Greetings, writers—
Someone once told me that Famous Writer X (I can’t remember who the someone or the famous writer was, sorry) once threw a rubber band into the middle of a big MFA seminar table and commanded, “Write about that.”
I took issue with this pedagogical strategy at first. Couldn’t he (I mean, of course it was a he) spend some time coming up with an actual writing prompt?
Then again, starting out with the smallest, most boring building block imaginable would allow for wildly varying results—way more than, say, John Gardner’s barn assignment from The Art of Fiction: “Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death.” That’s a fine prompt, and an entirely different ball of rubber.
Usually Good Ideas lands pretty solidly in Gardner territory, but today I’m going to copy Famous Writer X, though I can’t throw my chosen object down in front of you.
It’s a name tag.
Here, for inspiration, are three moments featuring this humble item. The first is from a Paris Review interview with the brilliant Joy Williams; the second is a line that Patricia Lockwood cut from her excellent novel No One is Talking about This; the last is a title of a New York Times Modern Love column.
I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. Receptive and responsible. If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it. You stop getting these omens. I love this little church group I go to. The other day we were talking about how God appears or doesn’t appear and how we’re nervous about seeing God, and it was all very interesting, but then somebody piped up, “Well, I think God appears often during the day! We just don’t recognize it! For example, I was trying to find my name tag before the ten-thirty service. There I was with all the name tags, I just couldn’t find it, and then I looked down and it had fallen on the floor! I thought, There’s God! Telling me where it was!”
You know what I told her? I said that it was really a large name tag. It was. It was huge. How could she misplace it in the first place?
Life as a long experiment to discover what was the smallest amount of power that a person would abuse. The answer seemed to be: name tag.
White Shirt, Black Name Tag, Big Secret
Happy Friday, happy writing—
Emily
Hello!
My name is
Your Best Fan
Love,
Holly