Friday Write #081
Hi! This is Good Ideas, a newsletter about writing, creativity, and craft (and sometimes animals—don’t worry, the cat is FINE), with weekly prompts designed to help you make progress in your current writing project. If you’re not working on something already, the prompts will help you start.
Greetings, writers—
This morning a friend and I visited an eighth grade classroom to “talk to the kids about a life as a woman writer.” That was the brief from our other friend, who’s a truly incredible and inspiring teacher at Vernon School.
We were like, life? Let’s talk about our mornings as women writers! Mine had consisted of pre-dawn foam-rolling, cleaning up cat vomit, making lunches for kids who are way too old to be coddled as such, going to a gym class, and then belatedly realizing that because the car was out of gas I would barely have enough time to make myself semi-presentable before arriving in the front office to get my name tag and visitor’s pass. Midday as a woman writer is writing this Substack, which I can tell will not be one of my best, but least it fits with the job description. My afternoon as a woman writer? Well, we’re out of coffee and brown rice, so it looks like it’ll involve a trip to Costco.
Such a glamorous writer’s life! But it was a lovely visit, with kids asking us things like how we choose names for our characters, whether we change strategies when we’re writing for kids vs. adults, and how we edit down our sentences so they don’t ramble too much.1 I never wanted to leave.
But leave I did, only because the bell rang, and now I want to pass on what seemed like a truly wonderful bit of writing advice from my teacher friend. One of the kids was talking about how she hadn’t done a great job on her most recent piece; she was worried that it was “uninspired.” My friend said, in her calm and wise way, “You don’t have to bring the fire to every school assignment. You just have to bring the structure.”
Everybody really loved that. I think you can interpret structure in all kinds of ways, too: the architecture and logic of the essay or story, obviously; or the basic meeting of the assignment criteria (i.e. it doesn’t have to be great, but it does have to be done); or even just the organization of your time: You don’t have to bring the fire to your writing practice every day, but you do have to bring the presence. Your presence. Your readiness. Your good will.
So I went to eighth grade and learned something today.
And now I’ll offer you a structure, a way to turn a memory into a very short story. This exercise comes from a craft book, the title of which I stupidly failed to put in my notes. (I’ll do my best to locate it so I can give credit where credit is due.)
Pick one scrap of memory that will build on itself to convey the most feeling.
Reframe your memory so that it has the form of a story – start with an opening description, then shift gear to a second character and dialogue. For me, this shift is what turns it into a story.
For the closure, one of my favorite ways to end is with a final line of dialogue, as in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: “Isn't it pretty to think so?”
The writer then includes a model, which is Stuart Dybek’s story Confession:
Memory into story. Go ahead, give it a shot!
Happy writing—
Emily
I had lots to say about all of these things.