I often suggest that writers who are looking for fresh perspectives on their manuscripts take a bit of time away from their drafts and instead devote a little energy to some writing on the side: the same characters and settings and concerns, but approached in new ways.
Something that can be useful is a block of time devoted to I Remember exercises for different characters, using their voices or points of view. Stick with one character for a whole week, perhaps, adapting the prompt every day, e.g., I Remember School, She Remembers Her Mother.
I also suggest variations on this form of the list. A good One is I Can … or I Can’t …
Can: to be able, to have power to, to know. In this case, the simple verb form stresses a character’s powers – or limits. What strengths and talents or knowledge is the character endowed with, and what might that lead to? Or what is a character unable to do, and what are the consequences of that?
The cumulative energy of this form of writing, gathered at a pace in list form, sometimes like a chant, often taps into the unconscious mind and draws out powerful material. What surfaces is often surprising, or reaches whatever’s important quickly. It’s not always/often writing that goes directly into the project word for word, but it can help with focus, and also energise your writing with purpose when it is flagging.
As a writing experiment: For ten minutes a day for a week, use the prompt I Can for characters in your book. The following week, use I Can’t for the same characters. You can also try this as a one-off, when you get stuck.
Try the prompts as ten-minute sprints of free writing, without stopping, preferably writing pen to paper, connecting hand and shoulder and brain and heart and gut. Each Can is as long as it has to be: a couple of lines, a few words, a whole paragraph. And when that’s done, on to the next Can. Quick, quick – keep the pen moving, don’t stop; it’s just for ten minutes. Often some really juicy stuff comes around minute eight or nine – to be continued … Write for longer, if you wish.
And above: cookbooks, because I can cook. Sometimes I can follow a recipe, and sometimes I can’t. And sometimes I am successful, and sometimes I am not, and sometimes it’s related to being able to follow that recipe. But other times I can trust my instinct to, e.g., add add a pear but also less milk to pistachio-oat pancakes, and judging by this morning’s efforts I can safely say that trusting your own ability is a good thing to do.
As a writing experiment, use the prompt I never … to write a list-based piece exploring the inner and outer lives for a main character, starting every sentence with the phrase I never. Write for ten minutes, making this a free write, keeping the pen moving and seeing what comes up; if you find yourself halting or drying up, just write I never … again and let a fresh association surface for your character. Try to include specific and concrete references: project inner feelings on to physical objects, introduce particular settings, make detailed references to other characters, create complications.
I do recommend writing by hand for that organic connection between pen and paper and body and soul. But too sometimes a keyboard works better for some writers – comes naturally. And sometimes we get cramps in our hands, or our writing is slower than our thoughts – though too there’s no harm in slowing down occasionally. Explore, perhaps, and do whatever works for you.
In this instance, think about the choice of the word never, which is often used in contexts related to regret or loss or lack or failings or yearnings on the part of character: super plot drivers. You could even make the nevers a list of blatant denials (lies). What surfaces often goes to the heart of your character’s plottings.
Also: the list form has distinctive effects.
It comes easy, and has a cadence and a rhythm.
It enjoys the simple forward-moving power of the right-branching syntax of everyday speech; variations in the patterning of the sentence can add emphasis and curiosity.
The repetition has a powerful insistence that digs deep into your character’s basic drives, subconsciously drawing on instinct instead of depending on overly thought-out writing.
The list is a straightforward form to write, too – once you run out of something to say about a particular never, you can start a new sentence and find something else. Lean into the scaffolding you have created.
Some of them (I never, I don’t remember, I don’t want) have a tendency of drawing on darker material – what Natalie Goldberg might says ‘pulls in the shadow’, which as Natalie says can be the real ‘juice’ in writing.
Repeat variations of this exercise for your character on different occasions. Maybe try these for ten minutes every day for a week. Let this character’s urges and insistences inhabit you for the whole week. Then, making this a practice, in following weeks repeat these exercises for other characters. See what surfaces. Then take this material into your story.
You could also do simply for yourself as personal writing that might – or might not – feed another creative project.
This is a useful exercise to carry out as part of your planning or alongside your drafting, or perhaps if you are getting stuck in your writing. It’s helpful with plotting – I used this in a couple of plotting workshops for The Literary Consultancy this week. Such simple prompts can really help with the sorts of primal work that writing often needs, that digging for fossils that Stephen King describes in On Writing.
And another powerful use of the list structure is Zoe Leonard’s remarkable I Want A President, which I used recently in a Finding Your Fire workshop for tapping into and expressing our intention in writing. Note the effects of repetition and variation – the emphasis, the accumulations; the POWER.
I always love to hear about those ways into writing that come natural, come easy (well, I should qualify that: we do have to do the work of showing up, which isn’t always easy). Prompts such as these often raise things that nudge our characters into the sorts of situations that make for good plots.
Meanwhile, on an entirely other note: pictures of tulips, above, as it’s already time to think about which ones to order for delivery in the autumn … I think that is Ballerina with, I think, Queen of the Night?
I love lists. I have whole spiels on lists in literature. ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. Sections of the Old Testament (all that begetting). Christopher Smart’s ‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’. The lists in Moby-Dick. Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’. Anne Waldman’s ‘Fast-Speaking Woman’. Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’. Contents lists. Lists of illustrations. Indexes; how I loved to copyedit indexes when I worked in-house. When I was about thirteen, I was rarely happier than when I was geekily flicking through The Book of Lists (both volumes).
Lists have life, lists have colour, lists point in many directions nearly all at once. Lists don’t overexplain, or editorialise, or whine (at least the good ones don’t); lists just are. Lists accrete. Their items are not connected by cause and effect, but just sit beside one another with paratactic superpowers. Sometimes life’s like that: wonderfully random, surprising.
I recently read a couple of good articles on lists in literature: ’10 Lists That Read Like Poems’ in Flavorwire (which itself is a site somewhat devoted to the form) and ‘Literary Lists: Proof of Our Existence’ in the Guardian. They mention Umberto Eco, whose beautifully illustrated The Infinity of Lists sits on my shelf. In it he itemises lists both practical and poetic, miraculous and non-normal, and with some fantastic imagery states a case for the presence of lists in visual as well as written arts, and also for the list as a form that aspires to the infinite:
There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, i.e., when we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, when we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large.
This week, write a list. Or lots of lists. A list a day. Here are some more inspirations or models:
* A list of gratitudes (thanks to Bhanu Kapil for that idea)
* What I will and won’t miss (inspired by Nora Ephron; I love the way in which the tone shifts from the terse itemisation of things she won’t miss to the more open and affectionate style in the list of things that will be missed; and we miss you too, Nora)
* A list of friends (elaborated or not)
* A list of questions without answers (thanks to Jack Collom for that one)
* An ‘I Remember’ on a specific subject, e.g., first times, last times, friends, enemies, people you’ve worked with (that one’s fun), holidays or vacations, places you’ve been, things you’ve eaten, Christmas presents
* A manifesto of reasons (for x, or y maybe – to change the law, to not go to school, to follow advice, to be cheerful)
* An ‘I Remember’ for a character in a novel
* A shopping list for a character
* A bucket list of things a character wants to do before he or she dies
* A list of ingredients
* A menu of desires (seeing your desires through food imagery)
* A pillow book of adorable things
* A list of prayers for weak or fabulous (or whatever else) beings (inspired by ‘Twenty-One Prayers for Weak or Fabulous Beings’ by Toby Martinez de las Rivas)
* A classification system for your library
* A bestiary of imagined animals
* The things you carried
* A catalogue of new things, and/or an archive of old things
Gosh, this list-making is addictive. I could go on. One day I’ll teach a whole class on lists. But for now I’ll post this, early in the week for a change. That keen. Maybe some of you have snow days, and need something to do.
I remember jumping into piles of leaves and the dust, or whatever it is, that rises. I remember raking leaves but I don’t remember burning leaves. I don’t remember what we ‘did’ with them. I remember ‘Indian Summer’. And for years not knowing what it meant, except that I figured it had something to do with Indians. I remember exactly how I visualised the Pilgrims and the Indians having the first Thanksgiving dinner together. (Very jolly!) I remember Jack Frost. Pumpkin pie. Gourds. And very blue skies. I remember Halloween. I remember using getting dressed up as a hobo or a ghost. One year I was a skeleton. I remember one house that always gave you a dime and several houses that gave you five-cent candy bars. I remember after Halloween my brother and me spreading all out loot out and doing some trading. I remember always at the bottom of the bag lots of dirty pieces of candy corn. I remember the smell (not very good) of burning pumpkin meat inside jack-o’-lanterns. I remember orange and black jellybeans at Halloween. And pastel-colored ones for Easter. I remember ‘hard’ Christmas candy. Especially the ones with flower designs. I remember not liking the ones with jelly in the middle very much.
I Remembers rank among my favourite forms of writing, because:
1. the writing tends to be natural and easy, unforced and uncluttered – writing from the heart, writing from the gut.
2. the writing tends to be concrete, vivid, specific, e.g., the house that gave you a dime, and elsewhere in Brainard’s poem very light faded blue jeans, ice cubes in the aquarium, giving Aunt Ruby stationery or scarves for special occasions.
3. the writing usually shows rather than tells: the contents of Brainard’s version – references to movie stars and songs, the clothes, food, hardship and simple pleasures – conjure up a whole time and place, for example.
4. they are economical – each line or section stops when it has to stop, and then on to the next …
5. I love lists (if you couldn’t tell).
6. the form is regarded as both poem and/or prose and/or either/neither, and I love writing that plays with or maybe ignores categories, and simply enjoys being good writing.
7. the process of free association often takes us to places we never expected – what arises arises. In the extract above I love how we linger in specific memories of Halloween and then zip quickly via Easter to Christmas, where we will linger a page or two before moving on again – and returning elsewhere. There are many such threads and patterns through the book.
8. the writing is uncensored, authentic. For example, I note in the example above the reference to the Pilgrims and Indians celebrating a jolly Thanksgiving. Now: I don’t think it’s stretching things very far to say that that recollection is of a romanticised association! And we could of course parse that, and discuss what it means, e.g., in terms of decolonising the historical record. But the actual writing here is simply being honest – it’s about recalling a perception, a time and place – and it is being true to that. (Even if it’s not true to the historical record, and we hope there will have been scope for future reconstruction!) Elsewhere in the poem we get gender- and race-based descriptions that are products of that time, and there is an awful lot of sexually graphic and extremely fruity content. It means I’m always careful about selecting extracts for classes! But again: this has a truth.
9. the simplest things are often the best
10. I LOVE JOE BRAINARD! I mean, he painted pansies and whippets – what more could I want?
11. and repeating myself – the writing is natural and easy, unforced and uncluttered
There is of course a risk that this sort of writing unearths deep, sad memories. Maybe that’s not a risk. Maybe we need to confront those memories from time to time? But maybe, unless that is its purpose, we also need to set limits around that sort of writing (or have a therapist to hand). I often suggest that writers focus on, e.g., happy memories. The tone in the writing often ends up being quite soft and nostalgic, anyway.
So: this week, write an ‘I Remember’. But also introduce some twists, or focuses. For example:
* Remember your schooldays, a holiday, Christmas, a wedding, a love affair
* Remember your first times
* Remember your blessings (count them, even)
* Remember your failures (but maybe limit them … and only if you next:)
* Remember your successes (unlimited, and remembered after your failures – let’s end on a high, please)
* Draw (and write) your own graphic I Remember in comic strip format.
* And maybe do ‘I remember’ for characters in your fictions? This can involve a slight shift in the writing, and perhaps a bit more thought than some of the more natural, I-centred versions, but it can also be a good way to graft some of your fictional content on to your natural, easy, remembering voice
* I don’t remember (good for surfacing secrets and lies and subtexts and regrets and all that other good story stuff)
* And invent your own rememberings too! (Give us some prompts and ideas too, if you like.)
You can probably write forever this way. You might want to set some limits (time; focuses). Or you might not.
Enjoy! These pieces really are some of the most fun in writing. And also the most rewarding, working on voice and tone, and digging into the mysterious caverns of intention. Let things arise.
The I Remember form that has been adapted by other writers. Georges Perec’s I Remember, published in the UK by Belgravia Books, serves as an interesting point of comparison. After reading that book I discovered that Perec added a Oulipan constraint of including only things that other people could remember too. This adds a certain emphasis on public rather than personal history that makes his version at times feel more like a list of bald facts, which perhaps explains why I felt less connected to it emotionally. Its tone feels more detached (and at times even a bit name-droppy). Forty years after it was written, I was also unfamiliar with many of those specific names and events too. I was unfamiliar with some of Brainard’s references as well, but somehow they get swept up in the warmth and wit of his tone, or are explained in context, so I never stumbled or drifted.
Updates, 2020 and 2021: Here are others I’ve subsequently written (also see some more by others in the comments): I Remember the Library, I Remember York, I Remember Bobbie Louise Hawkins. I’ve also added further links, including those for books by Perec and Abirached, and altered the opening quotation to give a fuller illustration of the workings of Joe’s text. If you know of other examples, please add in a comment below.
Credits: The image of Joe Brainard’s mixed-media collage Blossom (1977) at the top of this page comes from http://www.joebrainard.org.
