Writers Lab: letters to self

Exercise #9: "It all turns on affection."

Hello, Lab Coats and all ‘bellies! Thank you for being here and for writing with me. We are working on building quite the warm-hearted community of storytellers and stories, and I am privileged to be doing this with you.

If you’re new to the Lab, please come introduce yourself here, and let us know a bit about you. If you want to be new to the Lab, you can upgrade your free subscription here; just know that we are glad to have you no matter how you want to partake at Storybelly. It’s all good, and you’ll always have access to the Lab posts until we get to The Assignment, where we go into more detail and gasp in Chat at the collective genius of the fun and the work ahead, hahaha, and as we start writing together.

Onward!

I’ve been spending some time in the past this week, both with Charlottesville (my young-adult (YA) work in progress) and with a memoir I’ve been playing with. The memoir was originally a part of Charlottesville, but it’s not working that way, as it’s no longer material that fits within the structure of the novel I’m now writing.

So I have split it off from my story about the 2017 Unite the Right rally, and I am left with a lot of material that’s not working as part of Charlottesville — what to do with that?

The material I’ve pulled is mostly 1) background on American history leading to the Lost Cause and to the Unite the Right rally; and 2) my personal journey through the Lost Cause, which — for some reason — we all thought was going to work in one book. Hmmm.

So I think I have a second book, we’ll see, but the important part, for the purposes of this Lab post, is to share some with you about Ways of Telling (Showing, Writing) and tie that into May’s Writers Lab themes… I trashed the Lab post I wrote yesterday — it’s also not working — so I’m going to start over and tweak the theme of sentimentality vs practicality in our writing.

I went down a rabbit hole yesterday, writing about personal anthems — literal songs — and the sentimentality they hold, trying to write about this in a practical way. And that personal journey has opened up a whole lot of personal material that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, but that is definitely asking for attention — I wrote reams about it yesterday. What do you do when that happens? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this in Chat, or in comments on this post.

In my case, you tuck up into a corner of your heart the feelings it brings up, you carefully save and shelve that work for now — I’ll come back to it — and you turn your attention and skills to the more-appropriate work at hand. What do you do with the (sentimental?) feelings that it opens up, especially when they feel raw and so close to the surface?

Since that’s what I’m dealing with right now, that’s what I’ll focus on for this Writers Lab. And that’s how we’ll get into sentimentality vs practicality. I’ll use my work to highlight examples.

Here’s how I began yesterday’s now-discarded Writers Lab post:

=======
I graduated from high school in 1971 in the Philippines. My dad was stationed at Clark Air Base, the Vietnam War raged, and a “new plane,” the C5-A Galaxy, an aircraft so enormous it defied gravity, flew supplies over to Vietnam and American bodies back to the US.

This flight, from the US to Vietnam and back, was something my dad had done, piloting C-141 Starlifters in the two years we were stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. Now Dad was in charge of the flightline and terminal at Clark, responsible for meeting the C-5 as it landed to refuel, sometimes at 3am, and making sure that the war effort ran smoothly from his duty station.

I was listening to protest songs. I had my anthems. “The Eve of Destruction” sung by Barry McGuire (and written by 19-year-old PF Sloane!); “Fortunate Son” sung by Creedence Clearwater Revival; Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” and the ever-popular to us budding hippies in high school who were facing the draft (or loved those who were), “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” [live at Woodstock; includes the ‘give me an F’ beginning] sung by Country Joe McDonald.

And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

======

So far, so practical, right? And, honestly, I’ve written so much that’s overly sentimental, and have been so dinged for it over the years by editors and first-readers, that I’m pretty good at spotting it in my own work these days.

I also know when sentimentality is called for. Romanticism and sentimentality, impulsivity and a deep quest for emotional depth are sometimes just what I need when writing something that calls for it, but those things are not more important than reality and practicality, critical thought, and some stability. The two can co-exist to great effect in writing, in art, and in life. Joined together in a kind of weird harmony, they create hope.

So. Let’s create some hope.

I’d like to spend the month of May in the Writers Lab exploring the ways in which we can work with both sentimentality and practicality in our storytelling.

Here are three first lines of mine, from three different books, all of them taking place in the fictional Aurora County, Mississippi, and all of them starring young protagonists:

“Murderers! You can’t have them all!” — from Love, Ruby Lavender

“I come from a family with a lot of dead people.” — from Each Little Bird That Sings

“Mr. Norwood Rhinehart Beauregard Boyd, age eighty-eight, philanthropist, philosopher, and maker of mystery, died on a June morning in Mabel, Mississippi, at home in his bed.” — from The Aurora County All-Stars

Astute readers have pointed out to me, over the years, that I start all three Aurora County books with… death. Well… yeah. I guess I do. So, when I wrote the fourth Aurora County novel, in 2019, I changed up my approach:

“They came, like secrets, in the night.” — A Long Line of Cakes

hahahaha. Okay, so I’m still writing about mysteries, one of which is death. I’ve been fascinated by death for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t set out to write about it… or maybe I did, subconsciously. When I was young, the idea of death fascinated me in a histrionic way sometimes, which is why the character Peach appears in Little Bird. Which is why Uncle Edisto turns the tables on death and says, “Open your arms to life! Let it strut into your heart in all its messy glory!” Now that I’m more crusty, I’m fascinated by death — and life — in a much more settled way, which is a gift of time.

These novels contain so much hope. The urge to write about love and loss and family and connection and grief and heartbreak and joy opens vistas — vistas! — of opportunities to be schmaltzy and saccharine and silly and syrupy and sentimental. I can be as sentimental as the next person, but I’m also working with practicalities when I write, so how do I balance a story? I want it to be read. I want you to clasp the book to your breast after reading it and tell someone, “You’ve got to read this!”

The way I get to practicality within these overly-sentimental tendencies is through humor, dialogue, and… affection. There is a balance, a beautiful balance, actually, a different balance for each book, and I am always looking for it.

We’ll keep in mind this month what Wendell Berry says about the human story, no matter how you tell it:

It all turns on affection.

So let’s work with affection this week. We’ll start with letters.

Again, you can join the Lab here, if you want to write with us this month. We’ll be happy to have you, and we’ll get out the pom-poms to welcome you. :>

THE ASSIGNMENT: