Chapter 94: Frozen Moments, Brought to Life
On the first day of this semester’s Memory Project class, my students brought in the photographs they would spend the semester thinking, reporting and writing about. One by one they displayed the photographs on the big screen in front of the room. They explained what they knew about their photos: who was in it, when it was taken, and where.
We all had questions: What were the circumstances? And who is that person in the corner? I asked: why did you choose this photograph? Why do you need to write about it?
Many of the photos were personal: a father as a young man before addiction; a mother at a beauty pageant she would not win; a family patriarch standing at the foot of a bed where his wife and two daughters lay covered in funeral shrouds; an aunt who would die young; a mother at the altar for a marriage no one talked about.
Other photographs were of strangers who had somehow captured the students’ imaginations and left them eager to learn more: a woman with her arm extended as a fledgling bird takes flight; a 19th century asylum for the insane; an aging artisan who does not yet have an apprentice to succeed him.
The students have two months to, as one of them aptly put it, interrogate these images, to find the story in the frozen moment. I’ve cautioned them that, like detectives in noir fiction, the story they set out to find may not turn out to be what is most compelling. They can learn this only by reporting, and in the beginning the reporting is set in motion by getting a sense of the lay of the land – the broad outlines in which their journeys will take place.
I love teaching this class. The students send weekly reporting memos – letters, really – in which they distill what they’ve learned. Then we talk about where the story might go, what looks promising. Early on, I admit, I can be a little – okay, a lot – heavy handed.
They will suggest an approach that strikes me as destined to be more a fine, well-reported feature story but which lacks the essential elements of a narrative: plot, tension, pressure on the characters, all of which combine to leave a reader wondering what happens next.
The hard part is recognizing what the story is about before knowing enough to see it fully. One of the biggest problems for new writers – when they are not reacting to the news – is being asked to write ambitiously before they know what they want to say. But you can dither only too long before you need to start – and by starting I do not mean plunging into interviews before you know what you want to ask. Rather I mean finding things out, gathering facts some of which may be random, putting them in a folder – real or virtual – and then pausing to assess what you have and what might be interesting.
Often, however, they don’t trust their guts. This is understandable, given that their guts are largely untested. Add to that the fear of getting things wrong, and you end up with stories that early on are framed by overly complicated questions that include words like policy, trend and issue. It is very hard and takes a good deal of practice and with it confidence to believe you can set out with a question as seemingly simple as, say: what was he thinking? Or, who was she before she was my mom?
My job is to resist saying: this is your story. Because then it is no longer their story, but mine. And that takes away the fun, or as my wise scholar brother calls it, the thrill of the chase. So I hint, and in a way that I suspect comes across as obvious but I hope is not, pose questions intended to lead them to where I hope they might go. Really, no one ever talked about the wedding? Why are the stories about your aunt limited to when she was very young or close to death? Why does your mom think she lost the pageant? Was he really that awful to your great grandmother?
I remind them that they are writing nonfiction short stories. I hope that they see what they are doing as reporters through the lens of, say, Raymond Carver or Alice Munro. I suggest stories to read – true and fictional. I suggest movies, too: (I have to ask: has anyone other than film majors under the age of 30 ever seen “Citizen Kane” and “The Godfather”? And why not?)
My students are decades younger than me, and for a long time that led me to conclude that the stories they chose to tell in their early 20s were very different from the stories I want to tell now. When I was their age (God did I just write that?) I wrote mostly newspaper stories and the stories I chose to report often fit under the umbrella of: this is so cool hanging out with people who are nothing like me – racetrack workers whose drinking started at dawn; prize fighters.
Over time, as I searched for new people and new stories, I became ever more aware that I was often picking the same sorts of people: the people who had never quite made it; the ones who lived on the periphery; the ones who struggled. On the very rare occasions when I wrote about someone who was, or more likely, had been famous, it was generally about life on the downslope.
Now, as I report and write about the past – about my late best friend, and the parallel world in which he came of age, right next to mine – I see that there is little gap between my students’ work and mine, that I was wrong in assuming that the stories we tell at 25 differ from the ones we tell at 65.
The choices writers make in the stories they choose to pursue and tell are not accidental or haphazard. As Norman Maclean, whose masterpiece, “Young Men and Fire” I wrote about in the second chapter of this newsletter, wrote, “the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.”
My students and I are doing the same work, for the same reason. We’re trying to make sense of ourselves through stories about other people, other lives, other struggles and pain and triumph. The answers, as I now know and they are learning, are elusive. We keep searching.