The Story You Have to Tell: Writing from the Urgent Place

Today I attended a three-hour seminar with author Cheryl Strayed, whose book Wild just finished its third week on the New York Times Best Seller List. The seminar was held at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. Every session I have attended at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop has been excellent.

It is difficult to summarize a three-hour seminar because I cannot convey all the wonderful examples that were provided to illustrate the points of the author; instead, I will just list the general gist of the session.

Strayed highlighted several points:

• Become the writer that you really are. (i.e., Don’t try to imitate others.)
• Be bold enough to share very weird things that you think/do.
• Trust that the risky, emotionally scary writing that you do is your best writing.

The author led the group through a series of exercises that you may want to try yourself or with your students. We were given about ten minutes to complete each assignment.

• List all the things you want to write about.
• Your story
• What is the question at the core of your plot?
• What is the universal question you want to ask? (Strayed came back to universal questions over and over again. It is the universal questions that allow the reader to identify with the incidents and emotions that the writer relates.)
• What happened?
• What is the meaning of what happened?
• Write a piece where your character shows what he or she is feeling through actions. Don’t explicitly tell the reader what the character is feeling.
• Choose a talisman (see below in bold) and write a piece incorporating that object. Use the talisman to express a universal emotion that is conveyed in your writing without explicitly describing that emotion.

Other points made by the author.

• Find the extraordinary in the ordinary. (Common, everyday occurrences can be used to illustrate very broad themes. I kept thinking about how two things I enjoy—golf and mountain biking—can be used as metaphors for life.)
• While fairy tales usually end with the line “...and they lived happily ever after,” your writing should end with the invisible, unwritten line, “...and nothing was ever the same again.”
• Initially write everything, even the high risk things you probably wouldn’t want your family or friends to know. You can always scale back later. If writing a memoir, there are certain privacy issues you may have to consider, but don’t consider them until you have everything written down.
• Consider your character’s
• Ideal self—the image he has of himself
• Actual self—the true reactions he has to a situation that, in reality, is probably quite different than his ideal self.
• Code—what it is that your character personally thinks or thinks society requires of her. How might that change during the story?
• Talismans—objects in the character’s life that may act as metaphors for a universal question or theme.
• Writing can be a very emotional experience. During difficult scenes, the author often sheds a lot of tears.
• Through the writing process, you may discover much about yourself. You may find that the writing helps you to see emotions and thoughts you have suppressed.

Strayed feels that there are many levels of writing. Beginning writers usually write only about the first levels of writing listed below. As a writer becomes more advanced, he moves deeper and deeper into the story, moving farther and farther down this list.

• What happened
• What it meant (the internal story)
• What else does this remind you of?
• What is the cultural story?
• What is the ancient story? (Relating the writing to the stories and myths of old.)
• What is the generational, racial, gender, etc. story?