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Learning Plots as a Way of Understanding History (and Ourselves)

In an essay in his book, Stranger than Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk outlines two benefits of writing: 1) It can help you make sense, and take ownership, of your own life and 2) it can help you better understand history (which in turn can help you understand how history is shaped).

One of the money lines from the quote below is, “if we’re too lazy to learn history history, maybe we can learn plots. Maybe our sense of ‘been there, done that’ will save us from declaring the next war.” Aside from that, the idea that forcing yourself to unpack ideas and pictures of the world beyond the detail we’re accustomed to thinking about is helpful. Maybe you really should try to imagine what a happy version of yourself would look like (and thereby try to figure out what you’re lacking in the present).

Controlling the story of your past—recording and exhausting it—that skill might allow us to move into the future and write that story. Instead of letting life just happen, we could outline our own personal plot. We’ll learn the craft we’ll need to accept that responsibility. We’ll develop our ability to imagine in finer and finer detail. We can more exactly focus on what we want to accomplish, to attain, to become.

You want to be happy? You want to be at peace? You want to be healthy?

As any good writer would tell you: unpack “happy.” What does it look like? How can you demonstrate happiness on the page—that vague, abstract concept. Show, don’t tell. Show me “happiness.”

In this way, learning to write means learning to look at yourself and the world in extreme close-up. If nothing else, maybe learning how to write will force us to take a closer look at everything, to really see it—if only in order to reproduce it on a page.

Maybe with a little more effort and reflection, you can live the kind of life story a literary agent would want to read.

Or maybe . . . just maybe this whole process is our training wheels toward something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures. Our flood of books and movies—of plots and story arcs—they might be mankind’s way to be aware of all our history. Our options. All the ways we’ve tried in the past to fix the world.

We have it all: the time, the technology, the experience, the education, and the disgust.

What if they made a movie about a war and nobody came?

If we’re too lazy to learn history history, maybe we can learn plots. Maybe our sense of “been there, done that” will save us from declaring the next war. If war won’t “play,” then why bother? If war can’t “find an audience.” If we see that war “tanks” after the opening weekend, then no one will green-light another one. Not for a long, long time.

Then, finally, what if some writer comes up with an entirely new story? A new and compelling way to live, before . . .

Sorry, your seven minutes is up.

You can read the entire essay (entitled You Are Here) HERE.

Be Interesting, Be Interested

Stop worrying about how many people follow you online and start worrying about the quality of people who follow you. Don’t waste your time reading articles about how to get more followers. Don’t waste time following people online just because you think it’ll get you somewhere. Don’t talk to people you don’t want to talk to, and don’t talk about stuff you don’t want to talk about.

If you want followers, be someone worth following. Donald Barthelme supposedly said to one of is students, ‘Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?’ This seems like a really mean thing to say, unless you think of the word interesting the way writer Lawrence Weschler does: For him, to be ‘interest-ing’ is to be curious and attentive, and to practice ‘the continual projection of interest.’ To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested (pp. 129, 131).

-Austin Kleon, Show Your Work, pp. 129, 131

I also happen to be reading Barry Hannah’s book, Boomerang, right now. The foreword actually mentions that it was Hannah who made this comment to one of his students. Interestingly, Hannah grew up in the town I now live in, and I happened to have been in contact with Barthelme’s brother just this week. Small world.

If you want to be interesting, be interested. And not just in people like you. Be interested in people, and stuff, that you aren’t naturally interested in.

Honesty that Dismantles Your Own Sense of Self

Do you remember the first class?

HEMPEL

Vividly. The assignment was to write our worst secret, the thing we would never live down, the thing that, as Gordon put it, “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” And everybody knew instantly what that thing, for them, was. We found out immediately that the stakes were very high, that we were expected to say something no one else had said, and to divulge much harder truths than we had ever told or ever thought to tell. No half-measures. He thought any of us could do it if we wanted it badly enough. And that, when I was starting out, was a great thing to hear from someone who would know.

-Amy Hempel, from The Art of Fiction No. 176, The Paris Review (Read it online HERE)

This is Amy Hempel describing her first class with her teacher, and a famous author and editor, Gordon Lish.

As I’ve devoted much of the last year to reading (so-called) minimalist authors, Amy Hempel has not only risen near the top of that list, but near the top of my list in general. The fact that she now teaches at an SEC school doesn’t hurt either.

Her short stories are worth the purchase price for the first lines alone. The first line of Tom-Rock through the Eels is one of my favorite sentences: “Are you here for all the things that I don’t have?” The Harvest beings with, “The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.” The story she’s referencing in the interview above,  In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried, has an equally good first line: “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting.” I recommend her collected stories as highly as I recommend anything.

I want that to be the line in my comments section instead of ‘Your Thoughts:’ Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting.

The disciples of Gordon Lish, and his literary descendants, use the trauma of their lives to fuel their stories. They do not necessarily tell you about their own lives explicitly, but they will hide their lives within stories. Tom Spanbauer refers to this as “dangerous writing.”

Let me get back to the quote from her Paris Review interview (there are a ton of great interviews at that site by the way). Imagine walking into a classroom/workshop with a teacher you greatly respect. Now imagine that that teacher required that you divulge your deepest darkest secret. You can read about Amy Hempel’s in In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried.

Here’s the deal as a Christian. What we do is this: we try not to tell lies. As long as we’re not fibbing we convince ourselves that we’re honest. But honesty may well involve much more than how we speak. It has to involve how we deal with ourselves.

Personally, I am so prone to bury all of my hurts, fears, and anxieties and pretend that they don’t exist. If they start creeping up I tell them to go away.

One of my good friends is going on this journey through minimalist literature with me. We each read things. We share what we read. We share how the things we read help. And so we help each other. He preached a sermon recently on 2 Cor. 1:3-5: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”

He actually referenced the above Amy Hempel quote in the sermon as evidence of the fact that some writers solicit more honesty of students than the church does of its disciples. The point of the sermon was that if we’re not honest about our hurts, then God cannot bring comfort. And it is through the comfort that God brings, which we often miss, that we are actually able to minister to others. You can listen to the sermon HERE.

In their own ways, the ‘minimalists’ use their hurts in their writing both for catharsis and to help others.

Here’s the thing for Christians, or at least for me: Are writers at writing workshops more honest than Christians? I tend to bury my pain and anxiety. I stick my fingers in my ears and say la la la really loud and hope that they’ll go away.

We are scared of digging up things that will ‘dismantle our sense of self,’ that will expose us, make us vulnerable. We think that ‘thou shalt not lie’ simply means that we don’t tell fibs. We never consider that we ought to be honest with ourselves.

We bury old hurts, they become scars, if you scratch them they start to bleed. We don’t want that. We want them to stay buried. Who would risk the danger of dismantling our sense of self?

The thing is, since we’re so content to bury it all as if it never happened, we never leave opportunity for God to truly heal the wound. Like a man with a gash that needs stitches, and he bandages it and refuses to see the doctor. We won’t dismantle our sense of self, and so we never really figure out who we can be. We never open up the possibility of the God of all comfort ministering to us so that we can minister to others.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

You Too?

Whenever I hear someone say they write to “express themselves,” my first thought is, nobody cares. Life is hard for everyone, some more or less than others, but it’s hard enough that a complete stranger demanding attention in order to express feelings about whatever is significant to them, personally, smacks of entitled bulls**t, aka privilege. I tell my students over and over, the purest way to express an emotion is to elicit that emotion from your reader. I say purest, not quickest or easiest. The expression is purest because the emotions are the reader’s, unadulterated and straight from their own motherboard.

The purest way to express an emotion is to elicit that emotion from your reader.

Conveying an emotion—fear, joy, anger, love, contempt—by eliciting that response from the reader makes the feeling shared. It’s those moments that make reading so worthwhile, those moments when we come across a passage that speaks to us, where the author simply nails it by putting into precise words a feeling, perception or experience that is so fleeting and nuanced we thought we were alone with it, or lacked the capacity to express it, to share it. Those lines that make you stop and think, Yes, that’s it, exactly, those are the moments when the writer and reader meet each other halfway. It’s the shared experience of emotion taking place above some chasm of time, distance, age, etc., that is the very nature of empathy. “Yeah, I get it.” “Me, too.” “I thought nobody else felt that way.” It’s the same note struck at the beginning of a friendship or love affair. “Yes, you get me.”

-Craig Clevenger, from The Safety of Transgression versus the Risk of Honesty (LitReactor.com)

In Jack Gilbert’s poem, Poetry is a Kind of Lying, he says,

Degas said he didn’t paint
What he saw, but what
Would enable them to see
The thing he had.

Preachers, evangelists, writers, people take note: it is not enough to be excited. It’s not enough that something gives you goosebumps. It’s not enough to tell someone that you love it or how it makes you feel, or to tell them that they should feel the way you do. You need to communicate it in a way that will actually make them feel the way you feel and see what you have.