What Is A Novel For? We Continue.
What Is A Novel For? We Continue.
On a forgotten memory prompt that came back to me twice.
What Is A Novel For? continues this Wednesday evening. If you haven’t signed up yet, Session 1 is recorded and available for another 9 days. Session 2 will also be recorded and available for four weeks after that. The course is close captioned and has ASL interpreters as well.
We began for Session 1 with a writing prompt I’ve taken to calling 80 memories, where you make a list of 80 memories from a time period you are trying to write about. I have found that I typically teach what I need to learn and so I usually do the writing exercises I give my students, as a way for me to help advise them and to help myself along as well. It’s a way to make sure my writing doesn’t stop while I teach.
I spent last week writing an 8-page story memo for the class, using my own results from the 80 memories exercise, in order to model how I might turn those memories into a novel, a memoir, a collection of interconnected short stories, a collection of interconnected essays, a screenplay and a television show pitch, noting how I would shape the material each time and how the focus might change accordingly. And now I have found that I also want to write most of these projects, so that will get interesting.
On Wednesday, I’ll talk about using the same material to approach autofiction, autobiographical fiction, speculative fiction, historical fiction, erotica, Young Adult fiction, and even the epic. After class, I’ll answer questions here like last time, and conclude with a letter with some last thoughts and some writing prompts to help you go forward from the class. The story memo along with the Zoom link went out yesterday to registered students, and if you don’t have it yet, please check your junk mail filter and if it isn’t there, please write to Kate Mabus, at kate@theshipmanagency.com. The way things are going I may end up with about fifteen different writing projects but we will see. The point of the class is to formalize a little the otherwise chaotic approach to using your life in writing and to see what you might include or exclude due to form, and to ask yourself if those choices are valid—at least to justify them to yourself. I hope you can join us, in person or by recording.
A former student of mine, Alysia Abbott, wrote to me on Instagram last fall to say she had assigned one the writing prompts I’d given out when she was my student back in the late 1990s at the New School. I’m very proud of Alysia, whose memoir, Fairyland, has been made into a feature film by Sophia Coppola, and just premiered at Sundance. Back then, she came to the class hoping to write about her father, the queer poet Steve Abbott, and she didn’t know that Steve and I had been friends back in San Francisco. It was really powerful to teach her to write nonfiction in that context.
I hadn’t remembered the prompt until she told me—I should probably be better at writing down all of my writing prompts—and if you are a former student of mine who remembers one that worked well for you, by all means, let me know. But in honor of Alysia and Steve, I’ll include it here: describe a realization you had connected with any physical action or gesture.
I hadn’t been thinking about this prompt recently when it came back to me yesterday. I was doing some yoga at home, a part of my attempt to return to a personal practice. I was specifically doing what I could remember of a series taught to me back in the late 1990s, around the time I taught Alysia, in fact. I was, at the time, also a yoga teacher at a studio downtown called Atmananda. I had been going to class so often, sometimes twice a day, that they asked me if I might want to become a yoga teacher and take their teacher training class. What happened is that I started with the memories of that teacher, Jhon T, and soon my body was remembering not just what to do but what to do next. By the time I reached what would be the middle of the practice, I was back in what I’d call a relationship to the teacher inside, as we called it then. I ended with a short chant I used to love, which I also remembered, including the chord changes, and the first of the three times I sang it, I wept, to my surprise, as you might at hearing a voice you hadn’t heard in a long time. I’ll be thinking about that a lot.
I’ve been practicing yoga with someone I trained back then once a week for years now, online, ever since COVID started. But I don’t really practice away from those sessions and I need to. It isn’t just for the physical activity, which is important, but for the meditation, and the sense of committing to myself. This way of calling back to myself out past the perimeter of these last few years made me happy. And then as I came downstairs I recalled Alysia’s description of the prompt.
I suppose I might include now a related prompt: as one way to activate your memory, do something you used to do that you no longer do from the time that you are trying to recall. An action, an activity, a chore. We remember with our whole body, just as we live, whether we notice it or not. As writers we are the instrument.
Until next time,
Alexander Chee