Deepening characters by writing their relationships to non-human living things.
Writing with the non-human. Running with the medium-sized dogs. Confessing to stones and frolicking with trees. Today you will write.
Hi, friends.
Today you will write.
Your ability to write right now is good enough to build what you are trying to make. You’ll revise over time and the work will become even more what you are hoping for, layer by writing layer. Perhaps you are in the generative stage? Your work is to write rather than judge the writing. Maybe you are trying to add another layer to that scene you wrote from last week’s newsletter. Or perhaps you are working on a book and feel at sea in too many pages? Word by word, you will find your way.
If you participated in the writing prompt and wrote a scene with us last week, how did it go? I put the drywall up and the first coat of paint on the Easter scene, but I know that it will need a few more coats. It’s an important scene coming near the end of the book, akin to painting with a really bright color. It will take multiple writing sessions, right now I’m letting the paint dry. While writing last week, I would also notice some other thing I needed to put somewhere else in the book, and then start sculpting that other scene, then come back to the Easter scene, so writing the intended scene took longer than I’d hoped. Writing: always taking a bit longer than we think it might take.
Writing with animals
When I was about six or seven, my aunt and uncle lived on ten or fifteen acres in New Carlisle, Ohio, with two dogs: Boris, a German Shepard, and Major, an English Sheep Dog. They were big stinky dogs, matted, with burrs stuck in Major’s long white fur, and it seemed that they were always wet, always finding mud and puddles and tracking that muck back inside the house. They weren’t fluffy or cuddly dogs, they were never clean, and they smeared their stink and grime on everything.
What I loved to do most with those dogs was run like I was a dog myself. I would lead, at first, and Boris would be in the middle, and then we’d be side by side, and Major’s tongue would hang out in front of us as we weaved through the maple, sycamore, walnut and beech forest of my relatives’ land. I’d say aloud to the current leader of the pack, to Boris or Major, Where are you taking us? And they’d pick up speed, leading us to an old outhouse or chicken coop with a collapsed roof, the abandoned structures of former inhabitants.
I want to say that the dog’s tongue would harangue because the g looks like a large dog’s bologna tongue flopping out of its wet mouth, even though I know that is not the right word. Those happy, slobbery dogs. There was something about running as a pack. I could feel, almost, like I was one of them. The way we all picked up speed, turned corners and rounded the towering pile of wood nested high for later bonfires.
When I was running with the dogs as a child I felt in communion. This was in contrast to my everyday experience. I was a lonely child, or more specifically, I was a child with an interior life I kept mostly to myself. But I felt many other things, too, I think, running with the dogs. Today I am going to write into this: about that running, about what I felt while running compared to other days during that time period, and I’ll ask myself what else was happening around that time I ran with the dogs—in the larger world, in my personal world. I say I’m writing into it rather than writing about it because into it feels like I’m stepping into a house and exploring the rooms, whereas about feels like I’m hovering above a house, in a helicopter, say, and never go inside.
The old stone cottage was sold when I was a preteen and the buyers cut down the property’s dense forest for the price of the lumber. My aunt shook her head and said, A tragedy. I drove by once. There was no mystery left between the cottage and the acres that led to it from the state route. You could see the falling down coop, the old outhouse. The dogs went on to live long lives after that, though, on a smaller acreage with my aunt, where her free-range chickens climbed the pine trees at night to keep away from the foxes.
I think here of Jo Ann Beard’s “Fourth State of Matter” which at its crisis point tells the story of her friend’s untimely passing and a tragedy that befalls the University of Iowa, but Beard enters the story off to the side, with her personal love: the dog that is dying and her marriage which is ending. Beard fuses these two departures together through the description of how the couple referred to the dog: “We used to call her the face of love.”
Running with the dogs, letting them lead. I think it is akin to what we do when we are in the flow of writing–letting the words and images carry us without rethinking them or thinking of them at all. Just running. Letting something else lead rather than our conscious self.
Writing with Plants
But maybe your connection (or your character’s connection) is to a plant rather than another animal? The other day my son asked me, on our walk home from his preschool, if I’d like to see his grandma. I said yes, and thought about arranging a date with my mom or a phone call with my mother-in-law. But instead, he led me to a big oak tree.
Hi, Grandma, he said, giggling, and gave that oak tree a fantastic hug.
Maybe you have had a tree of companionship? I know some of you do—looking at you, subscriber-writer-friend who takes me on hikes in urban forests. :)
There was a weeping willow tree in my grandmother’s backyard when I was a child, and I remember the glee of swinging from its branches and the loss and self-consciousness that came with late childhood when any swinging I tried stripped the weeping branches of its leaves. When I was no longer young enough to swing I intuitively knew this was sorrowful both for my physical joy and for what it portended: I was too soon no longer a child.
If you are interested in reading more books that center plants, I recommend Gathering Moss by scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. As a freshman in college, Kimmerer had wanted to know why three plants looked so beautiful next to one another. Her professor laughed. That question, he said, was not one for a scientist. Go to the art department if you want to study that. In the book, she tells readers how she went on to study plants the way she wanted to study them. And encouraged many grad student scientists just coming up to do the same. She writes about co-living with moss and what moss can teach us about living, in a really lovely way. Their resilience is almost unbelievable. She tells us mosses are our great storytellers. From an interview:
“…mosses, which have been with us ever since they arose, 400 million years ago, have endured every climate change that has ever happened. They are great storytellers. They are great indicators of air quality, and of heavy metals in the environment; because they have no epidermis, they’re intimate with the world. They’re storytellers. If I see a certain kind of moss, I’ll think, Oh, I know you… you wouldn’t be here unless there was limestone nearby. There are mosses that tell the story of land disturbance, and there are mosses that only come in after fires, and they’re habitats, too, for tardigrades and rotifers [minute aquatic animals], for algae, and all sorts of other things. They are the coral reef of the forest, a microbiome in which the species of the bacteria that live in the angles of their leaves are different, say, to those on their rhizoids [the filaments found on their thallus, or plant body].”
Kimmerer also wrote the intro to this anthology of writing devoted to trees from Orion: https://orionmagazine.org/product/oldgrowth/.
If you would like a writing prompt:
Think of a nonhuman lifeform that you or your character had a strong connection to as a child. Even if, and perhaps especially if, the “meaning” of that connection is not immediately evident. What non-human life brought you or your character joy, glee, and/or communion? If for a story, how could this relationship offer something different emotionally or in terms of the character, then we’ve learned thus far about the character? How could it be a counterpoint or illustrative of something else we don’t see elsewhere in the story about the character? I’m thinking here of Jesmyn Ward’s Savage the Bones, which opens with the family’s pit, China, in labor. How each family member responds to the animal’s time of need tells us something about the characters’ loyalty and care, especially notable for Skeetah, a complicated character we follow throughout the book.
More questions you might consider for your writing exercise: What activities did you (or your character) do together? Where did it reside and where did you meet? What did you think and not think about when you were together? What happened next, in the life of that non-human living being, and in your own life or the life of your character? What was that relationship in contrast to? I say as a child because that is long enough ago that the experiences have settled some. The writing might be a bit more multi-directional if you let your younger strangeness live alongside your present self’s reflections.
Today you will write. Just being there, in front of the blank page, and writing words that build into sentences, is enough. Welcome in that knock at the door from the voice, yours, that tells you you can write this thing.
Today, your words will wear ice skates and glide across the frozen ice of the blank page.
Love,
TS
You are reading Today You Will Write, weekly words of writing encouragement, multi-genre prompts, and craft glow-ups from TaraShea Nesbit. You can subscribe here or give a gift subscription here. Twenty-five percent of the proceeds go to education, social justice, and advocacy organizations. This post’s donation will go to The Gathering Place in Denver.
P.S. In the p.s. of this newsletter I explore a few books that are bringing me joy related to the craft idea.
Have you heard about this one, The Nature Book by Tom Comitta? I have it on order, but from what I understand about the book, it is a collage of excerpts from published fiction, using only the bits in which the fiction details aspects of nature, so that the book centers on living things that are non-human. There is no primary human character. Cara Blue Adams, writing for The New Yorker, says it tells us more about us humans that have written about nature than it tells us about nature per se.
There is a new literary journal, Lean Mag, devoted to “non-protagonist-centered fiction” and there is an excerpt from Comitta’s book in the first issue of the mag: https://www.lean-mag.com/about.
If you are interested in reading stories with non-human connections that are not living, I recommend the story “The Stone” by Louise Erdrich, in which a girl has a specific, moving connection to a stone. (Thanks, reader/subscriber/friend S for this story tip!) What Erdrich said about her story: “This story is about finding solace in an entity that isn’t human. A stone is alien but deeply familiar. It is a heavy secret and a messenger from an epoch of time beyond comprehension. I have no idea why the girl shares this upsetting incident with the stone—but it seems to help her. We all enact odd little rituals we don’t understand.” I love when a writer speaks boldly to say that even they don’t fully understand why the people they’ve invented do what they do.
And of course, how trees are written about in The Overstory by Richard Powers should be noted here. He lives in Tennessee now, in the Great Smoky Mountains, and when I went to see the synchronized fireflies last year I had a fantasy I would pass him on a trail. That did not happen, but I highly rec booking a campsite at Elkmont campground,1 which gives you backdoor access to the fireflies via a very short trail, with no lottery ticket required, if you want to have a psychedelic experience without the psychedelics.
xo
TS
If you do this, know that it is cub season, some bear foods are not yet ripe and therefore do be diligent about keeping food away from your tent. I have more tips, so feel free to reach out if you go. I’d love to know what you thought about the experience.