When Writers Have Nothing To Say
Are you paying attention?
Before the first week of my creative writing course ends, a handful of students will have lingered after class to tell me they have nothing to write about. Their lives are too boring, they say. They do the same thing every day, and really, what kind of story does anyone here have to tell? What could possibly be worth writing about in this land of weed-free lawns and mini-vans? Nothing happens in Mount Prospect, Illinois.
Of course, everything happens in Mount Prospect, Illinois, just as it does everywhere else. The trick is learning to see it.
In the 1995 film, Smoke, William Hurt plays Paul Benjamin, a soul-wrecked writer who thinks he has nothing left to say. Unable to work since the sudden death of his wife and unborn child, Benjamin’s loss has reduced him to a chain-smoking, creatively blocked recluse who manages life by feeling and noticing as little as possible. By paying no attention to the world, he dulls his grief, and everything else grows dull with it.
Auggie Wren, played by Harvey Keitel, shows him the way forward. Auggie owns a tobacco shop in Brooklyn and practices amateur photography. Every morning at exactly the same time, from exactly the same location, he takes a picture of the intersection in front of his shop. In one of the movie’s key scenes, he shows Benjamin his photo albums. Watch.
We all find ways to protect ourselves from life’s daily onslaught. We develop habits of mind that make us feel less vulnerable. We resist engaging with the world around us, saving our energy for something we imagine matters more.
But writers cannot afford to be invulnerable or disengaged. Writers have to practice giving their attention to the world around them, and this takes faith in life. Writers have to believe that all of it — the grit gathered in the windowsill, the shape of a child’s hand, the glance between strangers — all of it matters. Without this faith, why pay attention? If you’re not paying attention, of course you have nothing to write about.
Even those of us who struggle to pay attention when we are bored can give our attention to what we feel matters. The trick is believing that our own life’s experience is worth caring about. We have to have faith in our own thoughts, feelings, and experiences, confidence that the universe is revealing its mysteries right here, right now. We just have to open our eyes and look; it all matters.
Finding meaning in the mundane details of life is as essential for writers as learning to form letters and words. And like everything else, it takes practice. Writers must make a conscious habit of paying attention to what others ignore: the change of light on a sidewalk, the frightened glance of a passerby, the sound of a bell in the distance. Writers find stories and inspiration only by paying attention.
To practice giving your attention to what is most familiar in your life, try the following exercise.
- First, think of a place here in our school, or in your home or neighborhood, where you once experienced a strong emotion — grief, joy, fear, frustration, relief. Any strong emotion will work. Write a description of this place in as much detail as you can. You’ve probably been there a hundred times. What do you remember seeing there when you experienced this strong emotion? What did you smell? Hear? Think? If you can’t remember your exact experiences at the time, don’t worry. Just come as close as you can.
- As you describe this place, don’t start by spelling out what provoked your strong feeling; instead, suggest the emotion through your choice of words. Your unwillingness to tell about what happened will create a mystery. To figure it out your readers will keep reading.
- Come to class tomorrow having written as much as you can about this place and the thoughts you had there. At the start of class tomorrow, I will dismiss you to go to the actual location. Take your phone or iPad with you so you can record what you experience. How accurate was your memory of this place? Now that you are there and paying attention, add details about what you see, hear, and smell. Don’t forget to keep letting the emotion you felt influence the words you choose.
- Write at least a page, but feel free to write much more if you are inclined to do so. If you’d like, you can add fictional elements to enhance the drama of what happened here. To practice using your Medium blog, post your writing there.
- Give your piece a title and add a picture of the place you are writing about.
- If you prefer to not make this work public, just leave out the tags for your post. Once you have posted your prompt in Medium, you have turned it in!
- If your post is public on Medium and includes a title picture, title, and three tags, you can count it as one of the twenty public submissions required in our class. Here are some ideas for tags: memories, memoir, fiction, creative writing, anger, joy, triumph, etc.
If you know how to watch and listen, a dozen stories call to you even before you leave your room in the morning. You have more stories to tell than time to bring them to life. Now you have a more serious problem: which story should you tell first?
