The Memoir Back Cover Blurb: Another Writing Exercise

One of the concepts I tackle very early on in my memoir-writing class is the notion of how memoir differs from autobiography. On a very broad level, most people use the terms interchangeably. After all, librarians and book sellers shelve the two together.

For the purposes of my class, I ask students to believe in a minor distinction. An autobiography, I tell them, tends to be a chronological retelling of a person’s life, from birth to the present moment. Hollywood autobiographies in particular tend to hit certain beats—childhood, the recognition that acting brought attention and applause, the high school plays, the first acting jobs, the first big break. Then it’s a career replay that proceeds movie by movie and rehab by rehab, with some celebrity parties and a couple of marriages thrown in, until retirement age and the happy, quieter years in Palm Springs.

That’s not what I want you to do, I tell my students, right at the beginning of the first class. You’re not attempting a scrutiny of your entire life. Sure, you’ll have every incident in your life available for material, but what I’ll be asking you to do during the semester is to begin focusing upon a specific narrative with a connecting theme, selected from your decades of experience.

An individual life has too many stories to include in a single volume. They’re too wildly varied and jumbled, to boot. Every person I’ve known has multiple memoirs in them—multiple narratives to share. By the end of the semester, I tell my students, I’d like you to have begun thinking about which story of your life you’d like to take your first book to tell.

A book-length memoir, I stress to my students, week after week, has a through line. It is a well-composed snapshot of a portion of your time on this earth. It’s focused. It has an agenda . . . a story to tell. Like any snapshot, it can have as wide or tight a field of view as you choose; it can encompass years of a single relationship, or spend a hundred pages dissecting the subtleties and vicissitudes of a single weekend at Cape Cod. The aperture can be narrow, so that both the figures of your life and the background can retain all their rich detail. It can be wide open, so that the background is an atmospheric blur while the figures in the foreground command the attention. Those artistic choices are yours to make.

I encourage my students to seek out and read memoirs to see what I mean. I like using Alan Cumming’s Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir as an example of a well-written volume. Cumming has been in dozens of high-profile movies; he’s a staple on The Good Wife. He’s been a notorious catalyst in stage shows. He could easily have written a quick and dirty manuscript that consisted of the same easy beats and celebrity gossip as any Hollywood autobiography. What Cumming crafted, though, was a highly-readable memoir with a tight focus (as implied by the title) upon his relationship with his father. The memoir begins at a moment when, mere days before Cumming is about to begin taping for the BBC celebrity genealogy series, Who Do You Think You Are?, he receives a phone call from his father—a cold and abusive man who had terrorized Cumming’s childhood. Though they hadn’t spoken in decades, Cumming took the call only to have his father inform him, without emotion, that the show’s producers were planning to ambush him with the news that they were not biologically related; his father had not sired him.

The news comes out of left field. Cumming’s whole world is upended. The chapters alternate between deliberately-paced reminiscences, rich in sensory detail, about the abuses heaped upon him by his father, and the nervous days that follow in the current day of his narration as the show’s filming commences. The memoir’s scope, I tell my students as I describe the book to them, is narrow in its timeline—that is, the ‘action’ only takes place over the course of a couple of weeks as the show commences and finishes filming its one-hour segment.

But memoir is not tied to everyday chronology. It can wander, just as the mind and memory wanders from present to past to future. Cumming spends one chapter in the tense present-day, then in the next dwells upon his past relationship with his father and all the various indignities he suffered at the man’s hands. Back and forth in time he leaps, lingering in the past, inexorably advancing toward terrible revelation in the present. The book’s a page-turner. It’s a thriller in memoir form. If they’re as good as his first, Cumming could write as many memoirs as he likes and I’d be happy to read and recommend them all.

So I ask my students, right from the first class of the semester, to start reading memoirs. Or at the very least, to start looking at them—to pick them up at the library or the bookstore and to read the summaries on their jackets, or to browse Amazon and peruse synopses there. What I want them to realize is that each memoir is a mere slice of a person’s life, a view through a single facet into the jewel that is the author. I talk about authors who have written multiple memoirs, like David Sedaris, or my friend Anne Soffee, whose two touching and funny memoirs, Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love, and Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal LA, I bring in to class to pass around.

I talk about the ways in which an author can write multiple memoirs by changing her vantage point, by focusing upon another set of associated memories and sharing them in a literary way. I bring up the example of Betty MacDonald, a favorite humorist of mine and the author of the eternally popular children’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series. Between 1945-1955, MacDonald published no less than four popular memoirs.

The first, the runaway bestseller The Egg & I, is the story of MacDonald during her twenties, who despite being used to life in urban Seattle, allowed her husband to persuade her to move with him to the most rustic corner of the Olympic Peninsula to live on a chicken ranch. Lonely and surrounded by eccentric neighbors and a lack of amenities, she learned—somewhat—to make do. Although MacDonald was miserable most of the time, and although the marriage ended after only a few years, the book comes across as comedy; its inevitable Hollywood adaptation spawned the nine movies in the lowbrow Ma & Pa Kettle series. She followed up her bestselling success with The Plague & I, which focused on her nearly-fatal battle against tuberculosis in the days before antibiotics, and of attempting to endure the rigid rules of the charitable sanitarium in which she was quarantined. Her ability to spin comic gold from such a forbidding premise is, frankly, one of the reasons I admire her as a stylist.

MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything chronicled the dozens of jobs she attempted to hold down during the lean years of the Great Depression, and of her older sister's persistence in insisting that whatever skills a job might call for, from typing to photography to animal husbandry, MacDonald could provide it. Her fourth and final memoir was Onions in the Stew, a memoir about a happy second marriage and a move to the Pacific Northwest’s Vashon Island, complicated only by the struggle to raise two teen-aged daughters.

All four books wander freely back to MacDonald's childhood, I tell my students; they weave in material from the writer’s past to illuminate the choices she made during the four distinct time periods of each memoir. Though the material is often kind of grim at its core—a bad marriage, infectious disease, poverty, problem adolescents—her tone is distinctly light-hearted. What’s more, her voice is recognizable. You get an idea of who 'Betty' was from book to book, despite the disparate topics.

We discuss all these things in the classroom for several weeks, and then midway through the semester I give them this assignment. I want you to envision your memoirs as finished, literary products, I say. This week, at home, take an hour and pretend you’re planning your career in advance. Make believe you’re going to write three memoirs. I want you each to envision what segments of your experience these memoirs will cover. Take some notes. Come up with a title, if it helps. Then I want you to write one or two paragraphs that describe each of these three books—and I want you to write those synopses as if they’re going to appear on the back covers.

Now, at this point there are always questions. There’s always a literalist in the book who points out that the back cover of HER books is where the author’s photo and bio goes, because SHE only reads HARD COVERS, the way the good lord intended CIVILIZED people to read. I tell the stickler that she can pretend she’s writing for the inside flap, then. Whatever. There’s always someone who claims he’s never read a book jacket description. Lies. It’s all lies. We’re force-fed synopses of stories our entire lives, I remind them. Every TV Guide entry, every Netflix blurb, every movie trailer is trying to reach and and grab an audience by summarizing itself in the most appealing manner possible. That’s what I want my students to do in this exercise.

Look, I tell them. Here’s one of many ways I could present my life story:

Shocking her conservative relatives and in-laws was my mother’s favorite pastime. When I was six years old, she visited England and saw her first drag show. She returned to the states and, hoping to be provocative, promptly announced, tongue in cheek, that she’d decided I could have a fine and profitable future as a female impersonator.

Although I’ve never donned women’s clothes, there's something ironic about the fact that decades later I was perfectly comfortable to assume a female pseudonym in order to pen several novels of chick lit. My mother’s early career goals for me, however, were just the start of a life in which I was a constant wildcard attempting to assimilate—like a drag queen attempting to replicate the feminine, I felt I was always trying to ‘pass’ as something I wasn’t. Learning how not to draw attention as the only WASP in public school, or re-assimilating white culture upon re-entry to a preppy Southern college, or erasing my Southern accent in order not to attract attention in academia—all of it was boot camp preparation to being the only male author among hundreds and thousands of women at romance writer conventions.

So look there, I say to my students. Two paragraphs summarizing a potential memoir of my life. The pitch conveys a certain sense of tone—somewhat comic, somewhat the story of a struggle. It clearly delineates certain periods of my life from which I’ll be drawing. At the same time, it gives me a lot of leeway in the material I choose. It gives me plenty of opportunity to talk about my children-of-the-sixties parents and their progressive child-rearing ideas. I could have a lot of fun with that premise.

But it’s not the only book I could write about myself. Here’s another of several that I present:

I was twenty-three when I packed all my worldly belongings and moved into downtown Detroit, Michigan during the height of its reputation as the murder and crack cocaine capital of the country. On my first afternoon there, during a visit to the only grocery store within two miles of my new apartment, I found the market swarmed by cops. They descended on a vagrant standing next to me and shook him down, sending a cascade of knives and guns from his coat onto the floor. 

My twenty-five years in the city that followed were a love-hate affair, as I came of age trying fiercely to defend my commitment to the city, yet found myself increasingly worn down by its violence, its arson and gun-related lawlessness, its crumbling streets and buildings, its overt racism, and its poverty. Like Detroit, I saw myself as a scrappy survivor trying to reinvent himself. And very much like the city, I eventually lacked the perspective to know when enough was enough.

Again, I ask them if they can discern the tone of this proposed book. Can they envision the front cover? Yes, I’m pretty sure it’d be an artsy shot of a blooming weed flower in front of a burnt-out building, too. Very clearly this memoir would focus on the two and a half decades of my life when I lived in the city of Detroit. At the same time, though, there’s enough associative leeway to write about all kinds of things—the community in which I grew up, my expectations of living in cities based on the places I’d lived before, the youthful hopes and dreams I’d nurtured up to the point I’d reestablished myself. Could you see this as a book sitting on a store shelf, I ask? Of course you could.

So do this very thing with your own ideas. Pretend I’m an editor, and that you’ve got three memoirs to pitch as our elevator climbs from the ground floor to my ninety-seventh floor office suite. Sell them to me quickly with your book blurbs.

Here’s what I want from those pitches you’re going to present the following week, I tell them: I want a sense of who you are. I want to know what stories you need to tell, and how you’ll present yourself from volume to volume. Your tone doesn’t need to be the same from pitch to pitch. Each might cover some of the same events in your life from different angles. You might not even want to write any of these books when you’ve completed the exercise, and that’s okay too. Knowing what you don’t want to write is valuable, too.

Working up a number of book cover blurbs or pitches, though, will show you that you have options as you write. The exercise will drive home that in the end, as the author, you have complete control over how your life stories are narrated.

The next week, when my students come in with their pitches, a lot of them show they’ve really gotten the assignment. Their back-of-book blurbs often sound as if they were copied from publisher websites. Not everybody comes in with three, but most return with at least two in hand. I have them read their synopses, ask the rest of the class for their reactions, and ask everybody the big question: Would you want to read that? By and large, they absolutely would.

Then I ask the author: Would you want to write that? Because ultimately, that’s the most important takeaway from the assignment.

Almost universally, they do.

Even the students who only manage to eke out a single blurb benefit from the process. They start picturing their essays as part of a possible whole; they begin to understand that even class assignments can contribute to their overall goal. Some of the students with multiple pitches already know which, if any, of them they prefer to write. Others are giddy with choice.

Now, most of my students don’t aspire to publication. That’s okay. I stress throughout the semester that, at minimum, the rigorous self-examination that writing a memoir requires is its own reward. Having essays or chapters to share with family and friends is a heck of a bonus, though. The exercise is none the less valuable for those students whose work will never hit a Barnes and Noble. Once the students begin to imagine their life stories as finished volumes—as viable, valuable intellectual properties—their sense of pride swells. They become enthusiastic about their work. They stop seeing what they’re doing as disconnected weekly essay assignments, and begin writing in a way that contributes to a cohesive narrative. The glimmer and promise of a finished book, published or not, is a powerful carrot on a stick.

In a craft as reliant on self-starting as writing, students need to be able to spur themselves on a regular basis to sit down at their computers or with their pads of paper. A powerful motivation—particularly when it’s an idea for progression that they’ve envisioned themselves—can make the difference between a finished literary product and a dream that languishes, stillborn.

Super Subtext: Another Writing Exercise

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.

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.

A Revisit: On Writers and Envy

I was quite fortunate this week to attend a book signing with Garth Greenwell, a talented writer and good friend whose first novel, What Belongs to You, came out this month. The bookstore was crowded and the seating was tight, so I was privy to any number of semi-private conversations on all sides.

While I didn’t hear any actual carping or hurtful remarks directed at Garth, what I did hear among the chatter was a lot of generalizations, from what sounded like aspiring writers, about what it takes to break into publishing today. Much of it was scornful, derisive, and ultimately defensive and seemingly based in envy. I couldn’t help but be reminded of this essay that I wrote three years ago, so I decided to trot it out again.


The day my first novel hit booksellers everywhere, my life changed. Not in that banal, dewy-eyed way that happens only in Woody Allen movies, where a writer types THE END at the bottom of a sheet of paper, rips it out of his old manual typewriter, adds it to a neat stack on his desk, and then treats himself to a Cuban cigar or pops the cork of that rare and expensive vintage he’s been saving for a very special occasion. Inevitably in the next scene, the guy’s having a three-cocktail lunch with his editor at a swanky Manhattan lunch spot while discussing what his next mega-blockbuster chart topping best-seller should be.

I know you’ve seen this movie. It’s the same one in which the first-time author sits in the boardroom of Random House loftily naysaying potential book covers, each rendered on four-foot foam core stand-ups.

Alas, my life change was entirely devoid of both free lunches and foam core; mine was much more banal. I discovered that when you sign that first publishing contract, there are endless numbers of aspiring writers anxious to indulge in one-upmanship at your expense.

The very first encounter I had with the phenomenon came mere days after You Are SO Cursed! shipped. I had a friend—very quickly after this experience to become an ex-friend—who had ordered the book and after skimming through it wanted to present me with his ‘notes and course corrections.’

I was genuinely baffled at the announcement. His notes and corrections about what?, I wondered, assuming that perhaps he had some small collection of typographical errata that either I, the editor, or the copy editor had overlooked.

But no. He’d gone through the book and composed ten pages of reaction intended to point out my flaws as a writer, from my characterization and dialogue all the way through to my plotting and storyline. “Take these to your editor and have a good talk about them,” he told me, very sincerely.

I was even more baffled. The guy seemed to think the finished product had been—what—a rough draft? I wasn’t going to rush to my publishers and say, Hey, you guys don’t mind recalling forty thousand volumes so I can do a rewrite, do you? My buddy gave me notes! Did this guy attend movies and then write the studios with acting and directing tips?

I could tell that the suggestions the guy was attempting to make were the views of someone who hadn’t even read any contemporary young adult literature, yet held very fixed ideas about what it should and shouldn’t be. I tactfully told him I wouldn’t be needing the notes. “WELL.” His reply was stiff and offended. “If you don’t want to BENEFIT from the EXPERT OPINION of someone who is THREE QUARTERS OF THE WAY through a Bachelor’s in English Literature, SO BE IT.”

As I said, former friend.

It’s an unfortunate fact that there are too many aspiring writers out in the world itching to tell anyone with a little success how they really should’ve done things. Some of them are at a nascent stage of the process in which they’ve thought they’d have a good book in them if they sat down to work on it, though they haven’t actually scribed anything more arduous than the occasional LOL!!! as a comment on a friend’s reposting of a funny cat video. Experience doesn’t matter. In their heads, they are the go-to experts on good literature. They know what professional writers ought to have written instead of those hot messes that made it to the bookshelves or the TV or movie screen. If you’re published and have managed to wander within their sights, they have absolutely no qualms about taking aim, pulling the trigger, and letting you have it.

Sometimes the treatment I get is of a passive-aggressive sort. It’s usually prefaced by a milquetoast preface like, I may not be a published author, but . . . . that delivers its deadly payload after that quiet cock of the trigger. (I may not be a fancy published author, but at least I know that it’s I before E except after C! I guess it’s true that editors are the real talent behind a novel, huh!) It’s a popular way for total strangers and old college chums anxious to score a point to correct stray spelling and syntax errors when I post a casual blog entry, or update my Facebook status—and a cheap and easy way for someone to take an uppity published writer down a notch.

Often the treatment’s more contentious, as when someone will dismiss me with a Oh, what do you know, you and your silly little children’s books? (Hey. Fully eight of my sixteen published novels are silly little books for grown-ups, thank you.) Or as when a former friend with no fiction credits to his name recently posted all over his social media accounts messages to the effect that it seemed like anyone and everyone was shitting out another crappy young adult novel nowadays and that he hoped he’d never stoop so low to such cheap, lousy, trendy way of selling out.

Listen. I understand being frustrated as a writer. I wasn’t an overnight success. I struggled for years—decades—to get an agent to look at my manuscripts, much less a publishing house. It’s tempting to lash out, to vent, to exercise those dissatisfactions upon others. Working a job you dislike while writing in your spare time to make your dream career a reality is a hard road to trod. There’s no guaranteed payoff. Slamming established writers, whether slyly and subtly or with outright hostility, is a quick and dirty way of venting all those resentments.

However, my brothers and sisters, I am here to tell you that it is not anyone’s path to happiness. Lashing out is not a route to accomplishment. Allow me clue you in on something that I think most published wordsmiths eventually discover, but that many would-be authors have not yet assimilated:

Your success as a writer is entirely independent from anyone else’s. Belittling someone’s accomplishment does not accelerate or enhance your own success.

Repeat that to yourself. In times of stress, let it sink in.

The world of publishing is not the tiny circle of the Supreme Court. If you were a judge disappointed that Elena Kagan got the last open slot that you more amply deserved, it’s understandable that you might be a little miffed at having to wait around for one of the other eight Justices to retire or kick the bucket before you get a vanishingly small chance at advancement.

But publishing’s not like that. The fact that J. K. Rowling managed to get into print before you doesn’t in the least imply you’ll never be published. Her runaway sales have absolutely no bearing on how well your book would or wouldn’t do in the marketplace. You may be offended that Fifty Shades of Grey managed to hit the bestseller list while your vastly superior manuscript is still making the rounds of agents—or is sitting in a drawer somewhere, or is only half-written or even still exists only in your head. But as a success story, Fifty Shades has absolutely no direct impact upon your chances of finding an agent and a publisher—or upon you sending that manuscript out, or finally sitting down to pound it out.

Why? Because your success as a writer is entirely independent from anyone else’s.

If your manuscript is facing constant rejection, it’s not because some sadistic best-selling author is sitting around at the publishing house, blackmailing editors to reject your awesome query and setting fire to story proposals that might rival her own and expose her for the pathetic sham she fears she is. (That’d be a fun book to write though, wouldn’t it?) Even if you have a finished work that you feel is your very best effort, its rejection is usually for more mundane reasons. It’s honestly not a good fit for the publisher, for example. It might be too different from the kind of thing they usually put on the bookshelves. You may have disregarded the publisher’s specific request for one chapter and sent them three. It may be that while your chapters are rip-roaring stuff, your synopsis and cover letter aren’t selling it the way they should.

It may even be—and this is very often the case with would-be writers—that your basic obstacle is not completing the manuscript at all. It’s infinitely easier (and definitely more fun) to pick apart others than it is to sit down and write every day. Aspiring authors sometimes find posting on the internet the OUTRAGEOUS and GASP-WORTHY oversights they’ve encountered in a FAMOUS WRITER’S novel or screenplay much more appealing a way to spend an afternoon than firing up Microsoft Word and trying to pound out another page and a half of a project that seems endless and unfathomably intimidating. Bad-mouthing a writer’s efforts on reddit or The A.V. Club while pretending to defend to the death the tenets of Good Writing elicits immediate reactions. It makes one feel good. It’s a hell of a lot more tempting than the truly arduous, solitary process of creating something original.

Envy’s the root cause here. It’s a seemingly swift and fleeting impulse, that snatching out to grasp something just out of reach, that stab and pang of His success should be mine! Envy’s a deadly sin for a reason, though. The problem is that indulging in lazy pot-shots can become its own pursuit. Envy doesn’t enhance one’s own writing. It’s an obstacle that keeps one from writing at all.

Belittling someone’s accomplishment does not accelerate or enhance your own success.

No matter how we justify it to ourselves under the name of philosophy, chasing after envious impulses races a writer down the wrong path. No matter how light-heartedly we disguise our contempt, insult as its own pursuit is no more than distraction.

Mean-spirited words aren’t magical totems that, once unleashed, edge their wielder closer to perfection. An eighth-grade girl can start a vicious campaign of whispers against a classmate, saying he’s a fat and pimply loser, but the slander won’t erase her own flaws—it won’t clear her own complexion, make her thinner or more beautiful. Proclaiming him a loser doesn’t transform her into a winner.

Likewise, slamming a writer as trendy does not make someone more of a rebel or an iconoclast, nor any more original. Maligning an entire genre as kid stuff does not make someone more literary, or adult, or superior in taste. Accusing others of shitting out books for quick royalty checks does not magically transform one's own efforts into hard-worked achievements. Implying that other authors are hacks does not mystically elevate one's own work into masterpiece status.

Insinuating that others are bad writers does not make you a better one. It’s a waste of your time, and of energies that could and should be creative instead.

What will make you a better writer? Sitting down and writing will make you a better writer. Focusing your creative drive to build and construct and imagine, and not to tear down or disparage. Finishing a short story or a novel, all of it, from beginning to end. Taking the time to approach the completed project with a critical eye and to rewrite as much of it as necessary, as many times as necessary. Learning to listen to the honest criticisms of select readers and agents and editors. And most importantly, picking up the pen or opening the word processor once you’re done, and starting something completely new.

All the boring old truisms you’ve heard time and time again—these are the things that will make you a better writer.

What will make you a published writer? Constantly improving and challenging your own craft. Learning to write eye-catching queries and synopses. Consistently and methodically sending out and promoting your work to agents and publishers. Repeating the entire process with another completed project, and then another after that—these are the things that will make you a published writer.
Carping about the successes of others isn’t even on the list.

When you read in an alumni magazine that an old college acquaintance had a book published by a respected house, don’t grimace. Don’t grind your teeth and curse her beneath your breath. The two of you aren’t engaged in any race; if there’s a rivalry, it’s probably all in your own head. (If it’s not, isn’t it really time you set aside all that past foolishness?) Your success as a writer is entirely independent from hers.

Be genuinely glad that after so much time and effort, her discipline and hard work paid off. The fact she was successful should inspire you to see a similar future for yourself—one in which your dedication to your story and your persistence leads to you holding a copy of your first novel, or a magazine with your first published short fiction. Belittling someone’s achievements will never accelerate or enhance your own success. However, learning that you can celebrate the accomplishments of your peers while pointing yourself in a similar direction will make you a much, much happier writer.

And more importantly in the long run, any strategy that makes you a happier writer will encourage you to become a more productive and effective creative artist. There’s plenty of room out here for those.

Half a Lifetime

At some point in the past I performed a particular mathematical exercise. I don’t remember exactly when. Apparently I was so exhausted by the effort of stringing numbers together, after studiously avoiding them in all the years since the nightmare that was Miss Bibby’s trigonometry class in high school, that my brain blocked off all memory of the event—much as post-partum mothers shed the remembrance of how excruciating childbirth really is until right before they find themselves going through it all over again. I do know it must have been sometime after 2002, because that’s when I first started keeping my calendar electronically, and very likely before 2005.

A long time ago, in other words.

The exercise I performed was simple. Using a date duration calculator, I reckoned the number of days between the day of my birth and the day decades later when I started seeing my husband, Craig. Once I had the tally, I took that same number, added it to the day I met Craig, and wound up with a date, long distant in the future, equal in time away from the start of our relationship as my birth.

In other words, there’s only one day in my life on which I have lived as many days with Craig, as previously I had lived without him. That day is today. I officially have lived half my life to date with Craig.

It was a little bit of a shock to see Half a lifetime with Craig on my calendar when I flipped to 2016, a couple of weeks ago. What the hell is this?, I wondered to myself. Then I vaguely recollected going through all the calculations over a decade before—prompted by what, I scarcely remember—and my brain winced from the memory. I took a deep breath and went through all the calculations again, just to be certain. Sure enough, January 22, 2016 was the day.

Until yesterday I’d spent less than half my lifetime, heretofore, with my husband. Starting tomorrow, it will be more than half my life. Today—the balancing point.

Now, I like my milestone anniversaries. We celebrated our twenty-fifth, last year. Each anniversary is a blessing, in fact: pleasant reminders of many years well spent. But this achievement is rarer. Trickier. I’ll never be able to pin down, without the Nostradamus-like power of prognostication to pinpoint the date of my demise, the exact proportions of Craig-repletion to Craig-deprived. I just don’t have that kind of psychic insight.

What I do know is which of the two halves of my life so far—the half spent before my husband, and the half spent after—is the better. That is an easy certainty.

On The Writer's Credo

Earlier this semester in the memoir class I’m leading, one of the students was reading her essay for the week aloud. Something she’d written prompted a second or two of my furious highlighting. I saw a teachable moment there, and as anybody who stands in front of a classroom will tell you, when you have the good fortune to spot a teachable moment, you’ll furiously blow the horns, summon the hounds, and haul out the spears and bows, and like courtiers from the medieval Hunt for the Unicorn tapestry, chase breathlessly after it.

The assignment had been to focus in on an important conversation that took place at some point along the students’ personal timelines. I like the assignment—though I really should move it earlier in my teaching plan—because it’s general enough that it allows writers to write about nearly anything they choose (everyone’s had a conversation at some point, is my theory), but it also challenges them to employ dialogue in their writing, and also to zero in upon the small slice of time in which the conversation took place. For writers unused to writing with such focus, it’s valuable to encourage them to gaze narrow and think deep.

My student’s written sentiment wasn’t uncommon. A lot of us have similar thoughts. In the conversation she recorded having with a boyfriend, she voiced the phrase: I think it’s truly better to collect rich experiences than material things.

After she finished reading her essay, I went back to that paragraph and read the sentence aloud. “This is something you really believe?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she replied, nodding.

“Something that’s really, really important to you?” She nodded again. “Is it something that’s in your writer’s credo?”

“Oh,” she replied. I knew her answer was going to be No. But at the same time, I could see the gears turning in her mind as she thought it over and realized, It could be. It should be.

Credo. I believe. The writer’s credo is an assignment I give at the beginning of whatever writing classes I’m teaching. The idea of a credo isn’t mine; it’s not unique to my writing, certainly, or even to the field of writing in general. National Public Radio ran, a few years back, a four-year series with the title “This I Believe” in which writers and other types of celebrities discussed the core beliefs that have defined their lives and careers. The first time I heard the idea of the writer’s credo articulated was in college, when I was taking playwriting classes from Louis E. Catron.

Lou’s class revolved around the concept of the writer’s credo. He’d written an influential textbook that used the credo as its cornerstone—Playwriting: Writing, Producing, and Selling Your Play. Catron thought of the writer’s credo as a recorded statement of personal conviction:

A credo is the writer’s beliefs concerning topics he or she feels are highly important. It is focused most especially upon those portions of life that concern the writer most. It addresses topics about which the author has a deep emotional attitude—a burning anger, a scorn, an affection. It is, then, “This I believe. . . .”

It is uniquely your own.

Lou’s philosophy was that once a writer put into written words those convictions that mattered most, and once he or she had expanded upon and written, personally and privately, about each and every point of importance, it would provide a fertile ground from which art could grow and flourish. He believed the credo inspired students to write with passion and conviction—two qualities that differentiated good, rigorous work from tepid wheel-spinning.

To Lou, a writer’s credo was more than a mere list made into short essays. It was the burning spear of the valiant champion, the holy writ from which began a playwright’s righteous crusade. Taking time to write a credo taught his students to value the self as a source of material; it forced them to evaluate, often for the first time, their own moral compasses. The act of writing down thoughts and beliefs they may never have before examined would lead to stimulating deeper thought. And most of all, the credo was intended to teach students that their convictions had artistic and intellectual worth.

The assignment itself, as he set it forth in the first class of every semester in playwriting, was generous and simple. We were to write down those things we truly believed, the elements of our writer’s credo, and throughout the semester, in our own time, we were to expand on them little by little. He’d never ask to see our credo. It wasn’t graded. He didn’t specify a minimum number of pages. He simply sold the concept to us during that first week of classes and strongly suggested it would make a big difference. Then he left us to our own devices.

Of course, when you give students an assignment that the professor is never going to read or evaluate or ask about again, nine out of ten of them will never do the damned thing. I didn’t, my first semester in the class. I thought it was the kind of bullshit busywork that I could easily get away with not ever doing. In theory, I was right. I wrote and revised three plays that semester without ever having to think about what I really believed. They were okay student plays. Maybe even pretty good student plays.

Over the holiday break that year, though, I had some kind of minor crisis of faith. Maybe I had too much time on my hands, or maybe I was lonely and bored away from campus and my friends. Whatever the reason, I found myself writing in my journals quite a bit as I tried to find solace and inspiration. One night, I happened back upon Lou Catron’s grand and glorious credo. Suddenly I found the idea compelling. I ended up poring through past entries of my journal—in what, a diary that was about three years old by that point?—and compiling them into preliminary statements of belief. Item by item, over the next couple of weeks I went through and expanded each into a short essay that was more personal and heartfelt.

The next semester, my plays were a lot better. I mean, none of them were produced on Broadway with me highlighted as some kind of hitherto-unknown Southern wunderkind. But even at their most bonkers (I seem to recall writing a play that semester in which a clairvoyant housewife directed an amateur Shakespearean repertory company using as actors the ghosts from the local graveyard), I knew from where in my belief system each of those plays was coming. I could sense how much more confident my writing had become. Best of all, I always knew what I wanted to write about next.

Lou made me a convert. Over the years I’ve kept a credo in some form or another. It’s changed over the years, as Lou predicted it would. The concerns of a young man are not those of one in the um, middle-to-mid-late-summer-but-really-still-oodles-of-warm-weather-to-go-of-his-life old geezer like me. I keep it, and I keep revising it, because having a credo has made a difference in my writing. I keep a credo because it matters.

I want my students to have something that matters. So I assign the credo in the first class. I tell them how it will challenge them to confront and examine parts of themselves they might not have contemplated before. I tell them it will give their writing passion, depth, and that it will convince them that their intellectual property is valuable and worthy of attention. I inform them that throughout the semester we’ll continue talking about the development of their credos, and the challenges they encounter in doing so—but that I won’t ask to see it. It won’t be graded or evaluated.

Of course, predictably, nine out of ten students never do a thing about the assignment.

But oh, when they do, I can tell. Last semester I had a student in my memoir writing class—let’s call her Francine—who had a voice so distinct that, had you mixed an unread essay of hers with those of a hundred other students, I could without hesitation have picked it out. I knew what Francine believed. When she read one of her essays, I knew that Francine placed family above all else. I knew that Francine insisted upon the concepts of personal and familial loyalty, and that she had nothing but scorn for people who didn’t hold those as their highest moral absolutes. Francine wasn’t the most experienced writer, but every paragraph she wrote might as well have had I AM FRANCINE DAMMIT! stamped as the background watermark.

“You wrote your credo, didn’t you?” I asked her, one evening. “I mean, you really worked on it.”

Francine blinked at me in surprise. “Well yes,” she said. “You can tell?”

Yes. You can tell.

I think my young student from this semester was surprised when I asked picked that sentence from her essay and asked about the credo. She’s a very strong beginning writer; she has a good sense of purpose and a neat, insightful choice of detail. She writes with courage, and writes from the heart—two qualities that developing a credo encourages. But she hadn’t actually written anything as her writer’s credo, I suspect. She hadn’t yet made the connection that a credo isn’t woven from big, bombastic concepts, but from the little truths and self-realizations that make up our everyday lives. Truths like, I think it’s truly better to collect rich experiences than material things.

I hadn’t communicated myself well. I was teaching the credo all wrong. And I had a new class starting in just a few days.

When my Writing Calisthenics class had its first meeting later that week, I once again devoted a portion of the first class to the idea of the writer’s credo. Normally I would’ve launched into my usual talk about what a credo was, how I’d first encountered it, and why I thought it was important. In other words, what I’d always done that students yawned through while they wait for the first real assignment.

This time, though, I simply handed around a sheet of paper printed with statements. They included:

1. A stranger is a friend I just haven't yet met.
2. Everyone has only one true love in his or her life.
3. Arguing about matters of faith is a waste of time, as the only life we’ll have is the here and now.
4. Life is most honorable when lived without depending upon anyone for help.
5. My stories deserve to be heard.
6. The past is the past and shouldn't be revisited or dwelled upon.
7. Everything in the world is impermanent; we should not attach ourselves to things or to people.
8. Money does more good than harm.
9. I would and should sacrifice everything for my family.
10. Every adversity can be seen as a gift in disguise. The greater the adversity, the greater the gift.
11. I am responsible for my own happiness.
12. Anyone who doesn’t have a five-year personal/career plan is asking for trouble.
13. No one is truly complete until they have raised children.
14. In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
15. I believe that when fate or the universe offers us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it's our obligation to pursue it.

Without any other preface, I told them that what they held in their hands were statements of belief. They might not all be your beliefs. But you probably know someone who subscribes to each and every one of them. Two of them were my strong beliefs, I said, but for the moment it didn’t matter which. I gave them a moment to read them over, then suggested that they start at the top of the list and read them again.

This time, I told them, put a checkmark by those with which you strongly agree—on a scale where 1 represents extreme disagreement and 10 is strong agreement, check those that would get an 8 or above. Put large X marks by those that might get a mere 1 or 2—the items you find utterly distasteful and just plain wrong. It was okay, I told them, if in the end they didn’t mark any of them. In that case, at least pick out one or two that inspired a mild amount of agreement or disagreement.

I could see all the students found something to mark. After a moment, I told them that I wanted them to take five minutes and tweak two of the statements until they really represented what the student believed. If you’d put an X by one, I said, you should rewrite the affirmation until it reflected something that really and truly reflected what you think. Money does more good than harm might make them twitch, but perhaps Money is the root of all evil might suit you better. Maybe As a society, we must defeat economic inequity—soon is how you really feel. If that’s the case, fix it.

If there’s something you believe strongly, but you could express it better with a little adjustment . . . do it. Maybe you don’t want to condemn the innocent with No one is truly complete until they have raised children, but you really believe in My children are the center of my life. Great. Do it.

Pick two. Fix them up a little. Rewrite them from scratch. Renovate them in whatever way it takes to make them feel lived in—to make them feel like they’re yours.

Then I left the room.

When I came back a few minutes later, we sat down and discussed the changes they’d made. I was a little surprised that nearly everybody in the classroom had X’ed out and rewritten the third statement, the one about faith. (Maybe it was the contentious phrasing. I’ll have to remember that, next time around.) A couple of them rewrote the affirmation into a more traditional credence about needing religion in their lives, but one of them transformed it into something with a more agnostic bent that emphasized a need for communication. Some people rewrote the statements about career plans; others picked out the beliefs concerning family and amended those. Everyone had at least two statements they’d tinkered with until they were uniquely their own, though. A couple of the more ambitious had scrawled short paragraphs at the bottoms of their pages.

These two statements, these two beliefs that you’ve renovated and rehabilitated for yourself, I told them—they’re the start of your writer’s credo. Then I launched into my lecture about how stating This I believe followed by single strong conviction can be and should be the foundation for any number of stories and poems and plays and memoirs. They each had two. Think how much art they could weave from them both, alone or combination. They’d come up with two beliefs in less than ten minutes.

What if they had eight statements? They could do that in less than an hour on their own. Eight statements of belief were a solid cornerstone for a writer’s credo and they were already a quarter of the way there.

Did the exercise work as I hoped? Did it make writing the credo into a less daunting task? I don’t know. Maybe to most of them it seemed like the bullshit kind of assignment that they’d never have to turn in, that would never have evaluated, and that they would never contemplate or create.

For a couple of people in the class, though, I expect the assignment will resonate. They’ll think about their convictions and consider from what and where they arose. They’ll think about why their beliefs matter. Those students will have a certainty of what moral issues excite and inspire them. The art they create will be all the more heartfelt.

Then I’ll know who worked on their credo. I’ll be able to see that passion. Everyone will.

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.