Hello, dear writing buddies,
How have you been? Did you see the eclipse? The NCAAW basketball final? We did both. There was community disagreement about who to cheer for: the 10-year-olds cheered for Iowa (Clark effect), the 5 y/o cheered, in contrarian spirit, for SC, and I was all SC b/c I’ve loved Dawn Staley since her playing days. We were also in full totality here in Ohio—full totality is worth the drive—and we had family visiting from the West while the kids were on spring break. I got very sick, but now I’m better and appreciative of how often I’m not sick. The days are back to that feeling of having someone lift a freshly laundered sheet and letting it fall on you: comfortable, calm, quiet.
A Writing Prompt: “In my family, I’m the one who…”
I’ve been thinking about family. The stories we tell ourselves about our family and the stories we hope to find the end of. Thinking about family led me to remember a writing prompt I’ve given in the past that people often find generative, so I thought I’d share it with you.
The prompt is to finish this sentence: “In my family, I’m the one who…”
To make that tangible, I’ll tell you one way I could finish that sentence. In my family, I’m the one who thinks groundhogs can read.
Let me explain. I don’t think groundhogs can read, but something happened when I was about nine or ten, and ever since, certain people in my family have remembered me this way. Doing this sentence works, too, because it often gets at one representative story for something larger. The groundhog story is a kind of synecdoche for the story that I’m the one in the family who did well in school but lacked a certain common sense.
Here’s what happened
My mother’s mother had an issue with groundhogs eating the vegetables in her garden. She shared this problem at a family gathering and I said, “I know what you can do!” She asked, “What?” and I said, “You could put up a no trespassing sign!”
The family hooted. (My mother did not.) Their laughter is very easily accessible to me, but I recall even more my attempt to talk over the laughter, to explain where my idea came from.
The week before, a neighbor friend and I walked by a creepy house. The house was creepy because the yard was not tended, the trees and shrubs were tall and let to live as they pleased, and I’d only once seen a person in the yard, a short figure with long white hair, and loose clothing. I never saw their face. Staked in the yard of this scraggly place—a white wooden house, chipped paint—was a sign: “No Trespassing”. To make the place and the scene even scarier, the neighbor friend—I think Kim, though it may have been Laura, though it may have been a boy, Curtis—asked me if I knew what the No Trespassing sign meant. I said I did, that it meant we couldn’t go on their property. I’d heard “The Sign” song.
“Do you know what they can do if you trespass?” my friend asked.
I said I did not.
“It means they can shoot you.”
Ah, the things we believe when a person our age tells us them! So this was my logic: put up a no trespassing sign and you can shoot that groundhog.
In my family, I’m the one who thinks groundhogs can read.
Who were you in your family? Who have you been and how has that changed?
It works for fiction, too!
This is an exercise to try with nonfiction or fiction. I’m completing this sentence for the main characters of my novel in progress, too. I’m doing it as a way of accessing their backstory. It is an entry point into understanding and making up who these women were before the present moment of the novel, by exploring what family stories they come from, and what new stories they wanted to make to replace the old ones in the novel.
You can also do this with the stories you tell yourself about the people around you. Like “My brother is the one who…” or “My father-in-law is the one who…”
Finishing this sentence often gets you to a single story or repeated action, that becomes representative of other aspects of character (and our judgments).
And then, in the light of lights, we grow up and get to be other people, too. So you can ask, of yourself or the character, “Now, they are the one who…[does what?]”
If you try this, I’d love to hear what comes up for you! I’ve heard so many funny and vulnerable stories over the years. The one who never closed cupboards but thought it was her children that left them open (mom). The one who, by four years old, knew every word to every pop song and sang them in the shower (my lil brother).
A Wish for You
This weekend and into next week, may you find small playful moments to write that feel like being beneath clean sheets. A little fleeting lovely sensation of writing, enclosed in the writing, feeling lightly sheltered in something safe and warm, not too heavy.
I’m sending you so much love for your next writing session!
TS