The Freedom of Limitation

“All pieces of writing come with implied or stated limitations that the writer must both fulfill and overcome due to the dual need to satisfy and subvert reader expectations.”

-Papatya Bucak

            Watching my nieces grow into smart, openhearted, creative, beautiful young women has been amazing. When I first started baby-sitting them, I had this idea that I would be their mythical Mary Poppins figure, exposing them to child friendly art, music, and meadows. I would never stifle their ideas, or take their agency away from them. I quickly learned that if you give a child too many choices at too young an age, they begin to melt into a ball of confusion and tears, right there, in front of everyone in the Barnes and Noble Café. I learned that if you make the important choices ahead of time, and limit decisions, it takes the pressure off the child and they get to enjoy themselves; they are free to keep absorbing and interacting with the world around them in beautiful ways (most of the time).

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”
- Ernest Hemingway

            This phenomenon applies to adults as well. When working in a chiropractor’s office, I was trained to schedule appointments by giving the patient two options at a time (morning or afternoon? 2:30 or 3:30?) even if the whole day was available. I know, this seems nasty, but if I did make the mistake of saying something like, “Whenever you’d like,” I would be stuck on the phone hearing all of their plans for that day, and their whole life story, about how they have to take their dog to the vet, about how their boyfriend, Ted, has a bladder infection. In a busy office, there wasn’t any time for this. What I’m getting at here is this: limitations can be effective.

            Before taking Professor Papatya Bucak’s Forms of Prose class, I was part of the camp of writers who believe content dictates form. I still believe this is true for particular types of writing, like research papers (there are X points I want to make about this topic so I will write X number of body paragraphs), but I feel so silly for believing it (so whole heartedly) in terms of writing fiction.  What I took away from this class is the important idea that limitations in form can take some of the pressure off of my prose, and me as I’m writing it. If my words are my children, I need to decide on their limitations ahead of time so that they are free to grow and blossom in unexpected ways on the page.

“The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.”

― Susan Sontag

            This might sound like writerly nonsense, or just plain common sense, and you’re right; it’s both. Have you ever read a book where you think, “Wow, this person just enjoyed writing this?” The pacing is relaxed, the language manicured. I guarantee you this person had her limitations in form in full effect, which allowed her to really enjoy production.

            I guess my second analogy makes it sound like my words are patients in need of an adjustment (okay, sometimes they are) but the important part of the analogy is that if I don’t limit myself, my words can quickly get carried away with themselves, and start giving my reader TMI like some of my previous chiropractic patients.

            I see this happen in rough drafts of fiction (my own included) all the time: flashbacks and character backstories that have nothing to do with the real tension of the story itself, whole scenes and expositions of beautiful prose that ends up being taken out in chunks. This is part of writing, I know, and these chunks we take out can still be useful to us, inform how we write our characters later on. But it can also mean a crap ton of revision and confusion on the writer’s part.

“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”
- Henry David Thoreau

            Yes, there is always some level of confusion and revision, especially when writing novels (and if you were never confused or never revised I’d rather not ever speak to you). But now, I know: you can use limitations in form to limit the confusion, the tears, the tantrums, the bladder infections, and enjoy the process of watching your words grow in contained, yet unexpected ways.

Kim Grabenhorst is an MFA candidate in fiction here at Florida Atlantic University. She’s interested in fiction that explores the individual's relationship with her or his body, and that body's relationship to the world. She lives and writes in West Palm Beach, FL.

Revising With Tayari Jones: Editing the Soul

     The first things I noticed about Tayari Jones (after sitting down in the lobby of the Embassy Suites, fiddling with my hands and wondering if I was in the best seat possible to see her when she walked in) were her eyes. I don't mean her beauty, but her alertness, her focus, her ever-present I-have-an-answer-to-that look, her continual observing and evaluating of the world around her, a quality that's so necessary to posses in order to be a good writer.

     This is something that I, personally, had almost forgotten. I had recently covered the clear-glass globe of my world with sticky-notes of To-Do Lists that never seemed to get done. I had bogged myself down in the failures of the semi-finished (books to be read, family to call, student papers to grade, stories to edit) and these lists were obstructing my writerly view of the world, along with my own creativity.

     When I drove Tayari to FAU for the first time, I wasn't expecting any gems of wisdom (I was more so concerned with what notch the A/C should be on) and I didn't know I was receiving them until after the workshop entirely. In the car, she told me about how she wakes up around 5am (ouch!) and journals, writing letters to certain people, and prayers for others who likely won't ever see them. This last bit I took as her focusing on her personal, emotional, and mental health. It was extremely refreshing to spend the week with a person and writer who so openly spoke about all aspects of her life, even the centering bits that happen in between the moon and the sun, over a morning cup of coffee.

     This alertness and self-caring warmth was echoed in the first exercise we did in the workshop itself: pointing. It’s my new favorite thing. She gave credit to the person who first initiated this technique, but I was too excited to record it. Tayari would pick three or four people and have them each take turns reading a new chunk of prose they had written. While they’re reading, the rest of the class records phrases or images that struck them, so that they can point them out to the writer. We then go around the room, briefly stating what we liked best about the piece. This seems like a very sugary sweet exercise where writers are merely massaging others’ egos (she did mention, repeatedly, that it was like a nice massage; “Get your massage oils out.”) but here are three practical reasons why I think this exercise is great:

1. Its obvious confidence-boosting qualities can help a writer feel good about what she’s working on, giving her energy to revise it.

2. Since we’re writing awesome phrases down, it reminds us that writing is about the words—the infinite ways there are to string juicy thoughts together! Isn’t that why we got into this in the first place?

3. It pushes us to get more creative and sexy with our language, to try harder. (What if you everything you wrote was to be read during a pointing session?)

     Tayari also pushed us to re-work our pieces by imagining them as endless stories in order to make the choice of where they begin and end, on the page, a significant one. She taught us how to educate ourselves on our minor characters by giving them monologues that will likely never make it into the story, and she taught us if you’re writing based off of a real personal struggle you’ve faced, “If it doesn’t make you cry, then you’re not doing it right.” She reminded us to push ourselves to be unique with such phrases as, “Stop it, that’s generic,” and “Be you as hard as you can.”

     Her workshop was a jolt to my writerly soul, and I’m so grateful to the people in our Creative Writing program who worked to get her here (and those whose workshops push and inspire me every week!), to the Sanders Foundation for funding these opportunities, and to Tayari, for riding with me to FAU that afternoon, in my little hatchback, A/C blasting.

Kim is about to complete her first year in the Fiction MFA program, and is ready to flex her reading and writing muscles in the summer sun. Send her summer reading recommendations at kgrabenh@fau.edu.

 

Listening to the Art

Recently, while walking to our MFA workshop room—the one with the faux-wood conference table the size of a newborn whale and a ceiling full of fluorescent, sometimes ticking, buzzing, blocks of light—a fellow MFAer whose piece would be workshopped that night said something that, I think, any writer can relate to. It was something along the lines of, “If writing freaks me out so much, if it’s this painful, should I be pursuing a degree in it?”

Now, no matter how many times I’ve been workshopped, there is always a high level of anxiety that arises as I’m walking through the doorway into fluorescent limbo. Like an itch in an area of the body that can’t be scratched in public, I don’t acknowledge it, I keep my hands upon the vinyl veneer of the baby whale and smile and nod and write things down that I won’t make myself read for at least a week. Things like: “Let’s talk about the dream sequence” - an abundance of snickering.

I’m not saying the concept of being workshopped stunts writers’ creativity, but being workshopped is one of the many pressures of an MFA Creative Writing student, along with the imagined judgment of an idolized professor, the killer piece that another MFAer got published (even if you’re also totally proud of them), not to mention the way teaching, mainly grading papers, acts like an ice pick to your time and creativity. Yeah, we need to suck it up, no doubt, but if we let these pressures consume us, writing can absolutely become freaky and painful.

           

My motto this semester was taken from a quote I read by Junot Diaz:

"The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art."

Even back in August, I knew too well that these pressures could cause writing to quickly become work instead of a cathartic, pleasurable activity that was essential for my sanity and happiness. Consequently, in this first semester pursuing the MFA at FAU—a program that has so kindly welcomed me into its strong, careful arms—I try to think of or re-read this quote whenever I am freaked out, bummed out, struggling with the idea of majoring in something else, or watching one more episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Netlflix. I should write it on a handy notecard or get it tattooed to the back of my hand, maybe.

We also can’t forget that being a writer is masochistic in nature. Another Diaz quote that I found while searching for the above one illustrates this:

"I just want to write four books before I die. For real. And yes: I worry all the time about never writing again. Most of my writer peers write like it’s a daily they’re producing. I write like it’s an organ I’m pulling out of myself."

Anyhow, it is nice to know that, first of all, other writers struggle with this issue, and secondly, that I’m allowed—as an artist—to take my time and write, which, let’s face it, probably takes way less time than worrying about what the whole culture of writing is thinking and doing, and being too paralyzed to write at all.

Kim Grabenhorst is a first-year MFA student at FAU who, other than writing, likes refurbishing old, beat up, forgotten pieces of furniture into colorful, functional, happy things. She would also be one of the first to sign up for a procedure that could replace her blood, permanently, with iced coffee, so that she would be freed from the alluring, capitalistic chains of Starbucks and her Keurig.