My writers’ group—eight to twelve of us who get together every month to provide critiques, commiseration, celebration, and snacks—tried a storytelling exercise this week. (This was after a brief mental warm-up: describing an eighth dwarf for Snow White. “Sleazy” cheated at poker and was always trying to get Snow White alone.) Our main challenge for the evening was to briefly describe “the strangest thing that has ever happened to us or the oddest thing we have ever seen.”
Two hours in, we were still going strong. One hitchhiking escapade with a dodgy driver that ended in Death Valley could have been recorded almost verbatim as a complete short story. Others were pieces of narrative that might launch a whole symphony or be used in some work as incidental music: People and things that disappeared mysteriously. Ghost stories. Clairvoyants. A whole subcategory of jaw-dropping pet shenanigans.
The point of all this was to show ourselves that we have amazing, interesting stuff inside. We’ve had experiences. We’ve had emotional peaks and troughs. And we can draw on these in our own writing, much like the most uxorious actor, if he were cast as Othello, might seek out and magnify into mountainous proportions one minor wifely flaw. One member of our group could reconstruct her terror when locked in a room with a noisy ghost; another might recreate the merriment of family misadventures in Olde England; one has given the fear she felt when being stalked to her fictional character in a related situation.
This, I think, is how the often misunderstood dictum, “write what you know” should be interpreted. When it is taken too literally, it is patently absurd. Not to mention boring. “Another fascinating day in front of the computer, interrupted by a run to the grocery store. A literal milk run! Received 72 emails. Decided not to order FiOS.”
Writers can and should ground their writing in the emotions they know, distilling and intensifying them to the right pitch. We don’t have to write dully about emotions, we can write with them. Ready-to-tap, in full array, they are buried in the experiences that have amazed, amused, shocked, warmed, and frightened each of us. Two hours of round-robin storytelling proved the point. While none of the anecdotes we told each other this week will ever appear as a complete story—except perhaps the one about the wayward hitchhiker—we can filter the feelings these events inspired through new fictional situations and watch them emerge in emotionally compelling new guises.
Want to try it yourself?
- The exercises we did were from Naming the World, an eclectic collection by notable authors, assembled by Bret Anthony Johnston, pages 168 and 333.
- Notoriously challenging individual and group exercises appear at the back of The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner. (Three of us had published stories that began with one of these.)
- English 50 – Intro to Creative Writing: Exercises for Story Writers – two pages of exercises, compiled by Jim Manis at Penn State University.