Holiday mini-course prompts... let the thinking begin!
PROMPTS
Memory is like a shy cat at times; she hides in corners, slips through the hallway so that you almost think you didn’t see her after all; she shows up in least-expected places.
(A neighbour’s cat wandered into the house one day, wandered, left…)
Here, our task is to tiptoe after, draw her out from her hiding place, lure her to the bowl of milk, then watch her drink and note all the details: the drops on whiskers, the sound of her tongue dipping into the milk (you can hear it!) the sudden quick stare of her eyes as we make a sound and she looks up.
The sudden realization that this memory cat has one green eye and one blue.
And while in fiction, we don’t have to be “true” to memory, we are still true to the story itself, even as it winds along a path and changes minutely in the making.
Memory is frequently a prompt for both nonfiction and fiction
Let’s see what we have… Keep notebook and pen handy. You don’t need to answer all, but jot down words as they pop into your mind. I know writers are supposed to be able to remember everything, but I find this necessary.
Because we are working with the idea of “days that are out of the ordinary,” we are looking back, long ago or not so long ago in our own personal history.
First, think in terms of senses (I know you’ve heard this before, but I have to revisit it. Maybe you, too. )
Visuals
Photos and video. Take a look—what have you got? Take your time. What stands out? Look at the background. What have you forgotten? What’s tucked away in the corners and edges of the pictures? Can you name everyone in the photos? What about that forgotten guest? Have you ever been a forgotten guest?
Have you ever shared a holiday meal as a last-minute guest, or with a group of people you hardly know? And it turned out to be an amazing time? What made that happen?
Years ago, I owed my landlord a bit of money (!) and went to explain to the building manager (remember when we had live-in managers?) who had friends visiting. He invited me in, to join their card game. I swear they let me win; it’s the only time I’ve won money at such. With a group I hardly knew…
What do you remember of “visuals” of meals and times you have no photos of? My mind seems to have taken snapshots of so much, and I can turn them over and look.
Colours — I’ll add this here
What are the colours you associate with this day? What are colours you DON’T? Why not? What would happen if you mixed these colours when thinking of one particular time?
Sound
What are the sounds of extraordinary days? Here, you might pay close attention to the sound of family video footage. What happens if you close your eyes, don’t watch the footage, and only listen? Is the experience different from viewing? You might hear Auntie Katie chirping some background bite.
Then music—what have been your favourites? And what have been your teeth-gritters?
Many years ago, I worked as an apprentice in a hair salon, and one Christmas season, someone brought in the Elvis Christmas tape. Day 1 was all right, especially the morning. By Day 2 we were sick of it... not to mention Days 3, 4, and 5... But the customers liked it—after all, they came and went usually within less than an hour, just long enough to hear through the album. And of course, the person who brought it, enjoyed it more than anyone.
By the end of the week, another apprentice took the tape, dragged over a high stool, cracked open a ceiling board, and tossed it in... I’d forgotten this, until I began to make this lists of prompts!
So don’t think just in terms of “happy favourites,” but those human moments, too. The grouchy stuff. The Too Much, in this case! Years later, the memory makes me smile.
As a memoir piece, I might have a theme of how, for the motley group of apprentices at that shop, that was a moment of minor rebellion. As a piece of fiction, I might imagine that that moment of rebellion transformed someone’s life and translated to a more significant and necessary step taken in another sphere of their life. Maybe that simple act of throwing away something that irritated opened a door.
What other sounds, besides music, come to mind?
Sounds of children. How are they different from adult sounds?
You might be choosing to write a picturebook story, so put on your “child” lenses to read through this list. Remember what it is to see everyone at elbow height and hear exhaustion in adult words. Or to feel something you never have before, something that has come about as a result of it being a day out of the ordinary.
Smell
Of all our senses, the “nose” has the greatest memory. So what does your nose remember? What are the smells of “holiday”? Out-of-doors smells? When I smell fireworks, it’s not the Vancouver International Fireworks Competition that comes to mind; it’s the day after Halloween, when my big brother and I would go out into the invariable rainy day, and collect all the cardboard remains of the snaps and spinners and Roman candles. (What did we do with those…?)
Indoor smells? Fragrances?
The perfumes and odours of visiting relatives?! Or of houses you had to visit?
Feel
Holidays have texture. Literal texture, and otherwise… as we revisit times in our minds. Maybe jot down words about this.
Remember the texture of a costume. My mother made me a taffeta dress that was always cold to put on. Took too long to warm up.
The feel of a particular piece of decoration. Candle wax. That scratchy-rough picnic blanket you lie on each July, watching fireworks on July 1st or 4th.
What is the metaphorical feel?
Taste
Seems so obvious. And when something does seem so obvious, try to look under the surface. What was it about a particular taste? For me, one that stands out is the smell of anise in the pfeffernuss—traditional German cookies—that my mom made. I smell it now in licorice and fennel and pernod. It follows me, it seems. I could trace this through a memoir, to look at a thread through my life, or I might simply use the smell in a story as a detail to add verisimilitude.
Again, ponder the taste of the memory itself—how does it sit not only in the mind, but on the mind’s tongue? What causes us to savour one memory and want to spit out another?
Ten minutes
In “Old Friends From Far Away,” Natalie Goldberg talks about brainstorming with a pen for ten minutes on the topic of “I remember…” as a way of birthing memoir. Begin with any remembered details from anything.
I think holiday times can give you somewhere to start, as often our memories of these times and their details are more colourful and intense. If your mind slips away to some other detail, let it go—follow the memory cat. (Katharine Haake calls this “burrowing”—writing from one sentence to the next, pulling from the previous sentence to birth the next… a way of out any “block.”) This may be a direction to a particular thread through various days, and not just “one” memory. This may be the shaping of a memoir. Memoir is not about chronological, blow-by-blow, minutiae of life. You might even begin with an event not-so-distant in time, and work your way backwards to some earlier point. The “story”—as memoir—probably does not lie at all in the telling of one piece, but in what has come of pieces, all together, since.
Ask a family member about a particular day. The story may not hold in quite the way you’ve had in mind! Consider their input (do pause, let it sink in) but always work with what, ultimately, feels right to you. You may take a leap from nonfiction to fiction.
Elements of holidays
Relatives
For inspiration read, or re-read, Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Pause at his descriptions of the brittle aunts and cigar-wielding uncles. Even if nothing particularly outstanding pops into your mind about a specific relative, list the various relatives with whom you spent time. Or had some connection: I remember always receiving brown paper packages from my father’s cousin. Those were magical packages, filled with wonderful hardcover books. How I loved those packages! My love of books and writing was birthed with those packages surely.
If a story isn’t coming to mind, begin with a name, and the appearance of the relative... think in terms of sensory detail.
Pets
Can be a big part of our lives. What are they in yours... or your dotty old relative’s—who just had to bring Muffy along everywhere… What about the local shelter? Maybe you participate in an event there. Shelters and people who work for animal rights and awareness work hard to educate others about the realities of living with animals and “the cute puppy/kitten/bunny” ideas around giving pets as gifts... Have you or someone you know ever received such a gift?
Meals
Think about one aspect of a meal: the candles (favourite colour? sputtery wax?); dessert—a specific cookie, and a specific note-worthy flavour to those once-a-year cookies?
Maybe your special meal was a breakfast. Did you sit in a particular spot? go to a particular relatives’ or friends’ home? A neighbourhood midnight meal? A meal while traveling and experiencing a place new to you?
School memories associated with holidays
Concerts; classroom parties; assemblies. Remembrance Days and going to the cenotaph. Trying to recall the lyrics to a song.
Places of worship
Synagogue, church, mosque, gurdwara… Concerts. Ceremony. Rituals. Do you remember preparing yourself for a particular time? Something that brought a sense of joy, peace, contentment, a sense of purpose? (Or otherwise!) What was the central emotion to this time? And what was underlying that?
Family traditions
What is particular to your family? What is the thing that, when you’ve mentioned to friends and acquaintances, their response is, “you DO that?”
Gifts given or received
Don’t attach “story” to this, not yet—just create a listen of the gifts themselves. After noting a dozen or so, stop and add notes to each. Recall the emotion that the gift evoked, both in giver and receiver.
One of my younger brothers gave me a set of beautiful artificial pearls once. I was on the cusp of adolescence, and even though I knew my mother had probably found them at one of her many antique auctions or second-hand sales, I knew he’d probably done chores to earn them, and before I even thought through all that—that was subconscious—I knew, just looking at them, that I was growing up, and the recognition of that, from all sources—Mom, little brother, and from my own self—just made me bawl. My poor brother was utterly mystified, and I had to hug him more than once to let him know everything was right and normal. Did he understand? I should ask him…
Remembering
Sometimes, we can try so hard to remember important, significant events... and this causes block. Or you’ll begin to write this capital-I and E “Important Event”... and it’ll all fizzle to nothing.
Try instead, to write about an event that seems not to have been about much of anything, really. Just work to capture the details: the colors and smells, the appearances of the people involved, the emotions, both surface and underlying. Try to record some of the conversation/s. The details of any music, food. Keep writing, and “viewing in your mind”—like a film. And see what comes of this seemingly uneventful, or not meaningful, time. The fact that your memory holds this time says something. Why and what?
Transition times
Remember “transition” years: Valentine’s Day after the first time you’d fallen in love. Or divorced. First Mother’s/Father’s Day after becoming a parent—or after a child has grown and moved far away. First Christmas after thinking you’d discovered the “truth” about Santa Claus (I’m still in denial on this one!)
Life has losses and times of grieving, and holidays can be heightened periods of missing loved ones and re-connecting with life in new ways.
My mom remembers some years after losing her own mom, having an afternoon nap in the middle of a hectic day during the Christmas season, and dreaming that she was making a pot of tea to sit and enjoy together with her mom... When she awoke, she felt she’d had a comforting time with her. I love this story, from my mom; it says so much about the significance of special times in our lives, days we set apart from the usual.
And a little Vonnegut…
Yesterday I returned home after a short and hectic trip to Seattle to see back-to-back nights of Wilco at Paramount Theater. I stopped in Fairhaven at the bookstore there on the way home, and picked up Pity the Reader: On Writing With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell.
I never teach a course in the same way twice, so if you’ve done this before with me, you’ll see changes (and it’s been almost a decade!) I think it’d be good to throw in some Vonnegut. This book has back-pages of “practices”—exercises from his teaching.
It’s easy to be either sentimental or cynical about holidays
My own version of a “Vonnegut Practice” might be: take whatever story you are working on, and deliberately re-write as sloppy-sentimental AND another version that is cynical. Then tell/re-write it as you want. To get to your real place.
I once had a student ask about “tension” in a story—how to achieve it. I told her to write a story with absolutely no tension at all.
She got as far as about half a page, and the deliberate facing and working with the absence of something taught her more about the presence of it, than I could yammer on about in a lecture.
Some “Vonnegut’s practices,” if you want
(I am quoting directly, so modofy accordingly… insert “people” instead of “characters” and think VERY loosely about all this! (Pay attention to the “if you want” piece here!)
(from page 387 of this book): List five trivial things a character could want. Pick one and start a story by immediately stating the character’s desire for it. Even though serious things may be occurring, plot the rest of the story in terms of the fluctuating success the character has in achieving that goal.
(page 388): Write a story in which there is a clear conflict between two characters, but the conflict never reaches a climactic point and is left unresolved.
(page 389): Write a story in which the dramtic main event is revealed only through a character’s reaction to it.
(page 390): Make up a plethora of characters, all having approximately equal time and importance in a story centered around a social event such as a funeral, reunion, or holiday dinner.
Thank you for being here, and looking forward to this.
Cat’s out of the bag now…
Alison