Want to Write Better? Get Uncomfortable.

Lit Salon on the urgent necessity of pushing out of your comfort zone in order to write what really matters, make more meaningful art & find truer truths beyond your self-perceived "limits"

Recent & Upcoming at WITD

🎆 FLASH SALE! Grab a 15% back-to-school discount on annual subscriptions just in time for our fall seasonal intensive: The Letter Re-Imagined.

📝 Writing in the Dark: THE SCHOOL closes registration soon. 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.

🗓️ End-of-Summer Write-In for paid members and a celebratory WITD Salon with flash readings coming soon—watch this space for dates!

This is our last week of our Strange Containers mini intensive for flash, hermits & other oddities! If you haven’t joined us, it’s not too late. And besides, we’re having a 15% off back-to-school flash sale for new members, so maybe now’s your moment?

As soon as you join, all Strange Containers posts are active and will remain indefinitely available to paid members.

The work in this intensive has been incredible, and the discussions in the comments even more so (today’s Lit Salon post is pulled from the comments, so you’ll see soon). It’s been good, challenging, and transformative. You’ve said you’re writing in ways you never foresaw, learning more than you expected, surprising yourself on the page, and loving a lot of what you’re making, even the weird bits and pieces you aren’t sure what to do with yet. That’s my own summary, of course, but if you’ve been following along, you know it’s a pretty accurate distillation of what’s been said over the past few weeks.

But none of that is exactly what I want to talk about today. Instead, I’d like to face head on the messier, less comfortable, and at times un-fun parts of this work we do. The un-fun and even painful parts where we allow ourselves to take the risk of making some “absolute rubbish,” as my mentor Paul Matthews insists we must, in order to open ourselves to the real unknown, where truth lives, in that Wild West of discovery that lies beyond the comfortable “sentence-making” we’re so used to, and catapults us into the zone of:

• “what the heck is this” and

• “what is even happening here” and

• “why can’t I make this stupid thing do what I want it to do” and

• “maybe I’m just not cut out for this after all” and

• “what the heck, you said this would be FUN!”

All of those feelings come up when we throw ourselves toward the place where we downgrade our familiar and comfortable definition of “good enough” in order to bet on the wildly better but far less predictable possibility of making something new, interesting, arresting, and feral.

And yes, this holds true even if you are writing about your own life. Pam Houston addressed this concept eloquently on Facebook over the weekend, saying:

Someone asked how you surrender yourself to the mystery of a book you are writing … if it is a memoir and you already know everything that happens. I said that hopefully you do not yet know everything that happens and that no one really wants to read the book you think you are writing, they want to read the book you don’t know you are writing yet. … I said, in fact, you don’t even want to be writing the book you think you are writing, even though you think you do.

You are really here, we are all here together, because you want to be writing the book underneath the book you currently think you are writing. All the shit you actually know, but don’t know you know yet, and are about to discover.

To write as Pam describes, and as I teach, requires us to endure some uncomfortable moments in the art-making. There is no other way.

We also have to accept some less than thrilling results. Like this WITD writer who said last week, before posting her snippet:

I now have a disjointed piece in a journal. I like some of the bits.

When I read that, I was like, yessssss!!! That’s what we’re here to do!

Because this—this willingness to let go and try some shit and trust we’ll survive if it’s not great right out of the gate—is what it takes to start making truly new and better work, work that challenges and eventually stretches our current abilities and opens us up to uncharted terrain in regard to how we “do language” and what we even think language is capable of doing.

Friends, that’s the “creative” in creative writing, right there. That’s the “dark” in Writing in the Dark.

As a writer put it last week (emphasis mine):

After reading the instructions for the FLASH exercise and all the flash pieces—which I found each so, so good—I admit that I felt overwhelmed and intimidated to try writing anything. I had to forget about everything in order to write.

This is what came out, to my surprise.

And what came out, the snippet this writer shared, was extraordinary, so alive it was wriggling. It felt wholly original—it was clear it had surprised the writer because it was so unusual and immersive and untamed it would have had to. It was leaping off the page. Most of all, I could not predict its next turn—this is a tell-tale sign for me of alive writing, writing for which the writer loosened the reins and went along for the ride! When it ended, it left me wanting more, more, more.

Ultimately, most of us know how to consistently produce pleasant, effectively organized sentences that neatly communicate our ideas to the world at large.

But creative writing is something else altogether.

Creative writing is the dark forest in which we meet our emerging, un-discovered selves and face down everything we’re capable of becoming if ever we step into the next clearing—which, by the way, we can’t find easily, because we don’t know where it is.

No one does.

So with that preamble, what follows here is a conversation with one of our Strange Containers WITDers, Lisa, who “hit a wall” with her flash piece, but finished the exercise anyway, and posted what she got from it, even though she felt certain it didn’t quite nail the hardest part of the exercise, which is the “turn.” By many definitions, the turn is what makes scene-based flash flash, rather than a vignette or slice of life. The turn is what blooms the scene open toward movement and meaning, what makes it matter. It is what gives flash it’s urgency.

As Nancy Stolhman puts it:

… one of the biggest questions many writers have when crossing over from other genres—how is flash fiction different than a vignette?

The answer is quite simple: Urgency.

While Lisa did not say so, I think urgency is what she intuited her piece needed more of, and what caused her to feel frustrated, which she described to us in her comment.

Lisa bravely wrote:

This was my first exposure with how to write flash. After reading Jeannine's clear and instructive essay, I wrote out the two lists of ingredients needed for flash in my notebook for reference. 1. Quick entry, no redundancy, compression, voice, short swath of time, no space for anything else. 2. Image, Moment, Action, Turn, Image.

I read the examples provided and felt I was ready! I wrote down 5 images, conjured their moments, bullet pointed the action and then froze on the turn. (Later, I realized my thoughtful structure was actually a barrier to my creativity!)

I put the exercise down for the rest of the day and came back to it after dinner and after I read the beautiful and brilliant examples and comments from WITD community. I looked for how to create the turn without losing the concreteness of the image and action.

I toiled and grew frustrated, my imposter syndrome reared. Defeated, I screamed, ‘This is supposed to be fun!’ I slammed my laptop closed and climbed into bed where sleep would not come.

My bleary eyes came to the page this morning with compassion to finish and recognition that I need to start somewhere, even if somewhere is a pile of poo. So, I am posting what I came up with below in a show of solidarity to all the still-learning-how-to write writers and other flash newbies.

Lisa’s snippet, which she titled, “Sunrise Sunset,” was 384 words long and chronicled a playful morning with her two West Highland terriers, Noel and Jingle, their feeding routine, and the way they comically interrupted her morning yoga routine. She makes clear-eyed and poignant observation of her aging hands, her untoned arms—human frailty, the fleeting nature of life. The piece was very well written and ended with a small epiphany, where the narrator realizes that the dogs’ presence on her yoga mat, while once a source of annoyance, is all too temporary. She says, “One day, they and the games they play will be gone, just like me.”

It was a truly lovely vignette, especially for this yogi and dog lover. However, it probably wasn’t quite flash in the true sense of the word, just as Lisa had rightfully suspected—and this was due, as she also intuited, to the lack of a fully articulated turn, which ultimately diminished its urgency.

One thing about me is that I am honest (a thing I’ve mentioned before). I am positive, supportive, encouraging, and helpful, yet, I do not lie to writers about their work. I point out what I love and what is going well, because that’s the fastest path to learning. But if asked directly (I felt Lisa’s brave expression of frustration and doubt was essentially a direct question), I will answer truthfully, as best I am able.

Since Lisa was brave enough to share her process and her doubts, I felt I needed to be brave enough to answer her questions as best I could.

Here is what I said to Lisa:

Lisa, I love love love your process comment. Flash is HARD. I did give the warning/disclaimer in this week’s post, that this exercise was going to feel hard. Flash is hard for everyone, even very experienced writers. How can we do all of those things that Dinty Moore and Jennifer Sinor ask of us, in so few words?

What do they think we are, magicians?!

Haha. It's very very hard.

What we did with braiding and hermits was also technically flash—flash is really anything that's very short, right? But those forms are so unique, so highly constrained, they are not pretending to be "traditional prose"—they are not passing themselves off as mini-essays or tiny stories. They are those things, in a sense, but they feel like something else altogether because of their highly specific and constrained shapes and their inventive, experimental approaches.

With scene-based flash, it's different, though.

Scene-based flash seems like it should work like more traditional short form writing, like essays and short stories. But it doesn't. It has a hidden shape of its own.

This hidden shape is incredibly valuable for all prose writers, including long-form prose writers and book writers trying to understand the power of scenes, because scene-based flash represents super vigorous scene work. And with scene-based flash, that hidden shape, and its effectiveness or lack thereof, is almost always dependent on our ability to find and execute a successful