In How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the main character enters, stands center stage and addresses the audience. “Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson,” she announces.

The lesson the play uses as its central theme is one about driving–the connective tissue of the play is made up of quotes out of a manual for getting a driver’s license in the state of Maryland and images and dialog about driving. The secret that the central character will tell is about an inappropriate yet loving relationship between herself and the married uncle who she saw as a father figure and who saw her as a substitute for his wife. He taught her to drive. He taught her his love of driving. And it is a good thing she has that love of driving and of feeling her own strength, because his power over her as a young woman (and his death from alcoholism when she said she couldn’t marry him) weighs heavily on her.

The exercises I’ve included below will encourage you to use what you know how to do as a vehicle for reflecting on and articulating hard won life knowledge.

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To start, think about lessons you have learned. Don’t think about big life lessons right now, but skill sets–driving, swimming, baking, mountain climbing, hiking, pruning trees, guitar playing, piano playing, ballet, weaving, water color, etc. Choose one that interests you right now. If you were to teach someone else about your area of interest, what would your lesson plan be and how much would it cover? Write that lesson or a series of lessons on your subject.

Think about answering these questions as you write: Where did you learn the lesson? Who taught you and what do you remember about that person? What were the steps in your learning?

When you are done writing about the lesson, take a break from writing and think about issues in your life. Choose one that most strongly rises to the surface right now.

After the paragraph(s) about the lesson, write a line like this:

I could tell you about _________ (fill in the issue you chose) if I taught you how to ___________(fill in the lesson you wrote about).

For example, “I could tell you about growing up the child of controlling parents if I taught you how to change a diaper.” Or, “I could tell you about falling in love with an unsuitable if I taught you how to bake cakes with no eggs.”

You will be surprised at the correspondence between the lesson you are describing and the issue you are reflecting on.

 Next, write about the issue you’ve chosen by using the lesson you could give as a metaphor in your discussion. You might find that talking about learning to swim enables you to talk about your disappointment about not being eligible the Air Force. You might find a lesson on baking allows you to talk about a fear that you are pregnant. A lesson about pruning trees might help you discuss your feelings about your boss.

Think about joining thoughts on the issue with steps in the lesson you could teach. Write those thoughts under headings delineating steps in the lesson: For baking bread, for instance, the steps might be: gather the ingredients, mix them, let the dough rise, punch the dough down, bake the bread, eat it. If someone were writing about fearing she is pregnant, she could write small parts of her fear under each heading: “gather the ingredients” might lead to a discussion of who she is lovers with or of her relationship with her husband vis-a-vis babies and birth control; “mix the ingredients” might lead to a passage about forgetting or purposely not using birth control; “let the dough rise” might talk about the period of time she was waiting to find out if she were pregnant and getting used to the idea, and so on.

Paula Vogel says in interviews that she uses humor in her play so her audience will laugh and drop their defenses to hearing the painful subject matter and allow more of her character’s plight into themselves. What can you thread in about your secret that is funny or entertaining or amusing in some way?

When you are working on an ending, think about what the last step in your instruction is — how do you know that the task is finished and that you’ve done it successfully? Whatever you write for this last step will allow you to find a good ending for your essay, one that loops back to your opening when you spoke about learning the skill in the first place.

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When you finish writing, you might use your topic for three more pieces by thinking in these ways:

1. Who would hate discussing the issue? Create a dialog in which you divulge your issue to this person and he or she responds in the way you would anticipate.
2. Take the same issue and the same person and create a dialog in which that person reacts quite differently than you would think.
3. If something non-human had the same issue as you, what would that be–what animal, mineral, tool, weapon, food, etc. Write an essay from the inanimate object’s point of view on the issue.

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In a 1998 PBS interview, Paula Vogel said:

…in many ways I think that this play is an homage to Lolita, which I think is one of the most astonishing books ever written. So I started this thinking I wonder if a woman writer could approach this, I wonder if this could be done as Lolita from Lolita’s point of view. So that’s really the initial inspiration…I sometimes feel that being in that kind of mind set of victimization causes almost as much trauma as the original abuse. And so in many ways I think I felt that it’s a mistake to demonize the people who hurt us, and that’s how I wanted to approach the play.

Reading as writers read challenges us to enter the literary conversation by writing from our viewpoint and experience. In writing, we find layers and much more to our experience than we might have known or imagined had we not written.

Come at your issues through this juxtaposition of combining a lesson with an issue and you will find something very significant taking shape on the page.