Not Quite What I Was Planning

Hemingway once wrote a short story that was six words long. (For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.)

A couple of years ago, SMITH magazine held a literary contest, asking folks to submit a memoir in six words. The result is a slim volume of memoirs, called Not Quite What I Was Planning. Some are hilarious, some sound like potential titles for country songs, some fall a bit flat. But reading them is completely addictive.

"Bad brakes discovered at high speed." by J. Baumeister

"Found true love, married someone else." by B. Stromberg

"I still make coffee for two." Z. Nelson

"Savior complex makes for many disappointments." A Schubach

"Cursed with cancer. Blessed with friends." H. Davies (9 years old)

This is a good exercise, the attempt to sum up your life, so far, in six words. Some have floated the idea of trying to sum up the life of someone famous, such as the current president, in six words, and a few apt suggestions can be found on the SMITH mag website. (My favorite is: "Born on third base, stole home." Click here for more.)  The magazine is now taking submissions for its next volume of 6 worders. 

Five Quick Stories

People stare at Larry. They do. I mean, he's striking, so why wouldn't they, but still. It happened in New York City, at a restaurant. A man with long hair and these John Lennon glasses stared Larry all the way to his seat. Years ago, we were walking on the street in Provincetown in the middle of the afternoon, and as we passed a bar we heard a bunch of whooping. The men inside had all written big number 10s on their cocktail napkins and held them against the glass. I thought the guys were making fun of us or something, so I smiled and waved. One of them yelled out, "Honey, it's not you. It's him." I found this hilarious. Larry? Not so much. He refused to walk by there ever again.

Last Friday it happened again. We were having lunch with our friend, Jack. At the next table, a woman kept looking at us. She was looking pointedly at us and then leaning across the table to talk excitedly to her companion, who was a man. This happened multiple times. In my narcissism, I thought, "Why is she looking at me? Do I know her?" Then when we stood and walked to the door, her gaze followed Larry. She cut one harshly appraising glance at me, and then back to Larry. Then she leaned down to talk even more intently to her guy friend. At the door, I asked Larry, "What the hell was that?" He seemed unperturbed, but he knew exactly what I was talking about. For the rest of the day I made up reasons, increasingly crazy reasons why someone would do that. It was fun.

THE EXERCISE: Take a tiny incident you've observed and write five quick stories about it. The seed for this can be as small as you like. Once I walked behind two women in Back Bay. They were having a rather intense discussion that I couldn't hear and then one of them said with such vehemence: "I know the Dewey Decimal System like nobody's business!" She was quite angry and defensive about it. Start there. Or someone staring at a stranger in a restaurant. The five quick stories can be five reasons, just a sentence each. Or they can veer off into many detailed paragraphs. The exercise works better if the stories are, or seem to be, about strangers. 

How Are Things?

Roger-Pol Droit is a research fellow at a think tank in Paris. A couple of years ago, he decided to study objects, to examine and write about a series of objects. He literally took the question, "how are things?" seriously and literally for several months. He wondered if objects have lives, which he admitted seems silly, but then he decided to examine them closely and deeply to see what emerged. He said later he wanted to "draw nearer to things, to spy on them."

What eventually emerged was the book, How Are Things: A Philosophical Experiment, which is astonishing and wonderful, and sadly not in print in the US.

Early on, he describes a bowl of onion soup. 

"Set before me is a large bowl, steaming, still bubbling. Fragrant, crusted around the edges. Dark brown in some areas, almost black, tending to pale yellow in others. But what arrives is not a soup. More than the fumes, the steam, the waft of oven, what is set before me is a bowl. Solid, heavy, as if from the depths of time. From childhood and beyond. Prehistoric. A concave thing, protecting the liquid, preventing it from escaping. The shape of reassurance, instantly companionable and trustworthy.

"I almost forget what I am doing here, in the present. Here is one of the earliest, most primitive objects. This thing remembers the emergence of mankind. The larger primates had clubs, stones, rough likenesses of weapons and tools. But no bowls. Only with mankind to platters make an appearance: gourds, basins, bowls.

"The bowl inaugurates the function of receptacle. It is a fixture of reassurance. Amid the universal flux, the receptacle intervenes and stanches the endless flow. It preserves against dispersal. It prevents spillage. It suspends pouring. Liquid, which is fanatically committed to leakage and loss, is stayed. More effectively than cupping one's hands. And indefinitely. Effortlessly."

He goes on about the bowl. And then turns to the paperclip, which is an object of Eros. It binds things, he says, without paralyzing.  A key is like a lover; it needs a lock. But beyond all this, is the emergence of the writer who studies these objects, something he muses on in the essays. Objects are our silent companions, he says, who store our memories and emotions.

It's a lovely book and so deeply calming.

THE EXERCISE: Describe your silent companions. A fiction instructor at Grub often gives this prompt, to write a story about an object. The object has to be the central drama of the story. It brings the characters together, brings the epiphany, if any. It seems like a difficult and pointless thing to do, but try it. Once you have an object, characters appear all around it.

Planting Seeds

Yesterday, I sat at Garret's swimming lesson and wrote out my to-do list for the week. When you haven't started your to-do list and it's Wednesday, well, that's a sign of poor planning, now isn't it? 

Garret was having no better time of it. We usually arrive at swim class a bit early so the G-man can splash around in the shallow end before he faces taking turns with the laps and the breathing. Usually, there's another boy there, Jonathan, who is the sweetest little boy in the world, but who has no boundaries. He sees Garret get into the pool and charges toward him and wraps him in a wet bear hug and kisses his face and puts his nose on Garret's nose and smells him and touches his hair.  All the while Garret stands there smiling awkwardly and looking around for Jonathan's Mommie. And then she strides over from the chairs where we sit. She leans out over the side of the pool and says, "No, honey. Garret doesn't like that." She says it over and over again while reaching out to tug him away. Jonathan doesn't want to hear this, but he takes it, and goes off, still smiling. Then when she turns her back, he comes bounding over again.  His Mommie has apologized to me about this, and I just shrug. I really want to say, "Hey, all kids are nuts. Mine, too. What can you do?" Clearly, this would be the wrong thing to say, but it's true. At no time does Garret ever say anything to Jonathan. He doesn't push him away or say go away. Nothing. He just stands there, waiting.

So Garret and Jonathan are doing their little ceremony with Jonathan cutting glances at mom to see when she's not looking. I'm writing out the list that will not end. This paperwork, these errands, this deadline. Endless. I know that this little respite will be the last time I have to think until midnight. After the lesson ends, I hustle Garret out of the pool and into the locker room to shower and change and off to the car. The instant we get in the door, it's already 5 and I'm late leaving for my 6 o'clock class at a bookstore just far enough away in suburban Boston to need an hour's stop-and-go through rush-hour traffic. I workshop 11 stories between 6 and 9, then head home to set the coffee maker, pour a martini and start a 10 o'clock phone meeting to line edit the Indecent Proposal that absolutely, positively must hit the agent's desk by Friday. Then I sit dazed in front of the TV until exhaustion takes over.

The question is this: When to write? What to write? My schedule is all over me like that sweet little boy in the pool. I like all my little jobs, but no one is going to tug them away so I can get some space. Not writing for a few days doesn't work, either. Try that once, and you'll wake up a month later, or a year later, and find an empty notebook and an imagination to match. Ask me how I know this.

The answer yesterday was to sow some seeds on the back page of my notebook. This concept came from a student last term, a wonderful writer who also teaches English in middle school. She gives her students journals at the beginning of the year and the kids have to start by making a list of things that interest them on the very last page. Then later on, when someone whines and says, "I can't think of what to write," she can very sweetly point out the list they have made for themselves. It's sort of like saying "shut up and write" but ever so much nicer.

THE EXERCISE: Chuck the to-do list. That battle was lost long ago. Make a list of impulses, artistic or otherwise. It can be a list of book ideas, story ideas, old anecdotes that might become stories. It can be a list of the sins you would commit if you had the guts. It can be a list of the titles of books you will someday write. It can be the first line of five poems you will never write. It can be news stories that should (or should not) be made into movies. It can be a list of provocative topics (liars, whiskey, garbage, relief, massage) that could yield an interesting paragraph or two--or more. This is a personal collection of ideas still compact and powerful and waiting to grow.