Welcome to TODAY YOU WILL WRITE
We worry our middles are boring, our endings don't land, our openings lack momentum. Today we will write anyway.
Welcome to TODAY YOU WILL WRITE, a weekly newsletter of encouragement, writing exercises, craft tips and conversations about fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Goes live once a week. Today, you will write.
Why did I start TODAY YOU WILL WRITE?
As a novelist and writing professor, I struggle sometimes to keep the positive energy high enough to finish a draft and I see that struggle in writer friends and students, too. We are all in this struggle together. It is a necessary confidence trick to believe you can write the book you want to write, no matter how many stories or essays you’ve written before. And that’s why TODAY YOU WILL WRITE was born. TODAY YOU WILL WRITE offers encouragement, reading recs, writing exercises, and features from working writers, as a way to create a community space that encourages us to keep going, especially when the writing gets tough.
When and how often will TODAY YOU WILL WRITE publish?
I will post a writing exercise, craft chat, and reading recommendation throughout the year. I will respond to as many comments as I can.
Your first writing exercise: Write about an image you can’t forget, but that you also don’t know why you can’t forget it.
Some images we remember have clearer reference points, like in times of monumental joy or crises, or painful breaks. But other times, we keep remembering something that seems pretty benign. Try writing about an image, or sound, or landscape that you think about sometimes, but that the reasons you keep returning to it seem partially unknown to you still. As you write, describe the object or image. Connect that image to other images just by writing what comes to mind as you go. Let it not make sense to you yet. Then move outward: who was the caretaker or holder of this object? What else did that person do or say? How did you feel about them? If you have trouble thinking of this kind of object, a sub-exercise to write into is to begin a sentence with, “I don’t know why I remember…” and keep repeating that sentence as any times as it takes for you to get to something specific yet also still energetic with mystery.
Today, I’m writing about the concrete goose my grandmother always dressed up in seasonally-appropriate attire, or on game days, a sports jersey. I don’t know why I can’t forget it, but I suspect, as I keep writing, that it will become an objective correlative for some mysteries in my family and also be a distilled image to speak about the place a character I’m working on grew up. An objective correlative is often an object in a story or essay that carries significant emotional weight. The sweetened condensed milk of Stuart Dybek’s “Pet Milk”, the Volkswagon Beetle in Ann Hood’s “How to Write a Kick-Ass Essay” and the claim check in Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s terrific “False Star”.
But first: what is your concrete duck, your yellow rain slicker, an image you keep coming back to without a clear reason why? Today you will write and see what emerges, because your life matters, your ideas matter, and your mysteries are curious and interesting and worthy of being written about.
I’m setting my timer for thirty minutes, an amount that seems undaunting. You could choose a different amount of time, but choose something you can achieve.
Let’s go!
TS