“Start with a list,” I tell them. “Like Tim O’Brien did in “The Things They Carried,” the title story in a collection about an American platoon in Vietnam. In the story, O’Brien listed what each soldier carried on his person into the jungle, where the chances were good at least one of them would die on any given day. Every ounce of weight increased the burdens they bore, so they chose them carefully: Tranquilizers, a girl’s photo, foot powder. But also, the incalculable weight of their fear, love, guilt, and grief.
Everything is metaphor.
My workshop participants like this exercise. We are on Zoom, so I see them as small squares on my laptop screen, which makes them small indeed.
“Or write about a scar,” I suggest. “Make it real, don’t strain for meaning. “I give them 10 minutes to think about this. Some of them turn their cameras off, and some just mute their mics and leave the video on. I see their heads bent over their papers; some stare into space, and I think of my own scars.
There are a lot, most barely visible. One from when I was a baby cartwheeling down a flight of wooden stairs. One, the result of an adolescent bike accident—think Irish setter running into the path of an English racer on the downhill slope of a gravel road.
When my writers turn their cameras back on, I ask if anyone wants to share what they came up with in just 10 minutes—a rough draft, of course—no expectations. After all, didn’t we just read Anne Lamott’s famous essay, “Shitty First Drafts?
The best writing comes from letting go of any need to be perfect. And even as I promise them that I’m thinking—does the best life come from that kind of letting go as well? Write with abandon. Live with abandon.
Everything is metaphor.
And a woman who looks as if she can’t be more than 20 years old raises her hand and begins, “The night I met you, I accidentally cut myself. You held my hand, but we couldn’t stop the bleeding.” And she goes on to read an impromptu piece about wounds and longing and falling in love in a cooking class with a man who would hold and heal her for the next 30 years, and it just blows me away, it is so compelling. I know I should not be too effusive in my praise because the next volunteer will suffer by comparison—I should be neutrally dispassionate– but my goodness, have you met me?
I tell her how amazing the piece is and sure enough, the next writer to share has tried just as hard, but I have to dig deep to think of anything to say at all. That is the crucible of being worthy of another’s trust. It is not how you celebrate the talented, but how you accelerate those on the ascent. You are the energy that powers up the engines, you are the lifting force, then navigator.
Everything is metaphor.
Write about being rescued or rescuing someone else.
I won’t write it, but as my students dig deep again, I think about the season when young people annually sweep through my neighborhood, dropped off by a supervisor in a van to spend the day selling magazines door to door. I know they are required to sell a certain number before they can quit for the day, and the girl shifting her weight from foot to foot on the slate of my front porch is thin, pale, with a shy Georgia accent. I don’t want her magazines, but I do want to offer her water and a chance to sit down someplace cool for a few minutes.
I invite her in and am surprised when she tells me she is very newly pregnant and, she says, with a hitch in her voice, This is really hard.
I remember being newly pregnant. I remember really hard.
At the end of the day, the supervisor will drive her crew to a motel room off 301 South to sleep on the floor.
I can’t shoulder her burdens, but I can buy a bus ticket to Georgia.
Everything is metaphor.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
