Letters From Kelly

Nutrition Facts
for Hermit Crab Stories 
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Serving Size: One writer, one at a time
Number of Servings per container: Infinite
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Ingredients:
One subject the author feels moved to write about;
One desire to experiment or play;
One familiar form of writing^† that the author can
borrow for their story;
One imagination.
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Calories (spent while writing) — 350 to 500*
Calories (consumed while writing) — 350 to 500**
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Percentage (%) daily values
Subject                                                          15%
(These are flash stories, so keep your focus narrow.)
Borrowed Form                                            75%
(You want your reader to recognize the form immediately, but you should also feel free to play around, take literary license.) 
Narrative Arc                                               100%
(This is still a story with a central character and a clear beginning, middle, and end.)
Voice                                                              50%
(You’ll want your hermit crab to sound like the form you’re borrowing, but don’t abandon your own voice, either. This is still your story.)
Creative Exploration                                    50%
(Your borrowed shell is firm and imposes some limits; but wearing it enables you to wander further afield, play more, and find a fresh take on something familiar.)
Subject to Shell Matching Ratio                 ??%
(You might generate a nice frisson of resonance when subject and form share some symmetry. But it’s not necessary. Authors have written about romantic break-ups as auction item catalogue listings and WebMD entries, and I’m borrowing an FDA-regulated label for packaged food for a work on creative writing, so who knows, really?)
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Key Sources of Inspiration
Flash fiction as obituary                                   100% ***
Flash essay as resume                                      100%
Flash fiction as Facebook group rules      100 %
Further reading                                                   100%              

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^{† “}A hermit crab essay borrows another form of writing as its structure the way a hermit crab borrows another’s shell. Its subject might be something soft or vulnerable, (like the crab) that seeks the form of something harder or more rigid to encase it. The form must be written but … something less literary and more utilitarian such as a list, recipe, field guide, instruction manual, address book, multiple-choice test, horoscope, Web MD entry…” — Randon Billings Noble

* Will vary based on how angsty a writer you are, and how many times during the writing process you stand up, pace, walk the dog, go for a bike ride, and clean your kitchen.
** See above.

*** If you recognize Deesha Philyaw’s story “Mayretta Kelly Brunson Williams Bryant Jones (1932-2012)” from last June’s Writing Advice, you get a gold star! If you don’t, because you didn’t read it then, consider this your second chance and take the hint.

Kelly Caldwell,

Dean of Faculty

Last week, my Memoir II writers offered up some of the many ways other people try to shut down our work:
 
It’s disrespectful to joke about such a serious subject.
What will your mother think?
Sounds like maybe you’re still too close to the material. Maybe you should wait a few years.
You’re not a real writer if you don’t put words down every day.
Yes, but what about your mother?
 
What struck me about all this advice is that, while often well-meaning, it does not indicate possible harm, so you can avoid it. It presumes that writing is harm.
 
Luckily, author Jill Christman, who just published a book of love stories, was in the room, too.
 
“Having people tell you that you can’t tell your story, even if it intersects with theirs, that’s not a loving thing to do,” Christman said. “It’s not a loving thing for them to do to us.”
 
Or to ourselves.
 
In her book If This Were Fiction: A Love Story In Essays, Christman recoils from nothing. She writes about all the terrible things, which I won’t list, only to say that she doesn’t flinch from the ways that life beats you up. But she doesn’t leave it there.
 
Each essay finds a new answer to the question, when you know how much suffering the world can inflict, how do you love anyway?
 
An answer: You laugh. You love your people. And you write your stories.
 
As life philosophies go, we could do worse.
 
It’s often said, writing is cathartic. The author Brian Doyle said “writing is a time machine, writing resurrects, writing gives death the finger. And so amen.” Novelist Walter Mosley says writing is revelation.
 
What would happen if we thought of writing as love?
 
I’m not saying, write with love, or from a place of love. Because I believe it’s more than OK to write with or from fury, humor, sadness, delight, curiosity, spite. Rather, what if we thought of  the practice itself as love, the way, sometimes, making someone a peanut butter sandwich is love, regardless of how you feel about that person, or about peanut butter, in the moment.
 
Would it make our stories better? Maybe. Maybe not. But it could turn down the volume on the censors who are always nagging at us. It could perhaps quiet the unreasonable expectations we heap on ourselves.
 
Such a shift in thinking could, I believe, free us, to let our stories take us to the surprising, unexpected places they’ve always wanted to go. Which is why we were moved to write them in the first place.
 
“Writing automatically, by its practice, feels like a safe place to me no matter where I’m going,” Christman said. “If I’m being honest, writing really is my safe space.”

Kelly Caldwell, Dean of Faculty

Happy NaNoWriMo everyone! I always think NaNoWriMo month is a good time to talk about what to do when you’ve got a big messy bunch of words and you’re wondering, what’s next?
 
Here’s an idea: Doodle.
 
Don’t @ me about your drawing ability! You don’t have to be Amy Sherald or John Singer Sargent to doodle. You just need a pencil.
 
“Drawing can enrich your writing life, regardless of its visual appeal,” writes Rebecca Fish Ewan in her very fun book Doodling for Writers (Hippocampus Books). “If your drawings help thoughts form and emerge from your mind, they are useful drawings.”
 
Where to start? Fish Ewan suggests making lists —your chapters, your scenes, or the paragraphs of your short story. Then create a doodle for each one.
 
When writing her forthcoming book The Truth About Unringing Phones (Unsolicited Press), author Lara Lillibridge first listed all the flash essays she’d written so far, and color-coded them.
 
Then she created a notecard with a unique doodle for each one. She laid the cards out on her floor, shuffling them until a structure emerged.
 
“I never write in order. I write what is most pressing emotionally in the moment,” she said. “It is much faster to see the doodle and remember what that segment was about than to read a written description.”
 
Doodling can help you notice themes or see the outline of a plot. It can also surprise you, because it sometimes leads to what graphic novelist Lynda Barry calls “deep play”— when your doodles talk back.
 
“There is a reciprocity … that is a lot like a very good conversation,” Barry said. “The relationship between me and my drawing depended on that state of deep play, a certain state of mind that is not planning, not thinking, it’s some other thing.”
 
Exciting things can happen in that other state. Once, for an essay, I struggled to describe the idiosyncratic layout of my childhood attic bedroom. So I sketched it. But then I kept going, doodling my dolls and the funky built-in drawers in the walls. And I remembered a long-forgotten incident when I discovered my grandfather’s World War I pistol stashed in the closet. That memory helped me move the essay forward.
 
Getting unstuck is one reason Erin Entrada Kelly doodles while writing, but it’s not the only one.
 
“I doodle all the time. They ultimately don’t have any value to what I’m working on, but they help me focus and keep me creative,” Erin says. “When we grow up, we sometimes forget to be creative. I seize every opportunity to flex my creative muscles so they don’t atrophy.”
 
If you’d like to see a recent doodle by Erin, or how Lara Lillibridge used doodles to organize one of her essays, click here. Then close your computer and pick up your drawing pencil, and play. You’ll be surprised at what happens next.