Wants, Met and Unmet

A writing exercise built from big shapes and creative incongruities + the importance of anchoring scenes and stories + a strange and unending saga with Sun Country Airlines + why we must make messes

This week’s writing exercise stems from the unlikely and perhaps not particularly harmonious marriage between Sun Country Airlines and Grace Paley’s genius short story, “Wants,” and the resulting big shapes that make up our lives and the stories we tell.

Before I jump in, a quick reminder that I’m looking for your questions and comments for Lit Salon, a new feature where I write in response to your hopes and fears about writing, the writing life, and all things creative. The first post went out Monday and you can check it below, then leave a comment on this post or a future post, or email me if you prefer, and I’ll add yours to the queue for consideration. I was floored and deeply moved by your responses to Monday’s post, and I simply love interacting with you all in this way!

Now, back to big shapes. It starts Sun Country Airlines, and the flight I booked in November 2019, from Minneapolis to Ixtapa, Mexico, for three passengers. I was expecting to lead an oceanside writing retreat—my very first international retreat!—in Troncones, a remote village about an hour from Ixtapa. I was booking the travel for myself and two members of my Elephant Rock team—a yoga teacher and retreat coordinator. The actual flight was supposed to happen in late March 2020.

What happened instead? The COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result, I have been, for three and a half years, carrying forward the most maddeningly and impossibly restrictive credit with Sun Country Airlines. And for reasons too boring and complicated to explain, I have to, in order not to lose this credit, keep booking imaginary travel which I then change and re-book at least sixty days prior to departure. I did this just today, and will continue doing it until if and when I am able to make a trip work with Sun Country’s very limited destinations and flight schedules.

Notably, I was, toward the end of the first year of this stupid credit, able to swap out the travel companions from my retreat team to my two adult kids, Billie and Max, which at least eliminated the complication of having to somehow plan a retreat around this flight credit. Not only had Billie and Max both experienced difficult break-ups in 2021, but, also, the three of us had never, not even once, taken a trip together, just us. So, in late 2021, we hunkered down and settled on the idea of a week in Alaska in summer 2022 as the best option, and I booked it. Only afterward did we realize—as we tried to arrange lodging and activities—that we really could in no way truly afford to travel in Alaska, which, as it turns out, is staggeringly expensive. Also, people don’t seem to go there for just one week, because in-country travel is time consuming (and expensive) and it’s hard to see much there in such a short time. Turns out we were super naïve about Alaska.

So we decided to drive to Lake Michigan, a familiar and favorite family vacation spot from their childhood, for a week instead. And on the first day of that long-awaited trip, I got Covid, and on the second day, Max got Covid. Don’t worry, Billie didn’t get it, because they had already had it a couple of weeks before the trip. And although I know this sounds like a downer, the truth is the trip was actually, in spite of the Covid (and partly because of it, thanks to the tenderness), very special and monumental, because right in the middle of our vacation Billie got a call from Ramsey County and learned they would be welcoming an 20-month old foster child the day after our return to Minneapolis.

That little boy is still with our family and, as we learned just today, he is likely to remain with our family for the long haul. Obviously, that’s a whole other complicated and love-filled story that has simultaneously beaten and mashed our hearts into pulp while also stretching our capacity for joy beyond the territory of the known world. It’s an unfolding story you’ll surely hear more about, slowly, over time, as we keep learning how best to live it and do it justice.

Back to Sun Country. The other thing I did not know but soon found out while changing that Alaska trip was that somehow the factors I agreed to with that reservation rendered it impossible to ever again change the travel companions on the credit. So, even though single parenthood has made it far more complex for Billie to travel, as has Max’s increasingly busy schedule made it more difficult for him, thanks to the fact that he has, in addition to his work in architecture, begun teaching architecture at the U of M, we now have this absolutely iron-clad credit with Sun Country for me, Max, and Billie. Which, combined with Sun Country’s other maddening restrictions, is why I will be forced to book and re-book imaginary travel to preserve this credit (which is about two thousand dollars!) until the three of us are ever again able to travel together for a week to a place that Sun Country happens to be flying to (and that we actually want to visit).

In other words, the big shapes have to line up.

That’s the way I think about it: big shapes (destinations + schedules + desire).

That’s the way I think about most things, or try to, at least. What are the big shapes, and how do those shapes more or not? Align or not? And I guess I say this more than I knew, because the other day in the kitchen I was chatting with Max and Billie, working out the details of one thing or another, and I said, “Okay, but what are the big shapes?”

And Max said, “Square, triangle, rectangle.”

Then Max and Billie both burst out laughing because they had recently shared a joke about my tendency to search for shapes when parsing out life’s complications.

I have the same tendency with stories. Because big shapes give a way to focus on the most essential aspects of a situation. They give us an idea about the thing without pulling us into the weeds of the thing. Big shapes help us see things more clearly, both in life and in writing.

Grace Paley’s short story “Wants” is a masterclass in using big shapes to get to the heart of a feeling. In the story, a woman is returning some long-overdue library books when she runs into her ex-husband. The two have a brief exchange, during and after which the woman reflects not only on their marriage, but on her own life.

Here is an excerpt:

But I do want something. I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center. I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up. I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present one. Either has enough character for a whole life, which as it turns out is really not such a long time. You couldn’t exhaust either man’s qualities or get under the rock of his reasons in one short life. Just this morning I looked out the window to watch the street for a while and saw that the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple of years before the kids were born had come that day to the prime of their lives. Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I can take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.

I highly recommend you take a moment to read “Wants” in its entirety here. After you read and re-read the story, you can start looking for its big shapes. When we discussed this story in last week’s session of Writing in the Dark (the workshop), the big shapes we got were:

Unreturned library books

An ex-husband

Wants, met and unmet

Notice that of these three big shapes, the first two are concrete nouns, which means we can touch, see, hear, smell, taste them. The third is abstract, which means it is an idea, a concept, a thought. It is something that refers to something else (which could be concrete), but wants in and of themselves are abstract.

It is crucial to understand the distinction between concrete and abstract in order to dive into this week’s prompt. Here’s a short video to shine a bright light on this, which might be useful in helping you have more fun with this prompt! It’s only three minutes long, so probably a good idea to watch it! And if you are not an aural learner, here’s a short written description in words other than mine to help with this.

Why am I so obsessive about the distinction between concrete and abstract?

Because one of the biggest fundamentals in creative writing is the idea of concrete specific details. If you know me or read my craft writing, you have probably heard me espousing the power and importance of concrete specific details. I am convinced that our writing simply cannot come fully to life without an awareness of concrete specific details … and we cannot be fully aware of concrete specific details without a very clear understanding of the difference between concrete and abstract nouns.

If you feel confidently clear on concrete/abstract divide, you’re ready to jump into this week’s structured prompt, which is inspired by Paley’s incredible story. If you work the whole prompt, you’ll come away with the building blocks of a complete scene or story (CNF or fiction, it’s up to you). In addition to exploring how shapes work together to create an interesting story, we’ll talk about how to anchor your story in a specific time and place so that it doesn’t float aimlessly (a common problem).