The memoir-writing class I teach has a syllabus that’s changed remarkably little over the years. It’s evolved, certainly, as I’ve honed the exercises and assignments to be both fun and provide an obvious path to skill mastery. Overall, though, the grand design of the class has remained the same: as I urge students to start writing about their experiences, I have them start making timelines of their life, then identifying the areas of most interest for a potential book-length memoir, and finally thinking of the stories of their lives as a focused literary form—all while trying to provide them the basics of good storytelling.
On the other hand, I originally designed my Creative Writing Calisthenics class to be totally modular. I planned a handful of in-class exercises to have ready, at a moment’s notice. My thought, though, was that from week to week I’d assess the types of projects the students were bringing for critique, and from there I’d decide what they needed to explore. My students, this semester, have really been on point; I was so blown away by their short stories last week that the seminar ran nearly an hour late because everyone was so excited to be there. (How often does that happen?)
During the critique session last week, though, I noticed that a couple of the students were avoiding the use of dialogue in their stories. They’d write paragraph after paragraph of luscious description that dripped with sensory detail, but have their characters interact only in non-spoken ways. They’d tell us the characters chatted; they didn’t show us about what. You’ve got opportunities here, here, and here for dialogue, I’d tell them. Don’t let them go to waste!
For this week’s class, I thought I’d make up an opening calisthenic that would stretch their dialogue muscles. Not only dialogue, but subtext. Every good actor knows about subtext. Subtext is the motivation underlying each line an individual character utters in a script—the unspoken emotions, the murky meanings that the person talking may feel quite deeply, but doesn’t, can’t, or won’t put into speech.
A good writer keeps track of his characters’ subtexts. In a stage play, a sycophant might harbor deep feelings of hostility toward his supervisor, but he’ll say the sweetest yeses and verbally brown his nose. However, his physical reactions, stance, eye contact, expression, might possibly betray many of the true emotions roiling underneath. Written stories handle subtext slightly differently; the nonverbal communications of body language must be described, the state of mind hinted at, though perhaps not explicitly detailed.
It’s important for all writers to remember that every character, no matter how minor, speaks with his or her own subtexts. Knowing why a character says something is as important as—and quite often is the determination of—the actual words that come out of her mouth.
One of the most helpful classes I enjoyed in college happened in my Beginning Acting course, my freshman year at William & Mary. Professor Richard Palmer handed those of us in the seminar a list of lines to learn on the spot for a two-person skit. We all memorized the same ten or so lines. They were so mundane in nature that the very blandness of them made them easy to regurgitate. If I recall correctly, they started something like this:
PERSON 1: Hello
PERSON 2: Hi.
PERSON 1: How are you?
PERSON 2: Pretty well, I guess.
I mean, I think I’ve conveyed the white-hot excitement of the written words, there. What mattered wasn’t the exchange of niceties, however. Mr. Palmer would take each pair of actors aside, immediately before they got up in front of the class, and whisper to us our secret motivations. “You,” he’d say to my partner, “are a prison warden delivering a prisoner his last meal. And you,” he’d tell me, “are a death row prisoner scheduled to go to the electric chair before noon.” Our job as actors, then, was to use our delivery, our tone of voice, facial expression, body language, and a heavy amount of miming to imply what exactly was going on.
I remember being surprised how often the other students in the class figured out the various scenarios. I acted in one comic variation in which I was a guy on an elevator trying to pick up a pretty girl, while my partner’s recoiling reaction made it obvious to the seminar that she wasn’t biting. I remember another pair used the lines to convey pretty vividly that they were just about to walk down the aisle and get married. No one was on the nose about the death row situation, but they did manage to glean that there were life-or-death stakes involved. (I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve mimed the electric chair at the end.)
The point, of course, was to make us understand that the words themselves weren’t the only thing that mattered. The words weren’t doing all the work. We were all using the same sparse script. It managed to lend itself to any number of situations. What got the subtext across were all the other skills we as actors brought to the table.
Now, in a fiction writing class, it’s the words that matter. The words are doing all the work. I wanted to create a dialogue exercise—straight dialogue, no description, no internal monologue, no indication for them to use anything other than the spoken word to imply deep and seething currents of subtext.
First, I discussed the notion of subtext with my brilliant students this week. “If you were a pregnant character in one of your stories,” I suggested, “and you standing with a co-worker at a water cooler, and you wanted to convey to your coworker through dialogue that you were pregnant—without actually saying the words, and without being able to do something physical and non-verbal like this—” and here I rested my cupped hands on an imaginary baby bump, “what kind of thing would you say?”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I feel so nauseous this morning!” immediately replied one student.
“I’ve been thinking it’s time to freshen up that spare room of mine,” blurted another.
Either of those examples were a thousand times better than anything I’d dreamed up in my class notes. They totally had the general concept under control.
I then led them on to the callisthenic itself. I had the students pair up and share a single sheet of paper. I’d prepared colored notecards ahead of time. Each pair was going to write out a conversation made of nothing but speeches, I informed them. On pink notecards, I’d printed who their characters were, where their characters were located at the moment, and what was the situation prompting the conversation. In order to avoid false starts and get right to the point, I also provided the first line of each pair’s dialogue. So, for one of the groups, it looked like this:
The Characters
• The Single Older Sister
• The Single Younger Sister
The Setting
• The wedding reception of a childhood friend
The Situation
• Have a conversation about the unsuitability of the marriage you’ve just attended.
The First Line
• "He's just so wrong for her, don't you think?"
I gave the students a moment to read their pink notecard. Then I let them randomly pick one of two blue notecards made especially for their team—a secret subtext card that only their character would know, though they were forbidden to say it aloud. They were not to show these secret subtexts to their partners at any point during the exercise; they could only reveal them when I said.
So, for the sisters at the wedding, the random subtexts were:
Random Subtext 1
• You think your sister is eternally single because she's too picky about guys.
Random Subtext 2
• You have always found your sister infuriatingly controlling. That's probably the number one reason why she's still single.
Here’s an example from another group:
The Characters
• The Husband
• The Wife
The Setting
• Your breakfast table at home
The Situation
• Have a conversation with each other about the girl your son is dating.
The First Line
• "Jeremy was on the front porch kissing that girl of his well past midnight, you know."
Random Subtext 1
• You think your spouse has been paying too much attention to matters outside your marriage.
Random Subtext 2
• You find it ironic that your spouse shows such interest in your son's love life, when he/she hasn't been paying a bit of attention to your own.
I told the students to take ten seconds to choose who would take which character, and to decide who would be writing the first line I’d kindly provided. It didn’t matter which person spoke the first line; it didn’t matter which subtext either character got. (I loved the potential randomness of it. If I were to do it again, I might come up with even more subtexts for each pair, so I’d never know what I was going to get.)
They’d have eight minutes to take turns writing their lines of dialogue down on the sheets of paper they were sharing.
Go.
I sat in place, listening discreetly to the giggles as they played in their little sandboxes. I didn’t really know how successful the exercise might be, as I’d only conjured it up the day before. I deliberately attempted to create scenarios that might lead to squabbling, or polite hostility. There’s rich subtext to be found in situation in which two characters know each other well enough to have accumulated a heavy catalog of the other’s faults, but are compelled by circumstances not to speak of them directly.
But honestly, I had no idea whether these short dialogues would sink or swim. The only thing in which I could take heart was how quickly their pens flew across and covered the sheets of notebook paper.
Eight minutes later, I had them break off their dialogue where it was. I asked each pair to read their conversation aloud to the class. The sisters at the wedding went first. I know for a fact that the Younger Sister who was supposed to be perceived as the choosy one hadn’t read Older Sister’s blue subtext card (“You think your sister is eternally single because she's too picky about guys”), but by some stroke of good fortune the Younger Sister very quickly launched into a launched into a diatribe about the imaginary groom’s faults (“He’s too short, he has no chin, and those freckles!”) that fed right into Older Sister’s unspoken agenda, prompting some tart family bickering that was so naturally written that it sounded as if it had been transcribed from an actual wedding reception.
When they were finished, I waited for the laughter to clear before asking, “What does Older Sister here think about Younger Sister?”
Immediately someone said, “She’s distressed about her lifestyle choices,” and someone else zeroed in a little further: “She obviously thinks her younger sister is too picky about men.”
I told Older Sister to reveal her blue card. It read almost word for word what the last student had suggested. “How about Younger Sister?” I asked the class. “What are her feelings about Older Sister?”
“That she’s too intrusive,” said someone. Another student said, “I think she feels she’s being controlled and bossed around?” I had Younger Sister reveal her blue card.
The woman who had written the Younger Sister lines spoke up. “But wait,” she said, thinking aloud. “I had absolutely no idea what my partner thought about me, but somehow she got me to act as if I was picky and to say exactly what she wanted to hear, when I gave her the list of the groom’s shortcomings. . . .” She thought some more. “I mean, I fed right into her.”
“That’s subtext at work,” I pointed out, nodding vigorously. “Older Sister gave you a prompt that very clearly indicated she expected you to find things wrong with the poor groom, and you obliged her by giving that list. Her character never outright said, ‘Oh lord, I think you’re a persnickety bitch and I’m sure you’ve already got a laundry list of minor things that you’ve decided are this man’s major faults,’ but she clearly expected that from your character—and you obliged by giving it to her. You confirmed her prejudices.”
“And I didn’t know I was supposed to be controlling!” said the woman who had played Older Sister. “She turned me into it! She controlled me and made me controlling!”
I didn’t expect this reaction, but I found it to be a universal theme with the exercise. The students were so busy concentrating on conveying their hidden subtexts that they weren’t really engaging in any detective work about what their partners’ characters secretly thought about them. Yet somehow, in the sisters’ wedding squabbling, or the husband and wife icily and tacitly discussing their marriage through the vehicle of their son’s porch light make-out session, or whatever situation they encountered, everyone seemed to understand that when one character really brings their subtext to an encounter—even subtly—other characters will respond at an instinctive level.
The exercise made clear that everything was as it should be—their readers/listeners were able to discern exactly what information they needed to know about the two characters they created on the spot, while the characters each remained blissfully unaware of what the other really thought of them. They were even somewhat ignorant of how they themselves were behaving in ways that justified the other.
Every character a writer creates, at any given moment, has his or her own hopes and dreams and motivations. To each line of dialogue, they’re bringing entire worlds of experience and emotion. The mildest of declarations, deep inside, can be the throwing down of a gauntlet; a seemingly milquetoast question can be a covert declaration of war.
It’s the writer’s job to know what every character wants and feels, and what wild unknowns they wish to convey—particularly when the characters don’t know for themselves. Without subtext, dialogue is bland. Interchangeable. With it, it’s a writer’s best tool to conveying the individual rich worlds that each character occupies.
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Friday, March 11, 2016
Postcards from the Edge: A Writing Exercise
Among the creative calisthenics I’ve used for my writing class is one that Thisbe Nissen provided for the excellent book, Naming the World, and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. She suggests having students take postcards and, right there on the spot, asking them to imagine a character who then composes a message upon it. It’s an exercise that’s supposed to get students quickly flexing their imaginations, using artifacts from the real world as props.
I liked the idea when I read about it. A couple of years ago, during a summer in Provincetown, I visited a junk shop and stumbled on a trunk of old vintage post cards. I riffled through them and selected those with photos that suggested untold stories. Finally I assembled a couple of dozen. The shop’s proprietor was so pleased that someone was taking a chunk of old postcards off his hands that he gave them to me at a steep discount.
A few months later after class started, I ran the exercise. With no disrespect to Ms. Nissen, the results were a bit of a dud. Oh, I followed her directions and asked the students in my seminar to envision the kind of person who might select their particular postcard. I had them write in the voice of this person. I also followed Nissen’s advice and suggested they swap postcards and reply to them. The idea here was that they’d jump into the thought processes of a second character as they pretended to be the recipient of the missive.
But the postcards the students wrote to each other were largely dull. They were nice. They all started with identical salutations and inquiries about the weather and hopes that all were well, followed by reassurances that they were having a good time in Bakersfield, CA/Plymouth, MI/Provincetown/Colonial Williamsburg/beautiful Bayonne, NJ. The replies were largely as insipid, expressing relief that all was well and urging the original sender to have a good time, and that everyone missed them in Waikiki/Austin, TX/Carowinds/Virginia Beach/Fort Bragg.
I tried to push home a message of “See? A few short minutes and you’ve got two characters and a premise for a story!”, but even a three-year-old could have seen through my false enthusiasm. Those stories wouldn’t have been anything I wanted to read.
This semester I was going to replace the exercise with something—anything—else, but heck. I still had the postcards. Maybe, I thought, I could revamp the exercise into somehow. Make it more interesting. Maybe the writing students envisioned in Naming the World were universally in MFA programs, and not the retirees, young working people, and moms who sign up for my classes. Maybe rather than speeding up the exercise so that the writers were jumping from new character to new character, I should be slowing everything down and let them reflect on what they’d written.
The last seemed a reasonable premise.
So this time around I added a period of meditation, after they’d chosen their picture postcard from the brown paper bag. I had them look at the photographs on front and, over the course of a couple of minutes, consider a number of questions.
Who was the person who might have selected such a card to send to someone? What kind of person—what kind of character—would have picked this particular postcard to send?
I asked them to take a moment to envision the character. Was it male or female? Was it someone contemporary? Someone in the past? Someone who was educated? Or perhaps someone who’d never made it past high school? Was this person a saint or a sinner, or somewhere in between?
I told them to take a moment to imagine why they were writing this postcard, to begin with. Did they pick it from a rack while they were vacationing? Did they send it to someone far away as a reminder of home? Did they find it tucked in a motel Bible? Did they steal it?
Who was the specific person to whom they were writing? Why was the character sending them a postcard rather than a letter? What’s their mood as they write?
I added a few more instructions before I let them begin. This character should not be you, I emphasized. This character does not have to think or behave like you would. The character does not have to be nice. He or she doesn’t have to be pleasant. She can be in a moment of crisis, or elation. The character can be a criminal or a sociopath. He can be an ordinary person who is involved in something extraordinary.
And most of all, I told them, skip the niceties. The greetings. The well-wishing. Your character doesn’t have time for that. Figure out why.
Then I let them write.
Although I gave them the same amount of time to compose their postcards this time as before—five minutes—this time around I asked them to do something different during the exercise’s sharing part. Show us your postcard first, I instructed. Then read us what you wrote, and say nothing more.
To the rest of the class, I said, It’s your job to tell us who this person is, based on the clues you find on this postcard. Imagine you’re a detective, and this is your one piece of evidence. What does every word tell you about the person who wrote it?
The first student read her postcard from Hawaii. It was addressed to B., from P., and contained a message about revisiting Hawaii, where they’d married twenty years before, in an attempt to get over a relationship that had failed after a decade. Though it was only a few sentences, I asked the students, What kind of person is P.?
At first the answers came slowly. They debated back and forth the sex of B. and P. respectively, Who flies to Hawaii on a whim to get over a ten-year-dead relationship?, I wanted to know. It was at this point that the class became excited. A hopeless romantic, they suggested. Someone with her head in the clouds. Someone who wasn’t entirely in touch with reality, who was of a certain affluence, who had a spur-of-the-moment spontaneity that maybe even overwhelmed her common sense.
The class then zeroed in on the line with which the character had signed off—“Don’t show this to your wife!” This woman was very naïve, they reasoned, because after all even the postman could read what she’d said, if he wanted. Perhaps she was even willfully destructive. Maybe she wanted the wife to see the postcard from the ex arrive in the mail, to read the message, and to cause friction between the two.
I let the listeners debate for a while and read all the possible nuances into the scenario before I turned to the woman who’d actually written the fictional postcard. I released her from her silence to tell us how she’d envisioned the character she’d fleshed out in a few sentences. I’d never seen someone so excited to talk in class before. She confirmed that indeed she’d pictured a scatterbrained woman of middle age who’d revisited the site of her wedding on a whim. But she began to spin not only some backstory for the woman—she’d been visiting not just the site of the wedding, but all the spots across the country that had meant something to her during the couple’s courtship—but some of the unrevealed after-story as well: she’d decided to fight to get her ex-husband back.
The students wanted to know if the final sentence had been deliberate relationship sabotage—almost in the same way that fans must badger George R. R. Martin for unwritten Game of Thrones spoilers. “You know, I honestly don’t know!” she exclaimed, and paused. Her eyes were dancing with possibility.
“Do mine next!” one student exclaimed. “It fits perfectly!”
I let her show her card, which was a series of colored patio umbrellas somewhere in California. She read the card aloud—it was from a man who addressed his postcard to ‘Jackie, Darling,’ and peppered her with questions. “Are you startled to hear from me? Are you surprised I’ve made it all the way out to California? Do you want to know why I’m here?” The listeners drilled right into the text to wring every nuance out of it. The guy was obviously controlling, and dominant, and even a little bit scary, maybe. They debated what ‘all the way out to California’ meant—was he from a city on the east coast? Or some podunk town where anyplace in California sounded exotic and wildly sophisticated?
This woman, given the chance at last to speak, loved what she’d heard. She’d envisioned her character as a fast-talking lothario, sure of himself and of his good looks, who simply assumed that no matter how much time had passed since the last time he’d seen one of his conquests, that she’d still be madly head over heels with him. She and the first woman laughed at the notion that perhaps their postcards were the separate halves of the same story.
But they could be, I pointed out. They absolutely could be connected. Or they could be separate worlds of their own. What kind of stories could these two strong personalities generate?
Another woman in the class had crafted a lovely card about a boy in college who was a dreamer, who harbored longing feelings for a girl inappropriate for him; we spoke at length about how we saw him, based on the very few sentences she’d written. Another had written a grimmer postcard about a pilgrimage to a cemetery in Cape Cod. After several minutes of spirited debate, she filled us in with a richly-textured backstory about the character had involved a short-lived marriage, the death of a husband, property in Boston, a woman’s retreat in Arizona, and a late-in-life acceptance of her own lesbianism.
“I think it’s remarkable that you,” I told this woman, and then broadened it to include them all, “that you all started with seven and a half square inches of postcard and five minutes to write on it, and have generated enough imaginative possibility to fill pages and pages and chapters, and even a book’s worth of story.”
They all agreed, eyes shining. I couldn’t have felt any better, or any more excited, about the results. I still get a giddy feeling when I think about it.
The postcard workout flopped the first time, for me, because it never skimmed any deeper than the surface. The second time around, it was uncanny how much depth it brought out—how much wild, raw imagination was at work over the course of only a few minutes. The students confirmed to each other that even a few sentences of their own writing could be incredibly evocative; hearing their words explored and interpreted and wrung of nuance not only validated the bits they’d done right, but opened up vast possibilities for the story’s future.
Five minutes and a postcard, and some careful reflection afterward. That’s all it took for me to end up with a shelf of books I’d want to read.
I liked the idea when I read about it. A couple of years ago, during a summer in Provincetown, I visited a junk shop and stumbled on a trunk of old vintage post cards. I riffled through them and selected those with photos that suggested untold stories. Finally I assembled a couple of dozen. The shop’s proprietor was so pleased that someone was taking a chunk of old postcards off his hands that he gave them to me at a steep discount.
A few months later after class started, I ran the exercise. With no disrespect to Ms. Nissen, the results were a bit of a dud. Oh, I followed her directions and asked the students in my seminar to envision the kind of person who might select their particular postcard. I had them write in the voice of this person. I also followed Nissen’s advice and suggested they swap postcards and reply to them. The idea here was that they’d jump into the thought processes of a second character as they pretended to be the recipient of the missive.
But the postcards the students wrote to each other were largely dull. They were nice. They all started with identical salutations and inquiries about the weather and hopes that all were well, followed by reassurances that they were having a good time in Bakersfield, CA/Plymouth, MI/Provincetown/Colonial Williamsburg/beautiful Bayonne, NJ. The replies were largely as insipid, expressing relief that all was well and urging the original sender to have a good time, and that everyone missed them in Waikiki/Austin, TX/Carowinds/Virginia Beach/Fort Bragg.
I tried to push home a message of “See? A few short minutes and you’ve got two characters and a premise for a story!”, but even a three-year-old could have seen through my false enthusiasm. Those stories wouldn’t have been anything I wanted to read.
This semester I was going to replace the exercise with something—anything—else, but heck. I still had the postcards. Maybe, I thought, I could revamp the exercise into somehow. Make it more interesting. Maybe the writing students envisioned in Naming the World were universally in MFA programs, and not the retirees, young working people, and moms who sign up for my classes. Maybe rather than speeding up the exercise so that the writers were jumping from new character to new character, I should be slowing everything down and let them reflect on what they’d written.
The last seemed a reasonable premise.
So this time around I added a period of meditation, after they’d chosen their picture postcard from the brown paper bag. I had them look at the photographs on front and, over the course of a couple of minutes, consider a number of questions.
Who was the person who might have selected such a card to send to someone? What kind of person—what kind of character—would have picked this particular postcard to send?
I asked them to take a moment to envision the character. Was it male or female? Was it someone contemporary? Someone in the past? Someone who was educated? Or perhaps someone who’d never made it past high school? Was this person a saint or a sinner, or somewhere in between?
I told them to take a moment to imagine why they were writing this postcard, to begin with. Did they pick it from a rack while they were vacationing? Did they send it to someone far away as a reminder of home? Did they find it tucked in a motel Bible? Did they steal it?
Who was the specific person to whom they were writing? Why was the character sending them a postcard rather than a letter? What’s their mood as they write?
I added a few more instructions before I let them begin. This character should not be you, I emphasized. This character does not have to think or behave like you would. The character does not have to be nice. He or she doesn’t have to be pleasant. She can be in a moment of crisis, or elation. The character can be a criminal or a sociopath. He can be an ordinary person who is involved in something extraordinary.
And most of all, I told them, skip the niceties. The greetings. The well-wishing. Your character doesn’t have time for that. Figure out why.
Then I let them write.
Although I gave them the same amount of time to compose their postcards this time as before—five minutes—this time around I asked them to do something different during the exercise’s sharing part. Show us your postcard first, I instructed. Then read us what you wrote, and say nothing more.
To the rest of the class, I said, It’s your job to tell us who this person is, based on the clues you find on this postcard. Imagine you’re a detective, and this is your one piece of evidence. What does every word tell you about the person who wrote it?
The first student read her postcard from Hawaii. It was addressed to B., from P., and contained a message about revisiting Hawaii, where they’d married twenty years before, in an attempt to get over a relationship that had failed after a decade. Though it was only a few sentences, I asked the students, What kind of person is P.?
At first the answers came slowly. They debated back and forth the sex of B. and P. respectively, Who flies to Hawaii on a whim to get over a ten-year-dead relationship?, I wanted to know. It was at this point that the class became excited. A hopeless romantic, they suggested. Someone with her head in the clouds. Someone who wasn’t entirely in touch with reality, who was of a certain affluence, who had a spur-of-the-moment spontaneity that maybe even overwhelmed her common sense.
The class then zeroed in on the line with which the character had signed off—“Don’t show this to your wife!” This woman was very naïve, they reasoned, because after all even the postman could read what she’d said, if he wanted. Perhaps she was even willfully destructive. Maybe she wanted the wife to see the postcard from the ex arrive in the mail, to read the message, and to cause friction between the two.
I let the listeners debate for a while and read all the possible nuances into the scenario before I turned to the woman who’d actually written the fictional postcard. I released her from her silence to tell us how she’d envisioned the character she’d fleshed out in a few sentences. I’d never seen someone so excited to talk in class before. She confirmed that indeed she’d pictured a scatterbrained woman of middle age who’d revisited the site of her wedding on a whim. But she began to spin not only some backstory for the woman—she’d been visiting not just the site of the wedding, but all the spots across the country that had meant something to her during the couple’s courtship—but some of the unrevealed after-story as well: she’d decided to fight to get her ex-husband back.
The students wanted to know if the final sentence had been deliberate relationship sabotage—almost in the same way that fans must badger George R. R. Martin for unwritten Game of Thrones spoilers. “You know, I honestly don’t know!” she exclaimed, and paused. Her eyes were dancing with possibility.
“Do mine next!” one student exclaimed. “It fits perfectly!”
I let her show her card, which was a series of colored patio umbrellas somewhere in California. She read the card aloud—it was from a man who addressed his postcard to ‘Jackie, Darling,’ and peppered her with questions. “Are you startled to hear from me? Are you surprised I’ve made it all the way out to California? Do you want to know why I’m here?” The listeners drilled right into the text to wring every nuance out of it. The guy was obviously controlling, and dominant, and even a little bit scary, maybe. They debated what ‘all the way out to California’ meant—was he from a city on the east coast? Or some podunk town where anyplace in California sounded exotic and wildly sophisticated?
This woman, given the chance at last to speak, loved what she’d heard. She’d envisioned her character as a fast-talking lothario, sure of himself and of his good looks, who simply assumed that no matter how much time had passed since the last time he’d seen one of his conquests, that she’d still be madly head over heels with him. She and the first woman laughed at the notion that perhaps their postcards were the separate halves of the same story.
But they could be, I pointed out. They absolutely could be connected. Or they could be separate worlds of their own. What kind of stories could these two strong personalities generate?
Another woman in the class had crafted a lovely card about a boy in college who was a dreamer, who harbored longing feelings for a girl inappropriate for him; we spoke at length about how we saw him, based on the very few sentences she’d written. Another had written a grimmer postcard about a pilgrimage to a cemetery in Cape Cod. After several minutes of spirited debate, she filled us in with a richly-textured backstory about the character had involved a short-lived marriage, the death of a husband, property in Boston, a woman’s retreat in Arizona, and a late-in-life acceptance of her own lesbianism.
“I think it’s remarkable that you,” I told this woman, and then broadened it to include them all, “that you all started with seven and a half square inches of postcard and five minutes to write on it, and have generated enough imaginative possibility to fill pages and pages and chapters, and even a book’s worth of story.”
They all agreed, eyes shining. I couldn’t have felt any better, or any more excited, about the results. I still get a giddy feeling when I think about it.
The postcard workout flopped the first time, for me, because it never skimmed any deeper than the surface. The second time around, it was uncanny how much depth it brought out—how much wild, raw imagination was at work over the course of only a few minutes. The students confirmed to each other that even a few sentences of their own writing could be incredibly evocative; hearing their words explored and interpreted and wrung of nuance not only validated the bits they’d done right, but opened up vast possibilities for the story’s future.
Five minutes and a postcard, and some careful reflection afterward. That’s all it took for me to end up with a shelf of books I’d want to read.
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