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Stories at the Table, Beginnings and Endings, and a Prompt

I love how, in continued practice, techniques naturally unfold and lessons slide into place. 

Stories

Last Saturday at our monthly creative writing class, a few core writers and I sat around the table and read our stories based on the previous month’s prompt, After the storm. We followed along the lines of Barbara Hurd’s essay, “Wordwrack: Openings,” which begins with a beautiful first line:

A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped.

Like Hurd, we told our own stories of storms and the debris left behind, markers – some physical, some emotional –  that became signs of relief as much as evidence of our fears.

The amazing part in listening to these stories this month was witnessing how the writing in this group has morphed from a very natural, everyday style of storytelling to a strong use of technique. A few writers made the decision not to begin their stories in a traditional way, with a mini-prologue of sorts, but to open with the moment that carried the most heat, weaving in backstory when necessary. Their stories read like true flash nonfiction: “discrete, sharply focused…[revealing] the secrets of human nature contained therein” (as Dinty Moore says in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction).

And, the way these writer told their stories segued perfectly into this month’s topic: beginnings and endings. 

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.                                          ~ Graham Greene

Because the pieces we write in this group are so short and only a glimpse into our experiences, beginnings and endings are both critical in holding our readers attention or in conveying our message.

Beginnings

“[T]o begin is to commit, to stay, to hold.” ~Jenny Boully

Embryonic moments from an experience – like In the beginning or When I was born – don’t always mark the perfect opening for a story; a great beginning is when a certain energy strikes the page, when the reader tightens her grip on the book or the listener narrows his focus on what he is hearing. 

Endings

“An ending tumbles toward you over and over again; an ending will not stay flat, will not stay put; an ending troubles and taunts; an ending is sleep lost. . . . [An ending] is an emptiness that tugs you to read the ending once more, to read the beginning again.” ~ Jenny Boully

Likewise, endings do not always bring us to a nice, clean close. As in real life, endings can come without warning or they can leave us deep in thought for days, even months afterward. They might even push us to return to the beginning, to search for clues or to simply recover the emotion lost or gained in the experience. 

A wonderful example of all this is Vicky Mlyneic’s essay on BREVITY, “This I Am Allowed.” Read it, see where she begins; consider what she leaves out and where she stops. Then, turn to your own story. The place you begin and end can make all the difference. 

The Prompt

And then it happened.

* Photo credit: taliesin from morguefile.com

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The Importance of Details in Writing & Next Month’s Prompt

Last weekend, as I sat around the table and listened to stories written by my friends at the Retirement Center, we discussed the the power of details. Almost everyone wrote on last month’s prompt, “I look like _____,” and we marveled at how each person approached the exercise differently.

One person wrote about life with his identical twin. Another person told of his wife, how she often made him look good and never took the credit. One man wrote on himself, starting his essay with a punch, “I look like something the cat dragged in.” Then, he took the reader on an introspective journey from that image of what he sees on the outside to what he remembers on the inside: children and grandchildren, success and happiness and, despite one day’s sad musings, memories of a long life gone well.

Though all the essays differed, we witnessed one thing in common, how certain details in images can add texture and richness to a story.

Details reveal more than the setting.

Every month these folks bring tiny memoir pieces to the table, flash nonfiction, so this month I shared with them an essay by Brenda Miller in the ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION. In “Friendship, Intuition, and Trust: On the Importance of Detail,” Miller talks, about the importance of images and detail when crafting a story in such a short space on paper. She writes about her experience, of how one simple image—a piece of wood in the road—led to the unfolding of her own short memoir essay:

The essay came out of me in one piece, in about 30 minutes, one image leading to the next. The first words, I’m sorry…led me along, and become the mantra for the rest of the piece, I’m sorry, I said, and I said it again, and we continued on our way through the desert, in the dark of night…. Flash images arise…I let them come, I don’t censor them, because by now the essay has taken on a life of its own. And since I know this will be a very short piece, I won’t have to inhabit this space very long—in and out, touching the wounded spot and letting it go.

Later, she says of these kinds of pieces:

Because flash nonfiction is so short, I needed to take only a slice of that time, and from this one cross-section…I could unravel the rest. [Flash nonfiction] requires the same attention to language as one would give to a poem: each line needs to carry some weight, and to gradually evolve into more meaning as it goes along.

Then, I read a few paragraphs to those writers at the table from an essay by Barbara Hurd in her book, WALKING THE WRACK LINE: ON TIDAL SHIFTS AND WHAT REMAINS:

A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped. Hundreds of shells have settled sideways and tilted on the beach, half in, half out, sand-dribbled, seaweed-draped, partially rinsed. On the outside, they’re a riot of spires and pinpricks, ribbed turbans and knobby cones. Ivory, copper, pinkish, twisted, scalloped, hinged.

. . . .

When I open my eyes, the ocean seems to demand too much. At another time in my life, I might have responded — raised a sail, plied my oars, at least considered the lure of infinity. If the sea, after all, has any constant call that can also sound like taunting, it goes like this: come in, come in. But this is the cold North Atlantic and I’m older and I won’t and besides, if I did, I’d be out there immersed in the lives of these cracked-open things I’d rather look at underfoot. It’s not that I’m tired of desire; I just want to make sure it’s my own.

In Barbara Hurd’s essay, certain details are missing. We don’t know when the storm started, when it stopped, how long it lasted. But with the images Hurd leaves behind, and in each description, she reveals more into her own state of being. And, that’s what makes this piece so powerful.

As Lisa Cron says in her book on writing, “the story is in the specifics.”

This month’s prompt.

After the storm.

Read more from Brenda Miller in “Friendship, Intuition, and Trust: On the Importance of Detail,” in THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION and from Barbara Hurd in “Wordwrack: Openings,” in WALKING THE WRACK LINE: ON TIDAL SHIFTS AND WHAT REMAINS.

* Photo credits: kakisky and greenfinger on Morguefile.com

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Two Great Writing Books and a Prompt

Whatever kind of flash you write, fiction or non, the Rose Metal Press offers a book full of essays on craft and beautiful writing that will feed your creativity. I’ve mentioned the Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction before: each time I open it, I bookmark pages and highlight and say yes, yes, yes.

Last Saturday, I met with my senior citizen friends for our creative writing class, and I read from Barbara Hurd’s essay in the Fieldguide, “Pauses:”

In music, a rest note can, by its command, make me lift my fingers. ‘Shh-and-shh,’ my piano teacher says as she counts out quarter-note rests, those squiggles on the score that look like weak-willed iron gates rethinking their prohibition to proceed. My hands hover over the keys; I listen as sound recedes; I’m poised and waiting. Yes, wait, I tell myself, out of habit; for inside such possibilities might be the world in abeyance, the music both gone and still here. . . . Wait. Linger. No need to rush.

Then, I presented the group with a prompt from Midge Raymond’s Everyday Writing that, in a way, corresponds with the idea suggested in Hurd’s essay:

Write about a time when something small – a chocolate bar, a smile from the right person at the right time, a martini – made you happy.

In other words, I asked them to write about a moment that caused them to take pause, to take note.

Around the table, one person read about the moment his two brothers, discharged from the war, saw each other for the first time in three years. Another person described the thrill, as a ten year old boy, of watching a man cut blocks of ice from atop his wagon, knowing he’d toss frozen chips to him and his friends waiting in the heat of the sun. I wrote about my son, how his pause in one moment filled my heart and stayed with me:

The life of a fifth grade boy is busy. With a flip of the light switch in the morning, the wheels are slow to start. But, once they get moving there is breakfast and the comics and where is the sports page and check the weather and do you know how cold it is in Fairbanks, Alaska? Can I wait in the car, Mom? I’m ready to go, I don’t want to be late for school, I don’t want to walk in with the first graders, can we go already? Mom!

I don’t move fast enough for my son. To add to the tension, his sister puts on her coat with such precision that we are always two minutes behind. By the time we reach school, my son has one hand on his backpack and one on the seatbelt release, and he is out the door and on the curb with barely a moment for me to say goodbye.

So it is especially important to note the day he jumped out of his seat, waved to me over his shoulder, and started to close the car door when he stopped. He turned back, then, and looked me in the eye. For a full second.

“Have a good day, Mom.”

Just like that.

He could have tossed the words over his shoulder, could have mumbled them under his breath. But he turned and looked at me, as if to be sure I was paying attention. To be sure.

Have a good day.

A simple and common farewell took on much more meaning in that second. It was puzzling and endearing, and I thought about it all day long.

These pauses in his day are rare, I know. So, I hold memories of them close; I sneak in my own unprompted affection in subtle ways: a pat on his knee, a kiss on the top of his head when he is deep into his morning cereal. And, when I can get away with it, I hold his hand; in the car, as I ask him about his day at school; on the couch, when I sit next to him briefly to see what show he and his sister are watching.

This holding of hands, it is usually fleeting. But he allows me that small gift, and it carries me.

When was the last time you were caught poised and waiting, and remembering? And, what happened?

Next month’s prompt (via Lisa Romeo’s Winter Writing Prompts Project): You look just like __________.