Wisening your Vast Writer’s Heart

Last month, I wrote about my Shit I Cannot Know List. This is a place where I write down questions that empty my life of meaning if I try to pin them down intellectually. Here are some examples: How much of the world have I hurt unknowingly? Do our actions matter in any cosmic sense? Is reincarnation real? Is life nothing but a simulation?

I promised this month to send some ways I use these questions as fuel for my writing practice. These practices are geared toward the personal essay. The second practice is also a great springboard if you’d like to explore fictionalizing your nonfiction*.  

First, if you’ve not read “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story,” by Phillip Lopate, please do so now. Here’s his opening sentence: “In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, which will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self.”   

I’m reminded of moments I’ve sought counsel from a certain wise elder in my life, and she’s responded with a story. The purpose of her story is always twofold: I learn that I am not alone in my experience; I learn how others have survived/grown through similar experiences.

In order to pull this off, you have to have done the growing part. If you’re a writer, this growth is often accomplished on the page through a series of drafts.

The questions on your Shit I Cannot Know List are queries that you are uniquely positioned to explore in your writing. Why? Because these questions arise from personal pain points and obsessions, which is the stuff of initiation. Probe those places and you grow wiser.

Here are two exercises meant to help you unpack your own wisdom and develop your vast writer’s heart:

Opposites Attract

 1.     Select one question from your list. Write it at the top of the page.

 2.     Look over your life and write down five moments it seemed to you that the premise of the question was true.

Release yourself from constraints of time and event as you create this list.

For instance, imagine the question is, “Did my sister want to hurt my feelings with those hateful comments last Thanksgiving?” You won’t get very far if you just poke and poke at the few minutes surrounding her hurtful words, or if you only mine your relationship since the comment was made.

Go back farther, through the whole of your relationship with her. You’re looking to affirm the premise, so seek specific incidents where it seemed clear that she really did hurt other’s feelings intentionally. Seek proof of her callousness, her cruelty, her ignorance.

3.     Now look over your life and write down five moments when it seemed to you that the premise of the question was false.

Again, release yourself from the constraints of time and event.

If we’re working with the same question, then what proof will you seek to prove that your sister didn’t want to hurt your feelings at Thanksgiving? Maybe you know that you know has armored herself since her terrible first marriage. Seek specific incidents where you saw the need for this armor, or perhaps specific incidents where you saw her armor up unnecessarily, blocking herself from joy.

The idea is to look for conflicting truths. Allow that the questions on your list can be both true and false. Look for proof of both in your life.

Holding Complexity

 1.     Pick two events from the Opposites Attract exercise and draft them into quick scenes.

2.     Print each scene on a different color paper.

3.     Cut each scene into workable bits. This may mean that you cut the scene into paragraphs or you may cut it into sentences. There’s no right or wrong here, just intuitively reduce each scene to its building blocks.

4.     Spend some time arranging a new scene that loosely alternates between these two moments from your life. What happens when you put your sister crying over her husband’s betrayal right next to her spewing vitriol at Thanksgiving?

5.     Bonus step! Take one of your rearranged scenes and fictionalize it. Here’s how:

Change all that you can. Turn your sister into an old man in a nursing home; turn yourself into his favorite nurse. Turn your sister into a housekeeper and yourself into the homeowner.

Why are these characters behaving this way now? Why are they saying these hateful things? Why does one of them throw the gravy tureen, and how in the hell did that gravy tureen end up in the nursing home to begin with?

Give these characters motivations for their conflicting, complicated behaviors, reasons for their internal thoughts. Use your imagination to piece these two scenes together into a single story.

The goal of these exercises isn’t to write amazing narrative essays or brilliant short stories. The goal is simply to chip away at the solidified narratives that keep us from telling good stories.

Flat characters aren’t interesting, whether they’re imaginary or known to us. In order to deepen the story around our most painful moments, the stuff that gives rise to our lists, we must deepen our capacity to hold complexity.

With these exercises, we’re working our way toward our wisest, present-day narrator selves, the one who is currently holding the pen and telling the truth of what happened.

I’ve often been told that I don’t have to put someone out of my heart just because I will not allow that person into my home. Easily said, but so difficult to do—the work of a lifetime, really. These exercises help me with that. Perhaps they’ll help you too.

*I’m often asked by students and clients, “How do I turn (insert life event) into fiction?” Usually, folks want to tell their story exactly as it happened but hope that by changing the names nobody will get hurt. This doesn’t work.