Do you have a memory of an early piece of writing you did? A memory that has with it the feeling of enjoyment–that you really liked being able to articulate your experience and thoughts in words? I remember sitting down to my little desk in third grade to write the Chanukah scene for our class’ holiday play. I gave the girl character my favorite name at the time, Mary. Then I realized that I’d never known a Jewish girl with that name. I don’t remember what I changed that name to, but I think of this as my first revision experience.

Not too long after that play writing experience, I wrote my aunt a card for her birthday. It was a little booklet of paper folded and stapled together. The title of the booklet was, “How to Have a Happy Birthday.” Each page included something from the list: Have cake, blow out candles, and open presents were among the items I included. My aunt kept that booklet and gave it back to me about ten years ago. It was my husband who took a look and said, “It was your first how to book!” It is amazing how much of what we are drawn to as little kids is of the essence for us and something we long to develop over our adult lives.

This week, we are fortunate to have an essay about first writing by Brenda Miller. Part of the essay appears in her book, Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. She wrote this version of it from a writing group prompt that asked members to write about the first words they put on paper as a piece of their own writing.

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First Words

My brother is swinging the bat and I’m bored in the stands, seven years old. My mother has given me a piece of paper and a pen that doesn’t have much ink in it. I’ve written: “I HAVE TWO BROTHERS. ONE IS A LITTLE ONE. ONE IS A BIG ONE. WE ONLY HAVE TWO GIRLS IN OUR FAMILY. ONE IS ME. ONE IS MY MOTHER.” The mothers sit all around me, their straight skirts pulled tight across their knees, each one of them smoking a cigarette. They look like the women in the Life magazine ads, their mouths lacquered with lipstick, and they leave smudged kisses on the filters. When they tap the ashes off with their index fingers, their hard manicures gleam.

My brother is swinging the bat and wiggling his hips on the other side of the mesh. “THE BIG BROTHER IS MEAN. THE LITTLE BROTHER IS SOMETIMES MEAN.” Where is my father? I squint to see him near the dugout, his hands cupped around his mouth. My mother, she must be about thirty years old. My father, thirty-three. My brother swings the bat, and the ball sails, sails, sails out of sight. Everyone stands up, cheering, but I stay seated long enough to write: “THE BIG BROTHER JUST MADE A HOME RUN AND I THINK THATS ALL I’LL WRITE. GOODBYE.” I stand up, too, as my brother prances around the bases, casual and grown-up and intelligent, slapping the hands held out in high-fives as he trots past third. The plate is wide open, the catcher already sulking unmasked against the backstop. My brother slows to a walk and casually taps his foot against home.

I find that scrap of paper every time I move houses, or when I decide, in some fit of self-improvement, to clean out my closets. It lives in one of those old-fashioned memorabilia notebooks—School Daze emblazoned on the cover, with large pouches inside designated for each grade. My mother stuffed these pouches with all the detritus that comes with growing up: tissue paper report cards, sky blue and filled with the letter S for satisfactory; school photos, my earnest, lopsided grin never changing no matter how much I grow; stiff cardboard programs from tap-dance recitals providing evidence of my part in “The Sidewalks of New York.” This little scrap of paper—torn from a memo-size spiral notebook—has survived for nearly forty years, sandwiched into the second-grade pouch, the paper slick, the ink faded but wholly legible.

 Often, in my mind, I labeled this relic “The First Thing I Ever Wrote.” It provided a convenient touchstone, a way to navigate my beginnings as a writer back to this small flag, waving me into homeport. Here, I’m writing down my life: for whom I don’t know. Why? I don’t know. All I know is that it seems very important to get it right: the number of girls in the family, the number of boys, the indignity I suffer at the hands of my brothers. I need to record events as they happen, that home run now etched into stone. I need to figure out all the parameters of this place I call home, to sketch them out in the open, where I can see them clearly. And I need to tell someone all this, and to let my invisible listener know when I’m through, when real life, itself, calls me back to join it.

But now I have to wonder. Why would my mother have given me the pen and paper in the first place unless she already knew that writing would keep me happy?

So I try to think back further, to see beyond this convenient myth I’ve created, and I find myself in the classroom at Andasol Avenue Elementary School, a name that, even as a young girl, I sounded out like an incantation, measuring my steps to the hard beats—ANDasol, AVEnue, EleMENTary SCHOOL—as I marched down the sidewalk to class. There, a small girl grips a pencil in her fist, writing her first words on the wide-ruled paper. The classroom buzzes and hums, and she writes her first perfect word—then repeats it, and repeats it, because in repetition lies the magic. I write lists: the names of my brothers, the names of my friends, the names of their pets, my own name over and over, filling the page. I copy the lists my mother made before we went to the grocery store— bread, milk, cheerios—and I recite the words in my head, a litany of lush vowels.

But I know this isn’t quite it either: the first thing I wrote. Before I knew how to physically trace the words onto a page, I memorized the sound of the chain link fence as it rattled in the morning from hundreds of hands hanging onto it, and hands running sticks through it, and hands grabbing hold and shaking as we waited for the day to begin. And this is writing too: simply being in the world, recording the sound of a hundred kids making themselves known.

I memorized the sound of the tetherball as it smacked the pole that held it tethered. I inhaled the smell of crayons, and my second-grade teacher’s perfume (or “toilet water” she would have said, a phrase that made me shudder). It was a scent like cookies mixed with rubber cement and thick sheaves of construction paper, so that now I always associate writing with that particular aroma, as if the words themselves are baking on the page.

I learned the pattern of the dogs’ barking on my way home from school: first the German shepherds, ferocious behind the wooden fence, then the terriers yapping it up further down the block, and around the corner the ancient collie wheezed out his greeting and wagged his tail. I noted the way the light shifted on Babbitt Street, how I floated through bars of darkness, then illumination. I stared hard at the approach of my cul-de-sac, tried not to blink as the Amestoy sign floated nearer and nearer, that harbinger of home.

I felt the difference in heat between the sidewalk and the asphalt of the driveway; recorded the smell of the garage, the oil on the floor, and the sharpened tools hanging in organized rows. The squeak of the vice grip bolted to the workbench, the way the handle twirled round and round. The whooshing sigh of the screen door, the smell of the house at 3:10 in the afternoon, dust held in abeyance, vacuumed rugs with their furrowed rows, the brief absence of my mother, in another room, the few seconds before her trilling Hello! Who’s there? reached my ears. I was home, and not yet home, all of it familiar, and yet all of it new.

Maybe I had brought it all into being myself—this home, with its mother and father, its mercurial brothers waiting to love me—with my perfect recitation of the abc’s, my perfect cursive rendering of their names. And then: It’s me!, I’m home!, running into my mother’s arms, the powder on her cheeks, the smoky tinge of her hair, all of it just here, so beautifully arranged. The first thing I ever wrote was not writing at all, but the absorption of the world into my body—and I stood very still, held my breath so the words wouldn’t smudge, so that it might all come out very sharp, and so clear.

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And now it is your turn. Remember the lists you made as a child, the letters you wrote to relatives or congressman, the notes you sent a schoolmate, the entries in a diary with a lock and key. Start a piece of writing with some of the remembered text. One of my college application essay tutees started an essay recently this way, ” When I was five years old, I was ready to take on the world. Determined to change what I thought of as the great injustice of my time, that the government was letting the tobacco industry put profits ahead of the well being of the American public, I wrote a letter to the President: “Mr. Clinton, We demand that smoking is not allowed. Kids should make their own rules for themselves. Do not smoke forever. We will start a team.”

What do you remember writing? What does the adult rehearing the words associate with them? You can start with a list of the notes and words and after you have exhausted your memory, pick one that makes you want to write about the place and time from which the writing sprung. Or write passages after each of the phrases you’ve listed. You can make leaps of association both backwards as Brenda does to explore the intense listening she did and forward as my tutee does when he explains that having received a “canned response” from the government, he took matters into his own hands, “… kindergarten activist that I was, I took immediate measures. Whenever someone was smoking near me, I held my breath. If the government wasn’t going to protect my health, I reasoned, then I was just going to have to do it myself. While I didn’t realize it at the time, my behavior during this phase was instilling in me a sense of personal responsibility; when I grew older, I would discover the implications of this trait.”

Your piece of writing might turn out like an editorial or personal statement, a description of what early writing meant to you, or a prose poem or lyric essay that blends past and present.

Here’s what happened when I began the exercise using the option of writing passages after the key phrases from my early writing:

How to Have a Happy Birthday

I. Have Cake
The cake with candles blazes on the table before me, the white party dress my grandmother gave me, the way my chubby arms look below the cap sleeves and my blond bologna curls, as my mother called them. There’s a little wooden rocking chair in the corner, and along with my sister, who is 18 months younger than me, my cousins sit at the table. One is two years older than me and the other nine months older. They wear matching plaid, and all of our dresses have sashes that tie in back like apron strings.

II. Blow Out Candles
The tally on what the four of us grew up to be: one widow, one manic-depressive, one compulsive obsessive personality disorder, one who lost a child.

When we put that first bite of cake into our mouths, we were quiet, tasting the longed-for sugar.

III. Open Presents
Then: an edition of Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, a teddy bear, and Candyland. A baby doll no bigger than my hand.

Now: A surviving daughter. Two grandsons. So much sweet beside the sorrow.

I am going to find that little how-to-have a happy birthday booklet in my files and see what other treasures might be in the words, what I might sense in my old block printing and my number 2 pencil sketches of a cake, candles and wrapped presents.

I’d love to see what you write–so please send me your First Words Writing Prompt exercise results and I’ll make a future article from the results you send.