What follows is Chapter Five from the forthcoming updated edition of Writing In A New Convertible with the Top Down: A Unique Guide for Writers. In 1992, Christi Killien Glover and I began an exchange of letters to explore and articulate our writing processes. We wanted to help new writers invest in the magic of writing. All these years later, we are thrilled to see that our ideas, hunches and feelings about how we found our stories, images and meaning remain the same. We trust associative thinking and go from there.

Dear Sheila,

Here I am at the beach. I just set Annie Rose and Molly up outside with their paints and rocks—rock painting at the beach is a major pastime.

I’m thinking about inside and outside. Inside the cabin, outside on the beach; inside the car traveling to get here, Bill outside walking each morning for exercise. My feelings inside, the reality of the situation outside (which I’ll probably never truly understand). The painted creations outside on the picnic bench, the intention of what they are meant to look like inside the minds of Annie Rose and Molly.

Every story has this inside and outside part, at least any story that has richness and can sustain a reader’s interest. So when I start with the story idea, whatever piece it might be, I can’t go very far without uncovering the other side. It takes two ideas to write a story, rubbing against each other, creating sparks and fire.|

Sometimes I start with the outside idea, as I did with Rusty Fertlanger, Lady’s Man. I saw an article in the newspaper about a ninth-grade boy who had to wrestle a girl. A lot of the outside story (plot) was right there in the article—coach gives boy a choice, but if boy decides not to wrestle, he forfeits. Boy decides to wrestle, girl pins him, his friends give him a bad time. Okay. But that is a newspaper article. Reporting. It is a plot. This happens then that happens and so on.The thing that turns this into fiction, into a story, is the other idea (as well as the character, of course). I ended up pairing this plot with the idea that Rusty was a cartoonist especially interested in superhero comic books—and the idea that the masculinity portrayed in these books (and therefore what Rusty believes is true manliness) is a lie—to create the inner storyline, the inside idea.

Inside, looking out,

Christi

July 6

Dear Christi,

I think of you and your children painting rocks on the beach. What a wise mom those girls have who encourages them in their messy endeavors! We must have a place developed in ourselves that respects and enjoys art’s messiness or we will never grow the stories and poems, dances and songs, paintings and sculptures whose seeds are planted in all of us.

I don’t think there is a person born who doesn’t have the capacity of “design mind”—the pattern seeking, mystical, dream mind that knows something of the true nature of existence. Early in life we are taught to ignore that mind, to think of our dreams and stories as at best hobbies, to “learn a vocation that pays well,” to obey rather than create, to “work” rather than “fritter our time away” on creative pursuits.

The measure of just how very thoroughly we as a culture play down our design mind is how rich and how famous we make actors, singers, novelists and personalities who catch on. How much more parity if everyone’s creativity were cultivated. Art would not be a spectator sport.

We can nurture the confidence to listen for our design mind. Your way of expressing the structure of fiction writing is superlative—the inside and outside story. I like thinking of that. If we encourage ourselves, we will find the “magical weld” because that’s how our design mind works. We are all graced with the gift of it. Some of us have not buried it. All of us must be encouraged to reclaim it.

Going to water the seedsoutside and within,

Sheila

 

July 8

Dear Sheila,

Here’s a funny metaphor for you. The beach cabin we’re staying in here at Hood Canal is paneled with pine tongue-in-groove. The kind with the spattering of large and small brown knots from ceiling to floor. My mother and her younger sister shared a room with such paneling in their youth. One night Mom was gazing at the walls and she said to Emme, “You see those brown spots? Do you know what they are?” Emme did not know. She was ten years younger than Mom. “They’re farts,” my mother explained. “Every time you fart, it goes right up there on the wall. Little ones make little farts, big ones….” Mom looked at Emme’s stunned, but believing face, and added, “If you don’t stop, the whole wall will be covered with ‘em.” Emme went crying to Grandma, who thirty years later related the story to me. A good metaphor is a source of repeated delight.

Still smiling,

Christi

July 10

Dear Christi,

Yes, a funny story. However, I identify with the younger sister who went running to her mother, humiliated and frightened by all the farts past, present and future, on the wall!

My empathy for the younger sister reminds me of what I have had to overcome in order to write. One way or another my mother was always telling me how “dirty” I’d make the world unless I was “nice.” In its root, the word nice means “not to know.”

We can’t write meaningfully if we are trying to be nice. I remember writing empty letters to pen pals about how nice everything in my life was. I got a new dress! My social studies teacher gave me an A! I remember the profound flatness I felt writing this despite the exclamation points. My heart was actually breaking with sadness from my parents’ constant arguing, from my feeling unsure about their marriage and myself in a new school. I couldn’t write well because I couldn’t write things as they were because they were like farts on the wall that weren’t nice.

Art doesn’t exclude the unpleasant. It faces it. I’d like to follow these characters, the sisters ten years apart, on their journeys through life.
Yours as I imagine picking up a novel about them,

Sheila

 

July 11

Dear Sheila,

I’m still at the beach, as you can tell by my watercolor-painted envelope. I’ve been seized by creativity. Painting envelopes, making envelopes, inventing a new pasta dish with olive oil and tomatoes. I know it’s all byproduct of this story that’s building. The energy is there, pulsing inside me, seeing ways to improvise for lack of butter and 2% milk and a screwy washing machine. You use olive oil and jam, mix nonfat with cream and type letters next to the washing machine so that you can nudge the knob from wash to rinse to spin dry! You adapt. I adapt. And it’s fun.
There were two families in the cabin next door over the weekend: two sets of parents with two children each. One of the fathers caught my attention. He had boundless energy. He rallied the kids, including my two, into game after game, activity after activity. His voice was very distinctive, sort of nasal-ish but not abrasive. I knew where he was at any given moment of the weekend, and if I didn’t hear him, he was inside or out fishing. He was like an otter. A daddy otter. He even had a mustache.

I found myself wondering what this man did for a living, where he was raised, how he met his wife (who was very cute, but not nearly so friendly as her husband) what he liked to read, etc. Do you ever do this? I become intensely nosy about someone. I want to know all of his or her business. Does he pay off all his bills immediately, or is he in VISA debt? Does he cut his toenails off straight across as my husband does, or does he cut them to conform to the shape of the cuticle?

When I create a character, I almost always begin with the shadow of someone I know, or imagine that I know. I know enough about this father to use him as a minor character someday. Main characters are a different thing altogether. I have to know or make up answers to all of my questions.|

I begin, as Muriel Spark says in Loitering With Intent, by “fixing a fictional presence in my mind’s eye, then adding a history to it.” That’s the work I think I’m doing right now. I think my fictional presence is a 12-year-old boy who loves animals. Just saying this is like shooting electric current through me. I’m nervous, I’m interested, I’m jittery. I want to be writing this kid’s story. But I know I’ve got to play some games to pull him out of my unconscious.

I’ve used all kinds of stuff, tricks, in the past. Astrology books (I look up the sign I guessed the character to be and read the description), magazine pictures and pictures of old classmates in yearbooks (who look like my character might look), name books. I find myself reading similar books to what I imagine writing, trying to get a feel for my story. This is not plagiarism. This is priming the pump.

Sometimes I just start writing. Nonsense stuff, really. Just make up a name for this presence and write throwaway pages, to get me thinking, accepting and rejecting stuff. Improvising. Adapting. This is the trick that grabs me right now.
Off to write some throwaway pages,

Christi

July 13

Dear Christi,

Your sentence about olive oil and jam, cream and nonfat milk, and writing by the washing machine got me thinking of a man I was with for awhile. He told me that he fell in love with me watching me bake a cake.

I had felt the urge to bake and I’d chosen my favorite quick cake recipe, then proceeded to discover I had few of the ingredients it required. But on the wings of the energy of desiring to create the cake, I found satisfactory substitutes for the missing ingredients. My favorite applesauce cake turned out, forty minutes later, to be cranberry bread.

Once recently the same man told me the story again and I remembered the rush of energy, how I solved my problems like a happy raft on the river’s current.

Could it be like that always if I didn’t fret? If I trusted that the river would come and carry me toward solution? If I remembered that I am “river worthy” and can work wonders when that current flows beneath me?
Taking cranberries from the freezer,

Sheila

 

A KEY: COOK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE ON HAND

Cooking with what we have on hand means using the names, phrases, customs, and knowledge unique to our families and experience.

Christi’s grandmother loved to cook oxtail soup. She called it offal soup. Offal is unpopular pieces of meat—the liver, intestine, tail, feet. Her husband used to bring these home from the slaughter house. When Christi was writing her book All of the Above, she assigned this knowledge to a fifth grader who made a complete meal for under a dollar using offal and got her Girl Scout cooking badge.

Sheila remembers her father’s tallit, kept in a velvet case in his dresser drawer. In the Jewish religion, a tallit, or prayer shawl, may be given to a boy on his bar mitzvah. In a screenplay Sheila experimented with Neal becomes afraid of his prayer shawl because of the memory of his dead older brother’s body wrapped in one. He even refuses to wear a jacket or to sleep under covers.

While Christi’s husband was growing up, he shared a basketball pump needle with his brother. One of them was always misplacing it. Even though a new one was only ten cents, buying it was out of the question. Now, whenever he realizes he is denying himself something small—an extra stapler, magic marker, can opener, or scissors—he cries, “I’m doing another basketball needle!”

Don’t forget how loaded you are with these memories. Use them in your writing whether you write a personal experience piece or assign characters your memory tidbits. Either way, writing these tidbits can lead to surprising unconscious themes. Offal is the unwanted, the leftover. In the book, the girl turned that into success and gained satisfaction. The tallit is a prayer shawl and a shroud. In the screenplay, the boy comes to understand that to have a beginning acknowledges that there will be an ending. The basketball needle is a symbol of scrimping, denying oneself easier passage in the world. Maybe someday Christi will use it in a story.

 

TAKE IT FOR A SPIN

Take some time now to let yourself explore the cupboards of your memory. What are the sayings, objects, rituals, foods and events that are on hand for you? List them, fill as much of a page as you can.

Now choose one to explore with all the remembered details of time and place. Write a page or two describing the memory.

Ask yourself why you chose the particular subject you wrote about. Ask yourself how it relates to what you are experiencing in your life right now. Why did you remember it? Why did it attract you? How can you use it to evoke the essence of your current experience?

Sometimes we tap the unconscious as we begin a piece of writing, but other times we need to call in our unconscious when we are in the middle of a piece. We may not immediately know how characters would behave or how to show the consistency in their personalities, or we may not know what actions would surely cause certain behaviors. How can we go on writing when we don’t know the answers?

The unconscious can help here, but, like an oyster, it needs an irritating grain of sand before it can create a jewel.

The grain is a specific question. What are you after? What do you need here? You are trying to figure out what it is you’re writing about! You must back away for a second and brainstorm questions about your characters. It’s scary because you don’t know the answers, but you have to pose the question—How does Irene’s blackmail really work? What is at stake for the blackmailer and the blackmailee? Why does it feel desperate to them?

Once you’ve posed the questions (you might deal only with one or two of these at a time), leave the place where you are writing. Go shopping, wash the dishes, take a walk, sleep, whatever, to give your unconscious a chance to form the pearl. Something you hear on the radio or something said by passersby might answer the question. The unconscious is always working on it.