In pursuit of hope
Hi, friends.
I hope you are well. This week spring has really started showing off in Alabama. The Bradford pears and tulip trees and red buds are all exploding at once. The dogwoods and azaleas won’t be far behind this year. The birds are chirping their little hearts out and the bees are buzzing furiously and the nightnoise has returned. The vaccines are rolling and now it’s going to be lighter later. I’ve been waiting for all of this for so very long. Collectively, individually, we are in desperate need of hope. And what is spring but an expression of hope?
This semester my Intro to Fiction class is the only class I have where the room cap aaccommodates the enrollment. We’ve been meeting in person for a while now and we’ve slid into workshopping mode. It’s really nice to have that community again. I eavesdrop as they come and go. They mention how much the want to endings their stories on a happy note. As writers, we need hope in whatever form that takes. Endings. Beginnings. Pushing the pencil around the page with no purpose at all.
Story.
Okay, truth tellers, this week instead of a story, I’ve got an essay for you. I’ve been reading Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily column at the Paris Review for awhile. (I even had my comp students write textual essays on them.) Originally, it began as a look at motherhood and fairy tales but has taken a pandemic turn, as things do. This month’s essay is ~Hope.docx.
Craft tidbits.
Like the essays that have preceeded it, this month’s version braids together events in Mark’s personal life with that of a singular fairy tale. This time the magic of Jack in the Beanstalk is juxtaposed against her quest to find her missing plague doctor. In general, braided essays rely on repetition, circling back to the same ideas and characters and connecting them. The mother. Project Safe. The plague and plague doctor. Additional meaning gets swept up in each pass of the braid.
One of the things I think Mark does so well is convey the relationship she has with her mother simply through dialogue. In almost every essay it’s a conversation had over the phone. There are no facial expressions to rely on. And yet. They are not needed.
“Shouldn’t you be writing?” the mother asks in lieu of hello.
Right away, we know this mother. The naysayer who says it’s no surprise the essay isn’t going well. Who instists her daughter the found plague doctor won’t be hers. She’s the giant eclipsing any ray of hope her daughter tries to hold onto.
I tell her I’ve read every version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” I could find because I thought if I followed the hunger and the despair and the cow traded for a pocketful of magic beans and the beanstalk that grows overnight through the clouds and the boy named Jack who climbs the beanstalk and robs a giant of his harp and hen so he and his mother could live happily ever after I could make a beautiful map of hope because isn’t that what we need right now?
You can hear the desperation in Mark’s run-on sentence as it grows and grows and grows. She is breathless for hope. And yet. She is not sure.
“Isn’t that what we need right now?” “Hope,” I say again. “A map of hope,” I say again.
She repeats her question. She tries to needle her mother into agreeing with her. But her mother won’t.
“Hope?” says my mother, like it’s the name of a country she’d never pay money to visit.
It isn’t as though the mother has forgotten what hope is. Afterall, she’s the one who’s just been vaccinated. She has hope. Right in her arm. But no. It’s the disdain that the mother carries for it. Hope isn’t enough in her eyes. Maybe nothing is.
The mother is but the first of the dream crushers in the story. The second is the CDC website which winds up crashing Mark’s computer when she clicks on the link about Magic Beans. (Coincidence that vaccines rhymes with magic beans? Also. Friendly reminder: back up your work. Turn your Time Machine on. And stop clicking remind me later on the software updates. Take it from someone who also lost some work this week.) The third is the woman at Project Safe who falsly believes she found the plague doctor. In the opening paragraph Mark wants so badly to believe that its him. That he’s been found. She’s written before about how he was purchased on her honeymoon. Yes, it has sentimental value, but also she has begun to heap some mythological expectations on him. As though finding him, being reunited with him, will somehow end this plague for all of us.
For the ending, Mark leaves the confines of reality behind and gives herself, instead, a more hopeful, more magical ending because we are still inside this story called plague. Here, she climbs down from her beanstalk to find that the hen and harp have turned to dust.
Now my hands are covered with dust and as the dust falls from my hands it looks like the ellipses to all the stories that we thought were over but are still being told.
A reminder that no story is ever over. There is no end, happily ever after or otherwise. Stories go on and on because we need them to. Sometimes we need to write ourselves into stories that are larger than we are. And sometimes we need to imagine hope instead of what reality has gifted us.
It’s a nice writing device when you want to move beyond the limitations of real life.
Sparks.
Write a braided essay or story. You can have as many threads as you want. Select one to be the main thread. Think of it as the anchor. What other threads would compliment this main thread? It could be another life event. Or it could be something outside your own life. Here it’s the fairy tale, but it could be a recipe. Or a historical event. Or the description of your childhood home. The possibilities are endless.
Or. Write your own fractured fairy tale. Use a contemporary setting with contemporary characters and conflicts but sprinkle in some fairy tale imagery - magic beans, glass slippers, poisoned apples, red hoodies, you name it.
Revision. Where can you insert some light into your manuscript? Where does it need some softness? What if your ending tapped into some imagined hope like Mark does? What would that look like for your story?
Other tidbits.
This is a great little essay about how to keep momentum for your book going when your time is limited.
Agent Cassie Mannes Murray shared some query letter examples on Twitter if you are in the market for query letter guidance.
I caught a really great talk for (Virtual) Virginia Festival of the Book this weekend. It’s going on until March 26. Schedule here.
There are still a few spots in my Guided Revision workshop. Perfect for polishing an essay or story that’s not quite where it needs to be. Let’s get them shined up and out the door.
I hope this move into spring has got you thinking about writing and renewal. May some magic words plant onto your page this week ~
Marsha