Dear Karen -
My box of sea things came last week. What a treat, and what a friend you are to take the time to wrap all these little shells and eggs in paper towels, box them and post them to me. I hardly receive physical mail anymore, and I love it. In fact I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love it. I think this is really what we all, deep down long for, a true and daily relationship with the physical world.
This might be one reason so many of us find our work unsatisfying. Much of what so many people do involves sitting inside, in front of a screen, punching buttons and responding to people who are also sitting inside, in front of a screen, punching buttons. It seems to me that something has been lost in the modern world, and that the only things we really disagree on are why it got lost in the first place, and what to do about it.
You posed the question of rules: Who gets to make those rules? Where do they come from? And who is to say where or why a story is born?
In my own teaching I try to encourage my students to go toward the story that is screaming at them the loudest. It might be the one they are most scared of, or it might be a story that has been tickling in the brain for years. Perhaps it’s a story/game they played as children. Perhaps it’s a fairy tale, fantasy, sci-fi. It might be about a killer whale, or shark attacks during the vacation season of a coastal town. All I know is that when I have the story I want to write, there’s energy there, and the energy can carry me through the process, the research, and drafts, and the whole puzzle of putting the pieces together in communicative and hopefully emotion-producing prose. I would not deny any writer that energy if it is available to her through the story she wants to write.
For ten years now I have been teaching a free Prompt Writing class. This class never fails to make me happy and give me faith in my chosen pursuit. Hundreds of people have passed through this class, and currently about 30 people show up on average. Prompts can be anything. Yesterday we wrote about school lunches, which inspired many fine stories. And I passed out fortune cookies, which also inspired many fine stories. Sometimes I read a poem, or pass out pictures. It really doesn’t matter. The students show up ready and eager to write, eager to see what might flow out of their pens, and eager to hear what others have written.
I often wonder about the popularity of this class, and I’ve come to the conclusion that something primal is going on. It comes down to that rules thing again. It used to be that we were all storytellers, that we sat around a fire after sharing a meal (perhaps of wooly mammoth) and told each other tales, or acted them out. Now we’ve turned storytelling over to the “experts.” So many people simply get their stories from TV and movies, most of which these days depend more on special effects than on plot and character.
In Prompt Writing there is not always time to develop plot and character, but it’s surprising what wonderful and moving stories can be written in fifteen minutes. And it’s a wonderful thing one morning a month to sit and listen to strangers tell stories to each other. Each time I feel cleaned out, as though listening to these sudden and surprising stories sloughs off the smog of the modern world, and gets me back to basics. We laugh, we cry, and we feel each other as human beings. Isn’t that what storytelling is all about?
Much love to you my friend,
Nancy
