Writing Lessons #2: Writers Are Sluts
on how to push a paragraph through to the end
It’s 5am, Penelope Trunk cried, when I told her the time at the start of our first call. That’s crazy, I forgot where you lived.
It’s fine, I said, because I had never been so wide-eyed and bushy tailed since my daughter was born.
Do you feel like you have so much to say about being a parent of a young kid? Do you feel like you’re about to explode?
Yes, I said.
Good, she said, on the same call. Then, you’ll say all the things about having a child that I wanted to say.
You’re still together with her dad? she asked, and I said, so far.
Congratulations, that’s hard, she said.
Oh, she’ll read my journal, I thought, and I was right that she did. It’s really really good to find someone that will read whatever you put down and tell you what resonates. Thank you, dear readers of this newsletter, for sending me texts when I send something out that speaks to you most.
This is good, she said of three handwritten pages about lockdown. You’re writing fast, she said. You should sent it out. I didn’t tell her I had no idea about where one sends anything. To me, I had already sent it out: I sent it to her! Out of myself was enough of a space to make. That time, two rooms, one of us working in one, the other two of us sleeping in the other. These tiny sentences all adding up to a fully formed memory of the hardest time of our lives.
Try to write each snippet a little longer, she said, I think each time you get close to an ending but you stop before you’re there.
Does that bit of advice ring true to you? To me, it was like a summary of my whole fucking life. To be just far enough along with a project that you can’t throw it away, but not enough along that it’s something of value, is the place I’ve been with so many projects. It’s at this point that a critical part of me failed. It is at this point that I give up. I didn’t know how to push MYSELF, meaning, I knew where the finish line was, but I started focusing on the finish line so much that I forgot that what was needed to get there was my body. I guess I’m trying to say that in the effort to complete things, I abandoned myself.
The tip on how push a paragraph through to the end proved to be such valuable writing advice that I use it almost every day. It’s easy to write three sentences about anything, just try it. It’s easy to tell someone something but not quite enough to make a connection. Then, use the last two sentences to take off all of your clothes and fast, which means, in writing class language, that you need to get vulnerable. This proved easy for me once I found out the trick: I’ve long been a sex on the first date kind of girl, and it turns out I like to be naked before you. Did that paragraph take a turn? Am I different to you now than when I began?
Not that the beginning of the paragraph isn’t important too — it is — but often it’s the set-up for the spike. I haven’t thought about volleyball since middle-school gym, but this is a thank you to a writing teacher who played it professionally, so I try to make reference to things she will like. I’m still courting her, this teacher, some years after working together. A past writing teacher is like a past lover that you’re still trying to prove yourself to. I’ll never be able to get as good at structure as she is but I’d like to blame this on being a double water sign and maybe throw in being dyslexic just for good luck.
It turns out, I’m learning, you also have to know when a paragraph’s complete and that part is hard. Like, in the paragraph up above, I initially wrote: “You might think that getting naked at the end of EVERY paragraph doesn’t work, but really it does. Sometimes, I leave my underwear on and that’s always a mistake. “ See how that would have been too much? What you want is just to do something unexpected enough that you’ve taken a turn; to delve into a different place than the reader might expect, each time exposing yourself to be other than what they might want, and in that way, surprising the reader when they find that they do.
I’ll share that I when I wrote about our small cramped space and how we co-existed in it, I wanted to move to another topic - I can see how my mind wanders when it approaches something difficult. But if I had changed directions too much this would never get done and the essay loses its slot in my editorial calendar and then it belongs nowhere until the next week. But perhaps belonging nowhere is the only way to belong: at least these days when any one place can become another overnight - a regular city hidden in smoke, a grocery store with aisles, then covered with dots, spaced apart, a school that’s for everyone, then empty, for no one at all.
If this isn’t making its way to people’s hearts, I wailed to her in our long hallway after a particularly bad class critique, then I might as well write about a turkey sandwich! All of life is a turkey sandwich, I think that she said. Maybe it wasn’t her who said this. I made a lot of calls where I yelled in those months. This is a paragraph that feels stuck at the start. It’s hard to find a way to turn this around. It’s hard to see where this piece wants to go and to not be able to take it all the way there.