Diane Morrow

When Writing Takes Us Outside Our Own Skins

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 28, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Fiction

The thread this month (though this may or may not be apparent) is the way that coming at things from a different perspective—a new angle—can sometimes lead to good things. And when I think about looking at things from a new angle—from a fresh perspective—one of the things that comes to mind for me is something I learned from college freshmen when I first started teaching them. When I first started teaching writing, I wanted the students in my classes to care about what they were writing. So I started out by telling them they could write about whatever they wanted. This did not go quite as well as I’d imagined it might. For the most part, the students wrote about their dormitories, their roommates, fraternities, beer. They seemed just a bit bored by their writing—and, I’ll admit, I was a bit bored by it as well. I suggested maybe they try writing about something more controversial—argument papers. They gave me papers on abortion and gun control. Lots and lots of papers on abortion and gun control. And, well—it was still boring. For them and for me. Their sentences seemed canned, as if someone else and not them had written them. They were giving me what they thought I wanted. They were giving me what they thought teachers wanted. I kept trying. Then at some point in the middle of the semester I remembered that story the teacher had told us about Sarah and her son—about writing fiction from a new point of view—and I told the students I wanted them to try stepping out of their skins. Their assignment: to write a paper from a different point of view. I invited them to imagine inhabiting some another body—animate, inanimate, I told them it made no difference. Just imagine being someone or something else, I told them. Be a different age. Be a different gender. Be a rock. And then write about it. And they wrote. John, an avid hockey player, imagined himself as a hockey player who had undergone a crippling accident and was left in a wheelchair. He wrote a story about this young man sitting in his wheel chair, watching movies, over and over, and then, one day, getting up and out of the wheelchair and travelling into the movie screen, onto a space cruiser, and then deep into the Andromeda System, to a planet called Saturn 9, which was like a place the young man used to dream about as a child. David became a police officer who got shot in the line of duty. Sam became a homeless man. Glenn became Alfred Einstein—Albert’s nephew. Chris became a white Camaro. The students leapt out of their skins in ways I had not anticipated. It was as if I’d pointed to a door and they flew through it. Actually, the five stories I’ve just described briefly here were chosen by these students as their best work of the semester, and they were in turn chosen for publication by the editors of the freshman review, a small magazine at the university of the best freshman prose and poetry. And, as it turned out, their stories accounted for half the prose pieces in the review, suggesting that I wasn’t the only person who found these new stories they’d...

Alive

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 26, 2007 in Uncategorized

Yesterday, while my son was at his piano lesson, I went to the public library, and while I was there I came across a book by Mary Oliver entitled Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Mary Oliver is the author of that poem, Wild Geese, among many others. In any case I brought her book home, along with a stack of others, and last evening I opened the book, and in the introduction I came across this—one of the loveliest invitations to making language–to writing–that I’ve seen— And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new a serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning, ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a...

Writing and Healing Idea #22: Once Upon a Time

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 25, 2007 in Writing Ideas

There are perhaps a million ways to enter or re-enter the writing of fiction. Here is one: Begin with “Once upon a time.” This particular idea springs from one in Dee Metzger’s 1992 book, Writing for Your Life. The book contains a wide range of exercises. One of my favorite of these is an exercise entitled “Entering the Tale”. In this exercise, one is instructed to simply choose a fairy tale—any one at all—and then shift the point of view so that one is writing it in the first person from the protagonist’s point of view. You write from the main character’s point of view as if the story is happening to you right now. For instance, if you were to choose to write—or rewrite—the tale of Cinderella, you might begin: Once upon a time, when I was a girl, and after my mother had died, my father decided to marry a woman who was not only cruel but who had two cruel daughters. . . Or, you could write in the present tense, in a more immediate style: My father has decided to marry again. I am devastated. . . You have a number of options here. You can include as many of the original details of the story as you like. You can also alter the details as needed. The fairy tale is at the core of your story—it’s the seed of your story—but you can take this seed, and shift perspective, and carry it wherever you like. Simply begin at the beginning—Once upon a...

Fiction and Truth

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 23, 2007 in Fiction

When I was in graduate school, one of my writing teachers told us this story, a true story about one of his students. Call her Sarah. Sarah’s young son had been ill for a long time with leukemia and then had died. It was a terrible grief, and one she had tried to write about many times—and couldn’t. My teacher suggested she try writing the story again, and this time switch the gender, telling the story from the point of view of a father who has lost a young son. Sarah wrote. The story began to come. And what she’d held in—a hard truth she’d believed was unacceptable—began to spill out into the story. Relief. One of the things the father in the story felt when the boy died, after months of watching him suffer, was relief. Question: Can writing fiction be a way of getting at something true? This same teacher who told us this story–or maybe it was another teacher–told us once that in order to write a good story you need to love all of your characters–have compassion towards them. And it occurs to me now that if an author could love all of the characters in a story, then it might become possible for one of those characters to express a feeling that the character might have thought was unacceptable. As the author felt compassion toward him–toward that character–an (apparently) unacceptable feeling might become, in that moment, more acceptable–ordinary–human. And that would be, I think, a good...

The Research on Fiction Writing and Health

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 21, 2007 in Uncategorized

There’s a piece of research that dovetails well with Lee Smith’s experience that I wrote about last week. It’s the only piece of research I know of that looks at what happens in terms of health when people write fiction. The study was conducted in 1996 by Greenberg et. al. and is cited in The Writing Cure (106). Participants in this study—college students—were divided into three groups: A group who wrote about nonemotional events A group who wrote their deepest thoughts and feelings about a previous trauma A group who wrote their deepest thoughts and feelings about an imaginary trauma Both the group who wrote about a previous trauma and the group who wrote about an imaginary trauma had significantly fewer visits to the student health center in the month following the writing than the group who wrote about nonemotional events. Thus, writing about real trauma was beneficial. And writing about an imaginary trauma—writing fiction—was beneficial. (Granted, not all fiction has to do with trauma or difficult life events but one could argue that a fair amount of fiction touches on this area. Consider, for instance, Stephen King. Edgar Allen Poe and that telltale heart. J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Charles Dickens and all those stories of orphans. Grimm’s fairy tales. I can’t help but wonder, as I write this, if reading these stories—holding strong emotions through reading—might not also offer a kind of healing—but that perhaps is a different question for a different day—-) In a discussion of this study, the authors propose a reason that writing about imaginary trauma might be beneficial. They propose that writing about imaginary trauma may have allowed people to “accommodate themselves to negative emotions in a safe context.” This resonates for me with the words that Lee Smith used when she talked about writing her novel: I was in a very heightened emotional state the whole time I was writing it, and it meant everything to me to have it to write. And Molly’s story became my story, or at least a receptacle of all this emotion I didn’t have anything to do with. Story as a (safe) receptacle for emotion? Writing fiction as a (safe) way to hold strong emotions? Writing fiction may, of course, lead to a lot of other things as well. Beautiful novels. Moving short stories. A deeper understanding of life. A new way of looking at the world. Entertainment. Joy. All of this may happen for the reader—or for the writer. But maybe one of the other things that can happen—sometimes—for any one of us—and not just published novelists—is this opportunity for writing fiction to become a safe way to hold and digest—and perhaps transform—strong deep...

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