Writing Is My Drink (10 page)

After work, I’d walk our dog along the red dirt roads that tra-

versedthe terrain of black volcanic rubble and silvery blue sage

across the street from our house. Beyond the lava and the sage,

stacks of the white and red rock formed the very surreal Snow

Canyon. Walking through this landscape, I’d feel my dream of

becoming a writer resurfacing, a force gathering critical mass. I

still had this idea that one day I would do something I thought

of as my “real writing,” although the hubris of this aspiration

also embarrassed me because I had no proof that I could write

and no idea what form this “real writing” would take. Haiku?

Fiction? All I knew was that I wasn’t doing it.

On the few occasions I did try to write, I wrote short sto-

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ries that inevitably ground to a halt after five pages or so. Some

segue or momentum of plot usual y tripped me up. After that,

I’d squeak out a sentence or two but my heart wasn’t in it, and

so I’d give up. I had a few notebooks full of false starts. The busy school years blurred past in a rush of students’ questions, papers, and class prep, but during the long, hot summers off work

the feeling of falling behind would start up again. The years were

going by, I told myself: Ticktock, as if writing had a closing bio-

logical window.

A woman in the HR department at the college told me about

an annual summer writers’ retreat in the mountains above Cedar

City, and I decided to go. Up a twisty road of pines and red rock,

an old lodge held a number of classes all about the craft of writ-

ing, real y nutsy and boltsy how-to classes. One class I took that

week, taught by the poet Ken Brewer, changed everything for

me as a writer.

Ken was a sweet bear of man who was a product of the very

best parts of the seventies—the groovy aspects that supported

equality, vegetable gardens, and self-expression. As he segued

into our writing assignment, Ken talked about how he always

had trouble sticking to external forms. He gave the example of

learning to waltz, which he’d found very difficult to learn. He

could dance free form to rock and rol , he told us, because then

he didn’t have to stick to someone else’s pattern of how his body

should be moving. As I nodded yes, yes, yes, he parlayed this

analogy into talking about how he’d final y discovered a form

that was perfectly suited to his content. He told us that this form he called “the triptych” had helped him to find as a writer.

Ken taught us that the triptych’s structure, a form borrowed

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from visual art, grows out of theme instead of story. Instead of

beginning with a story you want to tel , you start with an idea or

a feeling, he explained as he led us in a writing exercise that re-

quired us to isolate a concept, feeling, idea, or theme we wanted

to write about.

Everything he was saying about the triptych made sense to

me. I felt this tremendous sense of relief and joy, as if I’d been

traveling for years in a country where no one spoke my language,

and I’d final y met someone who understood me perfectly. As

I worked on the theme-identifying exercise, it occurred to me

that often my need to write sprung from the desire to express

an idea or a feeling rather than the need to tell a specific story. I quickly identified that I wanted to write about a long-standing

sense of separation I felt and my craving to heal that sense of

separation. Ken urged us to pick a single word and I chose this

word: “detachment.”

As instructed by Ken, I wrote the word “detachment” in the

center of a page. Then, following his direction that we come

up with three events or moments that matched this feeling or

theme, I named in separate bubbles two scenes from my child-

hood, and the final scene was the day I moved away from home

at seventeen. Ken explained that these three scenes would be-

come the triptych’s three panels, and when hung together they

would tell a story larger than the sum of its panels. Magic, Ken

called it.

Ken urged us to write those three scenes right then and

there. And so we did. We sat there in silence in this cavernous

lodge at four thousand feet with the smell of pine in the room,

writing. I wrote one scene and then another and then another.

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As I wrote, I fell into the story in a way I never had before, be-

cause I trusted Ken and I trusted this form. In this perfect storm

of trust and pine and high elevation, I moved into the belief that

the story I was writing
would
come together and that, gulp, I would finish it.

At the end of the day, I drove down that twisty mountain

road back to my house in the red desert and fired up my laptop.

I typed up what I’d written in class. A single golden thread of the theme of detachment wove its way through the three scenes—

just as Ken had said it would—magical y holding the scenes to-

gether, but just barely. It was the barely that thrilled me.
Barely
was exactly what I was trying to say; maybe
barely
was what I’d been wanting to say for a while. Maybe I’d been waiting to find

the right form. Maybe we’re all waiting for the right form.

In part, the triptych worked for me because it lent a struc-

ture that was a natural extension of what I felt compelled to say.

I’d been yearning to express how seemingly disparate moments

in my life were united by a theme and a feeling—for a way of

showing
how those moments were united instead of just simply saying that they were. The magic of the triptych sprung from the

empty spaces between the scenes, negative spaces that seemed

to whisper their own quiet message.

It was a small accomplishment, but it’s often our small ac-

complishments that give us the confidence to keep going—to do

more, to write more, to explore further. Final y I’d completed a

personal narrative, the writing I dared to call my own, to call—

even though I felt foolish to do so—my “real” writing.

I went on to write more triptychs. Okay, the truth is I be-

came hooked on triptychs. Some twenty years later, I’m still

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teaching my memoir-writing students the triptych form, and

the form continues to thrill me with its ability to tell a new type of story. Like me, many of my students feel the triptychs are the

first pieces they’ve written that felt complete.

The inspiration to finish that first triptych in that Utah

lodge was more than arriving upon the perfect form; the other

piece of magic I got from that workshop up that twisted road

of pines was the understanding that my life was worth observ-

ing, worth the ink and the paper, worth examination and time,

and was, in essence, of literary value. Even though the word

“memoir” wasn’t used that day, the examples Ken gave were

autobiographical. As a poet, he was adept at transforming his

ordinary experiences into a literary form, and so for him it

was natural to use his own experiences in the triptych as wel .

When I’d written fiction in college, I not only tried to press

my square-peg stories into a Hemingway-shaped story form, I

often tried to obscure their autobiographical roots, assuming

that my life was not the sort of life that could yield up litera-

ture. I’d never fought a bull or stepped foot in Manhattan or

fly-fished or fought in a war.

One of the essential characteristics of a writer is the willing-

ness and ability to see the stories in our lives and to believe that our observations, thoughts, and obsessions are worth following

to the page. If you’re accustomed to discounting your thoughts,

this process of valuing your own experience isn’t going to hap-

pen overnight. It will be a process, a long retraining in which we

move from negating to valuing. It has been for me.

I see this process at work each year when a new group of

students arrives in my classroom. Often, at the beginning of

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the year, at least some of them are struggling to believe that

their subject matter has value. At the start of fall quarter last

year, a student shyly told me that she felt self-conscious that

her topic was not important enough or maybe somehow self-

indulgent.

“What is it, the topic?” I asked in a whisper, anticipating

something like the joy of teacup collecting.

“Deciding whether to have kids or not,” she said weakly.

“You’re not sure if the decision to bring life into the world is

big enough?”

She nodded.

I urged her, maybe even begged her, to write on that topic.

“Begged” sounds extreme, but I am rabid about this issue, be-

cause I can very easily remember that time when I didn’t think

my own life-and-death topics were worthy, even when I could

read another writer’s five-page account of playing Frisbee and

think it was funny and fantastic, when it never would have oc-

curred to me to question the value of his topic.

Consider that you are developing bit by bit the habit of believ-

ing that your own thoughts are worth exploring. You are cultivat-

ing the faith that these thoughts will yield up something, even if

you don’t know what yet. You’re trusting that there will be some-

thing of value in there. Even if you feel sil y, like you’re wasting time on those thoughts now, someday you won’t feel sil y. That

day will come after you’ve followed the trail of your observations

and watched them become something and after you’ve worked

on that something until it becomes golden: a poem that captures

the moment, maybe even a painting that matches a feeling or an

essay that gives voice to a story only you can tel .

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Try This

1. Make a list of all the jobs you’ve ever had.

2. Pick as many of these jobs as you like and for each one list

“the emotional requisites” of the job, the emotional task or

tasks that the job required you to accomplish. For example,

teaching requires exposure and therefore vulnerability, even

though vulnerability is never listed on any job description for

teacher, instructor, or professor.

3. Pick one of these jobs and at least one emotional requisite for that job. Set the timer for ten minutes and write about that job

and what it required of you. Did you resist the requirement at

first? What did that look like? How did you grow and improve?

4. Write on this question: What did you learn in that job emo-

tional y that could help you as a writer?

5. If you want, continue with this pattern, writing about each of

the jobs on your list.

6. Write about a job for which the emotional requisite was over-

whelming to you. Perhaps, you left the job or stayed but remained

miserable because of the burden of the emotional requisite.

7. Write about a time when you took a big risk—such as moving

to a new place—so that you could follow a dream.

8. Write for ten minutes on this question: When have you “put

down the cards” and started following your own script in-

stead of someone else’s.

9. Now consider this: As a writer what would it look like for you

to “put down the cards”?

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10. Get a small notebook that you keep in your purse or back

pocket. Start taking notes on your thoughts and observations.

Challenge yourself to take at least one note every day.

11. Go to WritingIsMyDrink.com and read examples of triptychs.

12. Create a triptych of your own, following these instructions or making your own way there.

• Brainstorm a list of ideas/feelings/concepts that you

might write on. A partial list of the topics my students

have used includes: redemption, loss, grief, love, lust,

hope, faith, envy, jealousy, rejection, land, birth, dating.

But go for it and generate a list of your own.

• Pick a topic from the list. When choosing, I advise you

to go where the heat is, to one of these topics that ex-

hilarates you or even scares you. Personal writing is best

when the stakes are high for the writer.

• Follow the clustering technique outlined in the last chap-

ter, brainstorming as much as you can on your topic.

• Write three “panels,” ensuring that each panel is some-

how tied to the chosen theme. The panels don’t have to

be the same length.

• Try different orders for the panels before settling on a