The Case for Impulse

Friday Write #166

Dear writers,

Arriving at my volunteer shift this morning, I saw Violet flinging globs of peanut butter into a stainless steel bowl big enough to wash a bulldog in. “I decided we should have peanut butter chocolate chip waffles,” she said, dumping a bunch of chocolate chips on top of the flour, peanut butter, and whatnot, and then aiming the spray faucet at everything. “Let’s see if it works.”

How Violet and I are different, besides her skill at skateboarding, her excellent neon eyeshadow, and about a thousand other things, is that if I had an idea for chocolate chip waffles with peanut butter in them, I would go onto the Internet to see if anybody else had done such a thing before, and then I would read several recipes, decide which one I liked best, and then do careful ingredient math to make breakfast for 60.

Is one way better than the other? Not necessarily, but one is clearly more fun.

no waffles in this Dutch Breakfast by Floris van Schooten (1590-ca.1655)

It occurred to me, as I was operating the waffle iron moments later, that Violet’s breakfast prep was also a potential lesson for writing. To wit:

Follow your impulses, especially when drafting. Beware of overanalysis. Have a basic knowledge of the ingredients you’re working with. Don’t plan too carefully, and prepare to be surprised.

Trust the process, I would urge.

Fuck around and find out, Violet would say.

If all that’s too hokey for you, well, fine, same. But lately I’ve been thinking about the role that trust plays in writing, and the idea that you can let your story (or novel or poem or essay) show you what comes next. To tell you it wants.

George Saunders says something to this effect, and Bret Anthony Johnston does, and Amy Hempel does, too. No time to find the hyperlinks, sorry, but the questions they ask are along the lines of: What is already in my story so far? What is revealed to me by that? And how does it point me onward toward the next scene, the next setting, the next sentence?

It’s about trusting the process—but maybe also the subconscious. (?) (Will have to ponder that more later.) In the 60 minutes between volunteering and the next thing on the calendar, I did have time to find this nice little piece about a workshop Amy Hempel once taught, and I’ve stolen your writing prompts for today from it.

She asked her students to pick any day and “ask twenty questions of it.” You can do that, or you can answer one of the questions they came up with, writing as yourself or as one of your characters. A few are here:

Will it come in time?

What do I have that’s already enough?

What is a secret that dismantles my sense of self? (I’m pretty sure this one comes from a Gordon Lish workshop Hempel took many years ago, and that her answer to this question is the story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.”)

Happy writing!

Emily

P.S. The waffles came out great. Clearly the batter wanted peanut butter.

P.P. S. Some things I read this week:

• “Every book grants you the language
  you need to make contact
  with something you had no idea even existed…”

• “Scrolling destroys spatial memory. Years of interrupted reading patterns weakened sustained attention. These aren’t metaphorical or subjective changes. They’re neurological adaptations, visible in behavior and measurable in studies.”

• “I’m sorry for neglecting

  your myriad signs, which seem

  obvious now as a hawk’s head

  on an empty plate.”

• I got a fake Blue Mountain e-card “from” Jonathan Franzen, my very first writing teacher, because his email account had been hacked. Here’s a Paris Review interview with him that I started but haven’t finished.