Exquisite Corpse

Last May, I visited my father just as my spring teaching semester was ending. I’d had a quick meeting with the nice people of the Greenwich school system the night before my trip down; they wanted to know if I had any ideas for a second writing class for the fall of this year. I didn’t, at that moment, but I told them I’d think about it and let them know by week’s end.

The idea came for a class as I sweated in my dad’s back yard. Where now stand a lot of overgrown shrubberies used to stand an apple tree. It was a marvelous thing to have as a kid. We loved its sweet blossoms in the spring. We played in its sturdy branches during the summer. Come fall, when Golden Delicious fruits would hang heavy from the branches, we’d have all kinds of pies and cobblers and apple butters and applesauces. There was an awkward week or two when winter would melt into early spring, and we’d find our toes squishing in the rotted brown carcasses of fruit fallen to the ground months before, but the rest of the year, we loved that apple tree.

My sister and I especially enjoyed it when we were young because beneath its canopy was a sandbox, a leftover from the previous tenants. My parents would fill it with sand, come spring. We’d spend hours at a time in there making dunes, building castles, burying toys, and playing endless games of let’s-pretend. Both the tree and the box disappeared decades ago. It was while I was digging up things in its vicinity that I started thinking about this new class I was supposed to plan.

Several of my former students had told me they wished for some kind of class to attend that didn’t necessarily repeat the lectures and assignments of what they’d already taken, but allowed them to bring in their continuing work for critique. Something repeatable, for which they could sign up during the semesters they were actively working on longer projects. But I also seized on this idea of a sandbox for writers to play in, where they could work out their imaginations and try new in-class exercises.

I really wanted there to be a sense of play in this nascent class. So many writers treat their craft with deadly seriousness. They suck the fun right out of it. I’ve been in critique groups that were terrifying in their viciousness and sheer intensity. Now, there are absolutely times when a sober approach is necessary in writing.

But most writers initially found themselves attracted to storytelling not because of the hours of mental toil and the prospect of sitting in a chair staring at a laptop screen until their eyes cross. They write because it’s fun. They write because there was a moment in their lives when they started putting words together into sentences, and sentences into stories, and because they discovered a knack for making up things in their mind that inspired and delighted them. Sure, writing can be hard work. But we do it because we delight in it. We should, anyway.

Ultimately the sandbox idea became the class I started teaching last week called Creative Writing Calisthenics. We begin with some warm-up exercises—short, fun games and assignments that can be completed within five or ten minutes and shared with other class participants. As I envision them, the exercises will have some larger point, whether about creating character, or learning about storytelling, or paying attention to the ways in which small matters of word choice and emphasis can affect the tone and impact of the stories we tell. They’re modular, so one doesn’t depend on another. From semester to semester, I’ll change them—but I might repeat the more popular ones, if there’s a desire there.

Then the rest of the class, the bulk of the two hours, is a mentored critique group. Class participants will bring in whatever projects on which they’re working—whether it’s short fiction, chapters from a longer novel, memoirs or other creative non-fiction. It’s open to everyone.

In last week’s class we played the game known as Exquisite Corpse. Wikipedia ascribes the game to the Surrealists of the early twentieth century, which certainly gives an elegant spin to what is essentially a children’s party game. Exquisite Corpse is an exercise in group storytelling in which one person starts a story, then passes it to the person to his side. They take up the baton and keep the tale running until they pass it off to the next storyteller. In my version of the game, I had the students keep several plates spinning at once.

I created packets of note cards for them. The first card in the packet had a story premise. (I came up with all the premises, which I gave a loose unifying theme involving sharing or dividing things.) A mother and a daughter are alone in the kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner, dividing up the leftovers, when the daughter asks the mother the one question the mother hopes she'd never hear was one. On the day of an especially large Powerball jackpot, an office worker announces at the day's end that she's leaving early to get some lottery tickets on the way home. Her boss gives her a five-dollar bill to buy some tickets for him, as well. That night, she discovers among her tickets that she has a winning number was another. I slipped in numbered note cards, one for each member of the class, behind the premise. I let students draw packets randomly and open them up. Then the game began.

The students knew from the start that they’d have approximately eight cards on which to tell an entire story. They knew that because multiple stories were circulating at the same time, they’d be responsible for managing all the various parts of each story; one time they’d launch it, most of the time they’d have to keep the action moving forward, and once they’d have to tie all the strings together and bring a story to an end.

I was in suspense the entire time. The inaugural class for this experiment is diverse in age and background. There are students barely out of high school, and others who have matured well, shall we say. One woman has written her first novel and is contemplating moving on to a second, while an older woman has never written anything at all and wanted to see if she could try. While the students were letting their pens fly across the index cards, I kept thinking of all the ways in which these particular corpses could turn out to be, well, not so exquisite.

But you know what? The results delighted me. The story about the mother and daughter turned into a saga about parentage, in which the daughter doubted that her father had sired her and attempted to sneak a DNA sample from him to prove it. The Powerball jackpot saga became a devious Mamet-esque thriller of deception and double-crosses, as more and more people became involved in the woman’s scheme to keep any money from her boss. One of the premises had been about a professor debating whether or not to share credit on an important scientific discovery with the graduate student who’d done the bulk of the actual work. It jetted from the pristine laboratories of an academic setting to the muddy banks of the Amazon River, where the scientist and a journalist from Smithsonian Magazine engaged in life-or-death combat that emerged with only one bloody victor.

I mean, I would’ve paid to read that book.

One of the most effective stories was the simplest. The premise: Two adult brothers are doing their mother a favor by cleaning out her garage. In a neglected corner, they discover a box marked with the name of the father who abandoned their family twenty-five years before. On top is an envelope in their father's handwriting, addressed to their mother. The envelope is unopened. The writers in my little sandbox didn’t lob the story off into a violent path. They didn’t make the story a melodrama of revenge and recrimination. They kept it simple. The envelope contained a goodbye letter and a sum of money, which the brothers disagreed over. The note and the money unearthed some long-simmering resentments against their father and each other, over which they battled until the mother finds out about the discovery and steps in with a quiet resolution; she tells them to leave the past in the past, and to recognize that their father’s legacy wasn’t one of pain and heartbreak, but of two sons who’d managed to overcome abandonment to grow up into responsible adults.

By keeping it domestic, and by giving the brothers a graceful arc that included a sweet, but not overly sentimental ending, the class all crafted a story together that was surprisingly effective. It felt right. It felt whole. I was the one reading aloud that particular set of cards, and I was surprised how my throat started to choke up as I read the ending. In my head, I could just about see the movie version. (Meryl Streep starred. Bradley Cooper and Matthew McConaughey were the brothers.)

We weren’t finished, though, once the stories had been read. I was hoping I could prove a larger point. I started with the person to my right and asked, Did the story turn out how you thought it would? In some cases, yes, the scenario had developed along predictable lines. For others, the twists and turns were nothing like they’d originally envisioned. Which of the cards was most difficult for you to write? The easiest? I asked. Everyone agreed on the answer to this question: the very first card was the most difficult. Each one of the storylines had so many raw possibilities right at the start. Yet each additional written card whittled down the range of practical ways to continue the plot, so that two-thirds of the way through, what had to happen next seemed almost pre-ordained. The stories took on a life of their own. The concluding card came a close second in difficulty. Some of the scenarios had gotten so exciting that bringing them to an end was a challenge. But that first card. That nearly-blank canvas, that moment of nearly infinite possibility. That was the toughest.

Where did your story really change? I wanted to know. The students thought about it. Without fail, one by one, they pointed to the person opposite them. Where was the climax? Again, the students knew where that had fallen . . . either on the next-to-last or last card.

So this is what I learned from this exercise, I pointed out to them. Every single one of us in that classroom knew how to write stories—even the simplest ones, described in bare outline on notecards. We knew instinctively, without being told, that a story needs a premise. It needs characters in conflict. They need some development. Then there’s a twist, something that takes the story in a completely different direction. Complications heap upon complications until there’s a climax near or at the end. Then there’s resolution—of some sort, at least.

You know how to tell a story, I pointed out to them. Every single one of you rose to a pretty formidable challenge. These characters weren’t yours. You didn’t think up the original ideas—those were something I’d dreamed up at three-thirty in the morning, one night. But each and every one of them knew the raw elements of storytelling, from the woman who’d struggled through her first novel to the high school graduate who hadn’t written much on her own to the curious writer who mostly had written in journals. That older woman who had never written before and just wanted to try? She turned out to write some wicked cliffhangers on her cards, and she supplied the ending to the story of the brothers—the ending that made me tear up as I read it aloud in front of a roomful of near-strangers. She knew storytelling. She knew how to control it.

You know how to do this, I told them. You just showed me. Think of how amazing it’s going to get when you’re writing stories of your own.

Of course, that’s where the work of writing comes in.

But don’t tell them that. Not yet.