“It is simply that what happens in the writer happens in the reader” – Jane Hirshfield
Make a list of journeys you have taken in your life. From where to where? What about internal journeys? What do you remember most?
Now choose one journey of yours to focus on to write about.
Prompt 1: What did you not know before the trip?Was there a certain tension that you felt? What were your secret fears and secret sins? Why did you need to go on this journey? Did you do something you weren’t supposed to do? What did you risk? What was a scene that stands out to you?
You may have tried writing about this journey or others before. And asked yourself, but how can I get this story on the page in a way that helps the reader feel what I was feeling? How can I structure and craft my sentences, images, and scenes in a way that helps the reader experience the same thing I did?
I turn to Toni Morrison often, and especially this essay The Site of Memory she wrote about how her mind works as she is crafting her stories. She reveals a process of moving from the picture she has in her mind, in this case cobs of corn, through the memories and their emotional power, to the text on the page in her book Beloved.
Here is an excerpt:
“What I want to do in this talk is to track an image from picture to meaning to text - a journey which appears in the novel that I'm writing now, which is called Beloved. I'm trying to write a particular kind of scene, and I see corn on the cob. To "see" corn on the cob doesn't mean that it suddenly hovers; it only means that it keeps coming back. And in trying to figure out "What is all this corn doing?" I discover what it is doing. I see the house where I grew up in Lorain, Ohio. My parents had a garden some distance away from our house, and they didn't welcome me and my sister there, when we were young, because we were not able to distinguish between the things that they wanted to grow and the things that they didn't, so we were not able to hoe, or weed, until much later. I see them walking, together, away from me. I'm looking at their backs and what they're carrying in their arms: their tools, and maybe a peck basket. Sometimes when they walk away from me they hold hands, and they go to this other place in the garden. They have to cross some railroad tracks to get there.
I also am aware that my mother and father sleep at odd hours because my father works many jobs and works at night. And these naps are times of pleasure for me and my sister because nobody's giving us chores, or telling us what to do, or nagging us in any way. In addition to which, there is some feeling of pleasure in them that I'm only vaguely aware of. They're very rested when they take these naps. And later on in the summer we have an opportunity to eat corn, which is the one plant that I can distinguish from the others, and which is the harvest that I like the best; the others are the food that no child likes - the collards, the okra, the strong, violent vegetables that I would give a great deal for now. But I do like the corn because it's sweet, and because we all sit down to eat it, and it's finger food, and it's hot, and it's even good cold, and there are neighbors in, and there are uncles in, and it's easy, and it's nice. The picture of the corn and the nimbus of emotion surrounding it became a powerful one in the manuscript I'm now completing.
Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to render the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage. The process by which this is accomplished is endlessly fascinating to me.” - from The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison
Prompt 2: Now we are going to add the concrete literal images and pictures from this journey. Explore the images and associations connected to the journey in your mind. Let your mind wander and write as many associations with the images as possible. Let your mind digress and tangent.
Happy writing!
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