes between clarity and aboutness, I think I had issues with both clarity and aboutness, and a lot of my challenges with clarity were actually rooted in my challenges with aboutness.
Jeannine: Can you say more about that? I agree with you, but I would love to hear your take before I say anything more.
Billie: I’ve always been able to write pretty sentences, and for a long time I let