Mansion out of a Mole Hill

Lately I’ve been talking with friends about how I want to tell the truth in my writing. Not so much in the plot—it’s easy enough to tell the world in all its inherent weirdness—but more so in my impressions. As much as I flinch at sentimentality, I find myself falling back on emotions that feel right rather than are actually true. “The old woman smiled at me over her cup of coffee and that’s when I realized that this is what life is all about/the true meaning of Christmas/I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and so on, drawing from a mixed bag of other people’s life lessons and all those sappy movies and shows from my childhood. The number of times I’ve hit a wall in my writing because I followed this breadcrumb trail of false impressions only to find that it had abandoned me.

At the time of this writing it’s April Fool’s Day, which means it’s time to play a little joke on my students. I can only do this every couple of years or else the trick gets passed on to the next grade. I give out essay prompts to groups of four, but instead of writing it, they have to compile a slideshow of images, and they choose one representative of their group to go to the projector and present, prompted along by each picture. That’s where I get ‘em and they find out just how wild their teacher is.

At the last minute I swap group slides so that the student talking about, say, the symbolism of the DeLacey’s cottage in Frankenstein, has to suddenly work with images from a discussion on, oh, the symbolism of Thornfield in Jane Eyre. These are Jackson Academy’s best and brightest students, so of course there is always the brief panic as they imagine their grades going up in flames (just like both of those houses.) It takes about five minutes to talk them down, promise them it’s all in good fun, and remind them what day it is and that I am, in fact, wild. They start relaxing a bit after that. For the theater kids, this is improv and right up their alley.

One group after another, each speaker has to force a square peg into a round hole. They have to convince their audience that the DeLacey’s broken down cottage is Rochester’s mansion, shoe horning the first image that comes to them. We the audience can see the absurdity.

I think that’s what I’ve caught myself trying to do in my writing, and avoiding it requires constant redirection. I’ve had to backspace entire paragraphs that were the wrong, long trajectory of a single false impression, the first thought that came to me without any sort of sifting or turning over. If I panned the gold a little bit longer I would more likely find my idea to be just shiny grit. I might realize that the lady smiling over her coffee at me did not move me to any profound changes of the heart. That I was actually confused as to why she was smiling at me, and I thought her coffee looked a little too hot to drink. And when she took a sip of it unflinchingly and I watched the scalding drink ripple down the ol’ pipe, I wondered how many years of exposure it took to make her steel-throated and why she was the lucky one to develop steel and not cancer of the esophagus. But I guess that sort of thing can be a bit random, and I don’t think people want to read merely abstract observations.

When I was in grad school I wrote a paper on citrus fruit in Jane Eyre. I mentioned profound things such as their existence and their repeated appearances in decor and in film adaptations. I got a fat “SO WHAT” in the margin of page one. My professor was a small man with a great forehead and a neat little goatee reminiscent of the caricatured version of the devil. To this day, when I sit down to write and try to go citrus on my audience, I hear that rhetorical question. Sometimes I hear it in the all-caps yelling from my first interpretation and sometimes I hear it as a devilish whisper and sometimes it’s weirdly breathless, possibly because my professor also taught Pilates.

I should say that I agree with his feedback. Let me establish that before I accidentally take a wrong turn and try to make this into a piece on how a mentor hurt my feelings and crippled my writing ever after. After all these years I really don’t care how the feedback was delivered; it’s become a useful anecdote for my own students as they begin to dabble in more grandiose words prone to be simple statements of fact. The struggle I now face as a writer is a result of my own over correcting. I have to somehow find the best of both worlds. Somewhere in the middle lies a bright, valuable, truthful little story, a little gold crumble that couldn’t cap an eyetooth.

“Working with language is the means by which we can identify the [b.s.] within ourselves,” writes George Saunders. “…[T]he process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and, most important of all, tells us what we really think. But”—and this is my least favorite part of his quote— “this process takes time…”

Student: “Jane Eyre…ah…well…she had a rough life at the beginning…”