Saturday’s Zoom conversation was joyous. Thanks to everyone who came and sent ahead questions about writing from life. The event has been recorded, and after we edit it a bit, I’ll post a link for PAID subscribers.
Today’s piece is an example of something we talked about—beginning with a small, concrete prompt, and layering it with associations in the form of jump cuts. At the end of this post, I’ll offer a suggestion for working small that may help some writers who are working long and feel a bit stuck.
The stack is now into its second year. Many paid subscribers have renewed, and the support feels like love. In the second year of anything, there’s churn. If this is a time you can upgrade your subscription to PAID, it would be super supportive. We’ll offer Zoom conversations throughout the year as well as a new feature for PAID subscribers: a clinic for your writing projects that will be more interactive than the larger Zoom gatherings. The first clinic is scheduled for SATURDAY OCTOBER 28 at 3pm EST. It’s limited to 25 people, and I’ll start a waiting list for future clinics. To RSVP write to me at: lauriestone@substack.com.
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The Happiness of Bats
Recently, I read a story in The New Yorker by Lyudmila Ulitskaya called "The Autopsy," and I felt Russia rise off the words. I had traveled to Russia in 2004, and while I was reading the story, I felt love for the visit and for entering spaces where you are a stranger.
The Russia that rose off the story was the Russia of Russian literature, a vast, breathing entity. The Russia that rose off the words was from the use of two names for the characters, for example. People called each other Marya Akimovna and Ivan Trofimovich. Also the unrushed pace of the opening panel, describing an autopsy performed by a retired coroner, called in to examine the body of a murdered young man. He discovers two mysterious incisions under the shoulder blades of the corpse, openings I immediately knew were where wings would grow.
I had once written a story about mutant babies being born with wings in the Bronx. The mutations were being kept secret. Also, Richard had read The New Yorker story and had mentioned an angel in the plot.
In Russia, I was a substitute teacher in a program, offered a space at the last minute when another writer canceled. This last-minute, get on the plane that's leaving the airport thing, was already the story of my life.
Richard had enjoyed the story’s jump cuts, moving from the interior of the coroner, to the interior of the murdered man’s mother—she had always felt her child was otherworldly, and she had been uncertain how he’d been conceived in the first place. The story then shifted to the interior of the young man, as he’s being killed by thugs for no reason other than spite, and as he feels wings growing painfully from his back.
The story, with its supernatural whisperings and set of coincidences, has the feel of a folk tale by Tolstoy, a form he adopted following what he considered his conversion from a landed aristocrat to a man of the people—including the serfs who worked on his estate. A man of the people in his mind, anyway.
When I felt what I took to be the Russianness of the story, I didn't faithfully remember my time in St Petersburg. I went into the warehouse of possible thoughts, looking for love the story had stirred.
In St. Petersburg, pink and orange buildings reflect in the canals. Clouds billow in blue skies, rushing toward the sea. My father’s parents were Russian—Russian Jews living somewhere in the pale, maybe in Vilna or Minsk. On the streets of St. Petersburg, I passed bearded men with the eyes of my father. I was told foreigners were resented there, but I couldn’t see this any more than I could understand the rest of what made Russia Russia. I didn’t feel afraid.
I ate sausages I would have liked to gnaw on for the rest of my life. It was summer, and it was light all the time. My room faced a courtyard. Outside, in the draining glow, I watched small, squeaking animals fly around. I wanted them to be bats. I was sure they were bats. My neighbor said they were birds. He knew Russia better than I did.
Once, when Gardner and I broke up, we ran into each other in front of a Chinese restaurant, and we went back to my place. He had a virus I caught. I was spaced out for months. After weeks of laying around, I got up off the couch and walked a mile to the tennis courts in Riverside Park. The sun was sinking. My dog chased a squirrel. All of a sudden, bats filled the sky, swooping and circling over a thicket of trees. Their voices were bells, or maybe the bells were ringing in Riverside Church. Anyway, it was the end of my long malaise.
In Russia, I was sleepless. The writing world is a small town, scattered across the globe. If I messed up at being a good guest, then what? I met a woman named Rosie who spoke Russian and calmed me down. Every day, we walked around the canals that ring the city and talked about our lives. She was there with her daughter, a slim, intense girl, who wanted to be a chef. The daughter feared that her parents would think the work wasn’t intellectual enough.
Rosie was the kind of mother I had wanted all my life. She could sense this. Everyone can sense this. She didn’t hover, but she wanted to help you, and she suggested ways she could help you, and after a while I could see the down side of being loved like this. The downside was that, if you were her child, you couldn’t loathe yourself in peace without causing your mother pain—and then you would feel bad about that, too. It taught me something about connection, but I don’t know what.
The story I wrote about the mutant babies wasn’t finished. I’m wondering if I should look at it again. The wings on the children were being surgically removed, but some of the parents and some of the doctors didn’t think this was a good idea. They thought people should become whatever it was possible for them to become.
In Russia, I kept telling myself, in an anxious way: you want the world, go figure out how to live in it. Wherever you are, smell the flowers and notice bees around the honey. Calculate the value of what you risk throwing away by opening your mouth. To this day, I haven’t learned to do this.
As I read Lyudmila’s story, the me that was a zigzagging print-out on a heart machine is not the memory that returned. It was the feeling of rising up out of the past on those damp, newly sprouted wings.
A note on Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Ulitskaya is an anti-Putin dissident. On the second day of the Russian war against Ukraine, Novaya Gazeta published a statement by her, Pain, Fear, Shame, strongly condemning the war. She was also among the signatories of an appeal by eminent writers to all Russian speakers to spread the truth about the war inside Russia. Since March 2022, she has been living in Berlin.
A note on writing small
One thing I didn't mention at Saturday’s Zoom gathering is the suggestion to work small.
One writer offered the "quilt" analogy of making a lot of small squares of text and then laying them out to see what patterns emerge, just by proximity. I think this is actually a pretty good description of how some pieces begin to form, although, as you keep working, you see the piece still needs to move forward in terms of momentum and amplification, with new tensions and angles added. A piece-in-progress generates new prompts for where it needs to go. It tells you the next square to write. The process is alive and organic in these moments of discovery, not something you can plan ahead.
For the moment, I’m suggesting working at the level of the sentence and the 400-word chunk of text in any genre.
Maybe try this: take a chapter or a story you are working on that has begun to feel leggy and dead to you as you read it. Pick the most dramatic moment that still has some blood in it. It will probably have blood because the narrator is looking out at something and that moment has produced a reaction or a memory or a moment of philosophical contemplation for the narrator.
That moment will have some crisp descriptive elements that do the work of "show" rather than "tell" (summary and analysis), and the chunk will also use language in surprising ways. It will be free of cliches and truisms. Anyway, that's what you're looking for in your work.
Take your happy chunk and try writing it as a 400-word piece. Ask yourself if there is a more imagistic word you can exchange for a word that came quickly to mind. Try to make your chunk into a baby story all by itself without resolving anything or teaching anything or coming to conclusions based on a conversion model—I used to be, and now I'm not. Try to make the baby story into an element that would make YOU want to read what comes next.
This chunk, once you love the sound of it, is the new beginning of your chapter or story. The fact that it's out of order chronologically, in terms of your earlier goes at the material, is a GOOD thing. Most of the stuff writers feel they must tell the reader they actually don't need to tell the reader (IMHO). The reader wants the excitement of wondering not only what will happen next in the piece but what they may make of the things they are being told.
In any case, what I'm suggesting is practicing the 400-word piece and using it as a template to write a great 800-word piece—and onward. I’ve found working this way to be extremely helpful in advancing any kind of writing and at any length. I hope it gives you something new to play with.
Also, there are a million other ways to work, and if they make you happy and productive, keep going and know I’m excited for you.
Birds have wings. Bats have wings. I believe bats are the only mammals to have wings. The only humans to have wings are angels. I think you have what I would call an associative metaphor.
“The wings on the children were being surgically removed, but some of the parents and some of the doctors didn’t think this was a good idea. They thought people should become whatever it was possible for them to become.” And so do you, it seems. Thank you for your continuous support of other writers.