Hello Loreates,
How are you surviving this utterly surreal World War Trump? Between breaking news alerts and calls to my reps, I’m taking refuge in my work, revising essays for publication, setting up writerly interviews in the hope that the center will hold, after all. I fervently believe that literature still plays a vital role in strengthening the critical thinking that democracy and peace require. It’s never “just a diversion” or “entertainment.” All writing is political if it’s any good. And that includes writing about writing. If you’re new here, know that this sentiment animates everything I do at MFA Lore. That’s why I’ve decided to offer this global peace special: a year of Paid Subscriber benefits for just $30.
Become a stronger writer and use your words to save the world:
Now, on to the business at hand.
At our Take 5 writing workshop last month, I invoked the old adage that writing is like talking to the stranger on the next bar stool. Do you know it? The underlying idea is that you’re never just “writing a book,” you’re telling a story to a reader who doesn’t know you, and you’re telling it for a reason that you must communicate to grab their attention so they’ll stick around to listen. Or, as George Orwell put it:
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” — George Orwell (h/t Cole Haddon )
To get that hearing, you lean toward your neighbor and whisper: “I have something to tell you…”
But this led to a much bigger conversation about the logic of the bar stool metaphor and the translation of “I have something to tell you…” into writing process. Having continued this conversation in my head over the past week, I thought I’d bring you into it here.
Read on!
Aimee
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Unpacking the Who, Why, What, How, and Whom of ‘I Have Something To tell You’
Write as if you’re talking to the stranger on the next bar stool.
I have no idea when I first heard this writing advice, but I confirm it almost every time I scrutinize the first lines of a story— especially stories told in 1st or close 3rd POV. Have a look at these openers from the first four short-short stories listed at narrativemagazine.com, and see what I mean:
I got this job where I sell snow cones from a cart in a petting zoo.
TONIGHT I’M STANDING in the bathroom, in my nightgown, scrubbing my false teeth with a toothbrush.
She fucks a sailor, a Turkish sailor, the summer she spends in Istanbul.
“You’d be surprised how many of us there are,” she said, as if it were gossip.
Can you hear the personal urgency, the intense leaning, the confidential voice almost strong enough for you to feel the heat and smell the perspiration coming off the narrator? Maybe the speaker is full-on facing you, or maybe just speaking sideways, but there’s no doubt these words are aimed at you (the metaphorical stranger at the bar) to get a reaction. They’re almost like verbal hands gripping your lapels. And those hands all deliver a single unspoken message: I have something to tell you!
The secret prelude/promise
If your story were an actual conversation at a bar (or on a bus or train, at a resort pool, during a group hike — the bar is merely a convention with conversational lubricants), the stranger would need to hear a little more about your “something” before paying attention. This would take the form of a prelude/promise such as:
Here’s what terror and grief will do to you…
I know what makes war so seductive…
What they never tell you about getting poor is that…
When you’re writing a story, you need that promise, too, but it probably won’t tumble out up front, the way it would in conversation. You might not be able to articulate the story’s promise until you’re several revisions in. And even then, you likely won’t want to state it so explicitly in your story.
So here’s a trick that can help you generate the same kind of heat and urgency on the page as you would if enticing that stranger at the bar:
