Archives | Writing and Healing

Writing and Healing Idea #25: A Memo at Your Breakfast Plate

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 27, 2007 in Writing Ideas

It occurs to me that it might be okay to borrow Salinger’s Seymour for an idea for writing and healing. You could imagine that you write some piece of your story, and you could imagine that Seymour reads it while you are sleeping. You could imagine that when you wake in the morning there is an envelope at your breakfast plate. You open the envelope. Inside is a memo. Inside he has written—what? That he can see the leaps in your story? That he’s seen how all your stars have come out? That he’s seen—what? What would you most long for him to say? You could write this down–what you most long for him to say–or for someone to say. You could write this on a piece of notepaper, or on a shirt cardboard, or on a piece of hotel stationery. You could write it at night perhaps and place it on the table where you eat your breakfast. You could write it early in the morning and place it in an envelope beneath a half of a grapefruit. And then you could read this memo with your breakfast as a way to begin your...

A Memo from J.D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Image for Writing and Healing?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 25, 2007 in Healing Images

One of the first writing workshops I ever took—this at the University of Missouri in Columbia—was taught by Janet Desaulniers, a woman who I’ve written about here before. One evening she began class by reading to us an extended passage from a J.D. Salinger story. The workshop was a fiction-writing workshop. She’d been reading our stories for weeks. And she prefaced these pages by Salinger by telling us that she sometimes felt a lot of responsibility, knowing that, at least for some of us, she was our first reader. She took this seriously—being a reader. It was one of the things that made her a good teacher. The passage she read was from, “Seymour, an Introduction,” this one in a series of stories that Salinger wrote about the Glass family. In this particular story, Buddy Glass, a writer, is telling about his older brother, Seymour, a young man whom he idolized and who is now dead. In the passage she read to us Buddy Glass is telling about a time when he was twenty-one years old and living with his brother, and had the habit of reading his stories aloud to him. And Seymour would then write responses to these stories, lengthy responses, sometimes writing them on shirt cardboards, or on whatever he could find at hand. Here is one particular memo, this written by Seymour on notepaper from the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago and placed on Buddy’s breakfast plate beneath a half a grapefruit. It’s daylight out, and I’ve been sitting here since you went to bed. What bliss it is to be your first reader. It would be straight bliss if I didn’t think you valued my opinion more than your own. It really doesn’t seem right to me that you should rely so heavily on my opinion of your stories. That is, you. . . . You must know yourself that this story is full of big jumps. Leaps. When you first went to bed, I thought for a while that I ought to wake up everybody in the house and throw a party for our marvelous jumping brother. What am I, that I didn’t wake everybody up? . . . Excuse this. I’m writing very fast now. I think this new story is the one you’ve been waiting for. And me, too, in a way. You know it’s mostly pride that’s keeping me up. I think that’s my main worry. For your own sake, don’t make me proud of you. I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all of your stars are out, and for no other reason. Excuse the underlining, but that’s the first thing I’ve ever said about one of your stories that makes my head go up and down. Please don’t let me say anything else. . . . I could write more here. But I’m thinking perhaps that I shouldn’t write anything else. Except perhaps to say that I think this whole notion of a first reader—and how that first reader responds—or how one imagines that this first reader might respond—has something to do with writing and...

Writing and Healing Idea #24: Deciding Who to Bring on the Train

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 22, 2007 in Writing Ideas

A patient helped me discover this writing idea. She uses imagery to help manage chronic pain. And one of the images she’s found helpful recently is to imagine that she’s falling asleep on a train and as she’s falling asleep she can hear the sound of the wheels on the tracks and the sound is very soothing and she’s lying very still—on a clean soft pillow—clean sheets–and she can look outside the window at the landscape if she wants—or not—and all the time she’s being carried to a place where the pain is becoming less and less and less. One of the things she’s discovered as this train imagery has developed is that she can decide who to bring on the train. She can decide who to have outside her compartment, riding on the train with her—and she can decide who to invite inside her compartment—and when. She can decide who she’d like to have for company. She can decide who she might want to have available if something should happen—say if the pain becomes worse. She can bring along a dozen people—or one—or none. But in any case she gets to decide, in this imagery, who to bring on the train. And it occurred to me that this image could be translated as an idea for writing. Say that you are beginning to write. Say that you have decided to do a year of writing and healing—or a month of writing and healing—or fifteen minutes of writing and healing. Say that you imagine that as you begin this writing—this writing project—say that you are boarding a train. And say then that you get to decide who will be riding this train with you. And say that it can be anyone at all—persons living or dead—persons real or imagined—some persons perhaps that you’ve only read about in books or some persons perhaps that you’ve conjured in your imagination. Who would you like to bring on the...

What Audience Do You Imagine When You’re Writing?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 20, 2007 in A Different Perspective

Peter Elbow, in his book, Writing With Power, makes a distinction between safe audiences and dangerous audiences. He proposes that we write more authentically when we’re writing for audiences that feel safe. He writes [p. 186]: First, a dangerous audience can inhibit not only the quantity of your words but also their quality. That is, if you are trying to talk to a dangerous audience, instead of finding yourself mixed up or tongue-tied or unable to think of anything to say [which, of course, can happen], you may find yourself chattering away nervously, unable to stop but also unable to say anything important. If, for example, I have to speak to a person or group that I find difficult, I might adopt a voice that hides my real voice and speak with, say, a tinny jolliness or an inauthentic pompousness. If, by contrast, I am with someone I trust, I may say less than usual but talk from my depths— I may say less than usual but talk from my depths. Maybe that’s how we begin to suspect we’re in the presence of a safe audience—when we find ourselves speaking from some depth. Maybe we only recognize a safe audience after the fact—when we realize what kind of writing or speech has become possible in its presence. Elbow also makes a distinction between an actual audience—a person or group we know will actually be reading what we write—and the imagined audience—that audience that we carry around inside our heads, the one we tend to assemble from all our past experiences of speaking and writing. Say it happens one morning—or perhaps it’s evening—say that we find ourselves writing something true—something that feels authentic. Say we write something that we didn’t even know that we knew, but then, after we write it, the words feel like they have this ring of truth. What has allowed those particular words to emerge? What does the audience for those words have to do with it? How much of it has to do with the outer audience? How much of it has to do with the inner audience? More questions here than answers—– What audience do you imagine when you’re writing? Does the inner assembled audience change with time? And what kinds of things cause it to change? And does this inner assembled audience have anything to do with...

A Bit of Writing Advice from John Steinbeck: What He Did to Keep from Going Nuts

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 18, 2007 in A Different Perspective

Just over forty years ago—on February 13 and 14 of 1962—John Steinbeck wrote some advice about writing to Robert Wallsten (a man who, it turns out, is one of the editors of Steinbeck’s letters). Steinbeck prefaced his advice on writing this way: Now let me give you the benefit of my experience in facing 400 pages of blank stock—the appalling stuff that must be filled. I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone’s experience which is probably why it is so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts. One piece of his advice seems especially relevant here to this notion of perspective—the possibility of reframing our stories (and perhaps our bodies? our lives?) in a clearer and somewhat kinder light. That possibility of looking at our stories in new ways— Steinbeck writes: Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn’t exist. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one. It’s sound advice, I think. It also leads quite naturally to a couple of questions: What does the nameless, faceless audience look like? What does your nameless, faceless audience look like? And say that you could address your writing to one particular person—any person in the world—alive or dead—real or imagined—who would you pick? [Note: I found the above quotes by Steinbeck in Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others, p....

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