Chapter 209: Wisdom. Late, at Long Last

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the prospect of once again asking my students to take The Great Leap from filing weekly reporting letters to writing their stories.

It was not as if they had not been writing for weeks; they had, week in and week out, been writing without having to feel self-conscious about….writing. After all, these were only letters, and in the great scorecard of life, they counted no more than the results of spring training games. Which is to say, not at all.

The problem was the leap itself – not to full drafts but rather whatI had believed to be the easier, more manageable step of the first hundred words The idea was that if you could nail the top, if you could seize control of the narrative over what amounted to thirty seconds of a reader’s attention, the rest would be easier.

Not easy, never easy. But not nearly so daunting.

I followed this approach year after year, somehow believing that by framing the approach in a way that made the step less frightening, the students would see how the writing they had done in those letters reflected who they were as writers.

Sometimes it worked. But too often I watched as students succumbed to a condition best captured in the title of the 1968 classic by Archie Bell and the Drells: The Tighten Up.

In the end, when I asked what had gone wrong, students wrote about how fear engulfed them - the fear of not getting it right, or choosing the wrong words, or of clunky phrasing. Of failing.

So this semester, my last in the classroom, I was determined to break the cycle and try something new. Instead of taking a leap that felt attainable but too seldom was, I asked them to take two interim steps: Write a final letter, but not as they had done in the preceding weeks, to me.

This time write a letter yourself. Dear (fill in the name), What is my story about?

They wrote their letters and came to class and there, without warning – I didn’t want them overthinking – I gave them a half hour to find and highlight in their letters the core of their stories. Not necessarily the first hundred words. But, with apologies to Graham Greene, the heart of the matter.

Then, and only then, I told them, was it time to write the first few hundred words.

I waited. And worried.

And then their stories landed.

I asked: how did it go?

This is what they said:

“For an entire semester, I had established a shared working document where I’d routinely write my memos for Michael. It was a safe space, a ‘playground’ of sorts where I wasn’t impeded by the thought of perfection. By the time Michael asked us to write a letter to ourselves, I had done weeks of reporting; I knew the story by heart, but the exercise of clearly stating what the story was about forced me to accept that the story was right in front of me. There was already very little room for failure. It was that sense of satisfaction after writing this letter that made starting my story a lot easier. Like rushing through a test that you’ve thoroughly studied for, I found that the beginning of my story flowed effortlessly. The letter to myself forced me to organize my thoughts, which became the gateway to writing a clear, simple but effective start to my story.

-Jimena Elmufdi

“Writing letters throughout the course of the Memory Project lowered the stakes for me as a writer, but in the best way possible. It didn’t mean there was less to care about or that the content was substandard, it just meant the normal pressure of writing for perfection was alleviated. This allowed for a more free flowing, creative writing process. Writing to myself, specifically, was a full circle moment for a story centered on ancestry, home and love. It also helped me get to the center of my story — a casual but productive conversation between both audience and author.”

-Avery Young

“For me, being given the time and space for the interim step of ‘What do I think my story is?’ was crucial. Had we jumped immediately into writing the opening, I think it not only would have felt like too large of a stylistic jump, but also would have shoehorned us into too narrow a process chronologically. I often need to get into the meat of a story before I figure out what the opening will be. And while the reporting letters were a very effective tool for taking some of the ‘writing’ pressure off throughout the semester, I definitely appreciated the final memo as a sort of transitional moment. I needed to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. It was a chance to not just sketch out a rough outline of the story, but to see how it really felt to me, and to get a firmer grasp on it in my head. This made the shift to writing the story feel seamless and well within my control. ‘What do I think my story is?’ is such a great framing question, and being able to get one last round of feedback from Michael on how I answered this made me feel more confident as I jumped off the deep end to write the whole thing.”

-Katherine Weyback

“I already knew quite a bit about my topic and learned much more through the extensive reporting process. I was therefore struggling to really focus on what details the story needed and which could be left out. I wasn’t exactly sure if the story was about the occupation, the photographer, the zoo, Jewish life in these early days of the war or all of them combined, and I definitely wasn’t sure how I would combine them. Writing a letter to myself, forced me to just start writing without having to think about structure etc. Instead of getting bogged down by the amount of information, this helped me zoom in on what I really wanted to convey and what the story I wanted to tell exactly was. Writing a Dear Jonathan letter was thus helpful for me.”

-Jonathan de Bock

So what was the take-away? More to the point, what had I learned, or better said, been reminded of?

Writing is an endeavor that comes with great risk. Not the physical risks of other professions, but a different sort of risk - one that cuts to who we are and, through our work, how we hope the world will see us.

By pushing my students too quickly to leap from letters to stories I had unintentionally raised the level of risk beyond where many were comfortable. I had forgotten how jarring it can feel, leaving the comfort of letters to be seen only by me, to writing even a hundred words that might be seen by everyone.

They needed a couple of steps in between – to get used to the water before diving in.

Maybe, we all do.

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.