Writing Prompt: Unspooling Our Way to the Truth
I want to talk about writing that contains truth, and how to achieve that. It’s a complicated topic, even though we hear about the importance of truth in our writing all the time. Just as with terms like sensory detail, or scene, or narrative arc, the term truth gets bandied about often—but without, I think, enough attention to what we really mean by it. Certainly, many prominent writers and thinkers have spoken on the matter. A few weeks ago, I quoted Wendell Berry, poet, essayist, and activist, who wrote, back in 2010, in a letter to an English teacher and her class:
“By taking up the study of writing … you are assuming consciously … a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. We live in a time when we are surrounded by language that is glib, thoughtless, pointless, or deliberately false. If you learn to pay critical attention to what you hear on radio or television or read in the newspapers, you will see what I mean.”
And Ernest Hemingway famously said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” Meanwhile, fiction writer Joy Williams said it this way in a Marginalian interview:
“The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the absurdity, the disorienting truth, the question that is not even a question, this is the koan of writing.”
Ah… the disorienting truth. So beautiful! But what is that, exactly? Certainly not factualism. Obviously not. Creative writing, even creative nonfiction writing, is not journalism (though certainly journalism can be richly creative, but that’s a topic for another day). Creative writing is art. So, what truly do we mean when we agree—some of us, anyway—that the job or art is to say something true?
I think we mean a few things, but perhaps mainly that our work must say something so precise, so new, so slanted, and so alive that it wakes readers up. Something so deeply and wildly articulated that it surprises readers in some significant way, turning up the volume (and this is true even of the quietest work!) on some inescapable, universally human reality. Given that I believe this, it’s no accident that I placed that Wendell Berry quote within a discussion of the need for writers to defamiliarize our work, including the language we use, enough to “make it capable” of doing that most crucial job of telling the truth.
How then—in a nuts and bolts way—do we do this?
We must begin, I believe, by breaking out of our cages and writing against the grain of our typical habits. One way we can do so is to turn away from factualism, no matter our genre, and free ourselves from realism, even if we’re writing creative nonfiction. Because yes, something can be true but not literal. What is metaphor, after all? The reason I find abandoning realism so useful for getting at the truth is because it can open doors we didn’t realize were standing between us and the truth. As Williams said, and it bears repeating:
“The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it.”
She goes on to say:
“Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.”
That great cold elemental grace which knows us.
Okay, right—that is what I want! But if abandoning realism is a way to get at truth in our writing, then … how do we do that? How do we “abandon realism?” One surefire way is to try your hand at fabulism. Yes, fabulism! This is going to be hard for some writers, I know, but I encourage you to give it a go anyway to see what happens. I think of it like fishing (even though I am an ethical vegetarian, ha): You cast your line and see what you bring out of the water. If you can’t use what’s on the hook, throw it back and cast again. We did this last week in my Writing in the Dark workshop—it was our first week of this session—and results so far have been wild, startling, and true—and, to be honest, more interesting and fun to read than what often comes out of the water during the first week of the workshop!
We began our process with a collective close reading of Ben Loory’s flash fiction, “Bear,” published in CRAFT. Loory’s work is new to me, but he’s hailed as a star among contemporary fabulists. We know this about Loory’s process from the story’s introduction in CRAFT:
“In the author’s note that accompanies this story, Loory generously offers the reader a window into his writing process, sharing that ‘almost everything I do as a writer is designed to eliminate rational thought and amplify the voice of…the unconscious, the subconscious, the instinctive….’ Reading Loory’s note alongside ‘Bear,’ one can imagine the writer following the thread as it unspools, as the narrative ‘push[es] relentlessly to uncover and exacerbate the central conflict inside the main character and bring it to some kind of conclusion.’”
As my class read Loory’s story closely, we noted its effects at the line level (very plain language, a children’s-story-esque sensibility with copious repetition, rhythm and even some rhyme, a sense of movement, spare formatting with short paragraphs and lines, and an engaging use of dialogue). Then we talked at length about the story’s aboutness, which is of course especially interesting when we’re dealing with fabulism. In other words, the story is not about two people who bring home a bear to raise as a child. It’s about something … truer.
Once we had pinpointed some possible truths in the story, it was time to write. I offered my students a step-by-step writing prompt through which they could use fabulism to excavate something truer than true. As I’ve said, they’ve been doing exactly that, with exciting results. You can try it for yourself and see what happens.
Note: although this prompt pulls from fabulist fiction, it provides a process for stumbling your way through the dark into a new truth that may very well end up being a metaphor for something real in your own life. So, watch for that possibility.
Writing Prompt: Unspooling Our Way to the Truth
I invite you to begin by exploring premises for stories based on the unrealistic. That is, scenarios that could not happen in the world as we know it. I invite you to continue that process for a couple of days if possible. Let yourself be imaginative like a child. Let yourself explore all sorts of ideas for stories that are not realistic. Let yourself daydream your way into the wild and fantastical. Just a few of the ideas my students had: the ability for people to “wish themselves dead,” a red ribbon with yet-to-be-determined powers in an otherwise realistic setting, a world where our words spill out of our mouths in different shapes, sizes, and colors. Again, let your mind wander and search, explore and reach. Try not to censor anything.
The next step is to select your most interesting premise—the one that you are most excited to let unspool, the one whose thread you most want to follow.
Now, do that.
Using plain, clear, direct, simple language, follow your story. Don’t worry about knowing where it is going. You must eliminate rational thought and allow for anything happen. Do not try to know what your story is about yet, because you can’t. The feral and sometimes even dangerous space of uncertainty is where we want to dwell for now.
Eventually, however, as the thread unspools, it will take a shape. It will almost certainly (though this might take some patience) start to be about something more than the sum of its parts, in the same way that “Bear” was about more than a bear. Your story will deepen. As it deepens, something true will emerge. This moment is important.
The truth that emerges is pointing you toward your aboutness. And now that you have an inkling of what this weird thing you are making might be about, start cutting out the parts that don’t serve that aboutness. Meanwhile, write into any corners that need filling. Do this until the story seems to have some kind of final shape.
Now comes the hardest part, which is to find an ending for your story that brings it to rest, that casts a light back on all that has come before and illuminates the story’s core truth and aboutness. You can only do this after you have, as Loory describes, allowed the narrative to “push relentlessly to uncover and exacerbate the central conflict inside the main character and bring it to some kind of conclusion.”
Importantly, you must do all this in 750 words or fewer. If the story wants to be bigger than that, great. Then let this distinct portion be a well-shaped scene. If you have no word limit for the exercise, you cannot as easily find the aboutness.
