Notes from Class is a series in which instructors of Catapult’s writing classes chronicle their experiences as writers and teachers. More information about Lynn Steger Strong and her workshop is available here .
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Sometime during each semester, I ask my students what they think language is meant to do. Depending on the class and the subject, the answers vary widely: beauty , say the fourteen-year-old poets; to torture me , say the freshmen engineers in the required class I teach.
They’re all right, of course. Language can make beauty, is capable of creation in ways that are separate from life; but language is, I think, first and always, a thing that we pass from one to another. It is a tool through which we communicate.
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I refused to take a literature class for the first two years of college. I took Econ and Poli Sci. I skipped most of these classes. I stayed in my dorm room and I read. Books made me feel too much, I thought. If I went to class and some girl or boy stood up and said Virginia Woolf was stupid, I wasn’t sure I’d survive: I’d cry or yell or hit someone; the university would make me leave.
I couldn’t tell you what gave me the courage to finally do it. A long dormant desire to have a life outside my head. More likely: a desire to talk back to these writers for whom I’d fallen so hard. My junior year, I signed up for a class on Woolf, Conrad, and Forster. I was feeling not only intrepid, but like maybe I deserved a treat.
Our professor was extraordinary. She brought us Dunkin Donuts on days we had papers due and talked daily of her yoga practice. She used the word “problematize.”
We read Maurice , Heart of Darkness, Orlando, A Room With a View, The Waves .
We read Mrs. Dalloway : I met Septimus.
Septimus is the poet in Mrs. Dalloway , the one who kills himself. In her journals, Woolf explains that she thought at first that Mrs. Dalloway would kill herself, but Mrs. Dalloway is the sort to churn and roil quietly and appropriately, while throwing a party, while wearing a perfect dress. And so it is Septimus who is the tragic character, who must communicate to the world through his death.
Septimus is a “hero” of the First World War; his wife, Rezia, is a hat maker. Halfway through the book, they sit together and make a hat: “And, never had he done anything which made him feel so proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peter’s hat.” He has an eye for color, Woolf explains. He needs Rezia’s help, does not fully comprehend or feel capable of enacting the necessary mechanisms to make the hat himself, but it is made, and we understand this hat (I did; I still do now) to be a gorgeous nearly perfect thing.
Septimus is desperate to communicate. “Life is good; the sun is hot,” he thinks. Except he cannot speak it, cannot show it to the world. He’s not sure the world is interested. But, with the hat, with his wife’s help, he’s able to make something, communicate. He, other people, can hold it, pass it on.
I want to hold your face up against these pages as I read them then. I want you to slip somehow inside the desperation I felt at perhaps being never able to be seen or heard, about being somehow always locked up inside my head. To recognize that need in Septimus, to see him make a thing, this hat, to see him get it right.
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In one of the classes that I teach, we talk about reader versus writer-based prose. The idea is that we write first to communicate to ourselves (writer-based), that we write to discover, to make sense, to understand; in my class, in my life, this is a valuable, necessary part of writing in order to happen upon something honest, something worthwhile, something from life.
Reader-based prose, then, is shifting those ideas, shaping those words into a container that is communicable to others, to take into account how others might or might not understand.
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I have a video of our daughter when she was eight months old, trying to shove her (very thick) foot into a tiny shoe. She grunts as she does this. At one point, she tries to bite the shoe. She grimaces and tries to tear it open. She throws the shoe across the room. I took the video while I’d been trying to make sense of some particularly sticky writing, and I looked over and thought, you’re trying to do the very same thing . I felt the way she felt, biting, grunting, throwing, like I would never, could never get it in .
Reader-based, I tell my students, I’m reminded constantly, is very very hard.
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I wrote for years without any of it adding up to anything. I wrote pages of spewing feelings. I wrote to make sense, to get out, to talk back. It was only once I began to think of myself as writing for a reader that I realized I needed to employ a whole new set of tools—not just feelings, not just colors, not just ideas, but all of it somehow properly contained. A hat.
In grad school, almost ten years after that first lit class, our (brilliant, lovely, wonderful) professor kept asking us to “describe the action.” He had us write outlines of our novels: quick, 1-2 sentence summaries of the concrete action in the present tense. Mine said: “Maya (main character 1) reads and drinks her coffee; Ellie (main character 2) gets stoned and reads, lays on the floor; Maya runs; Maya and Ellie talk; Ellie goes for a walk with her dad.”
Life was happening in the novel in the way I thought then that life happened, but the result was not interesting or reader-based at all.
Concrete action, our professor told us, movement, choices, were what made one’s writing reader-based. These moments, actions, were the containers that portrayed, in that specific magic way of fiction, all the thoughts and feelings that cannot be conveyed in abstract terms.
But how to do this? What choices might I force them to make? This problem was complicated further by the fact that my novel was about reading and readers—I was trying to explore the specific experience of living in the world while also living largely, sometimes to one’s own detriment, inside of books, inside one’s head.
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In Mrs. Dalloway , not long after Septimus makes the hat with Rezia, he kills himself. This moment is, in its way, also triumphant. When I read this scene when I was nineteen, I had to close the book, I had to hold it to my chest. Just after Septimus jumps out the window, showing them, the doctors, the world, the men who made the war, something as sure as that hat, surer to them, Rezia sits quietly and sees and understands. Septimus no longer wants to live, not because he thinks life is awful, but because he’s not sure, in the face of what he’s seen at war, how to be in it every day.
Throughout the novel, just like Septimus, Clarissa Dalloway feels isolated, afraid, separate: “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very dangerous to live even one day.” She sees and understands how overwhelming, to buy flowers, to throw a party, to just be in the world. And yet she does it anyway; “he made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back.”
Clarissa is reader-like, lives in her head, finds life often completely overwhelming, and yet she goes back: “What a lark! What a plunge!”
Readers, at least some of us, read to escape because we are afraid, because we feel separate and isolated, because the decibel at which we sometimes experience the everyday feels like too much. We also read to acquire the fortitude to “go back.”
I wanted to write a book in which readers felt seen and understood; I wanted to make a hat that might help them garner strength.
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My colors, then, were this: I had Maya, an English professor, Woolf scholar, born and raised in Florida, now married, now one half of an academic couple in New York. I had Ellie, an angry, confused teenager, a kid who wanted to be good, do well, but only on her terms. I gave them things to do: I gave Maya running, I gave Ellie painting, sent Ellie down to Florida to stay with one of Maya’s closest friends. I gave Maya students to care deeply for. I let her keep her books.
I knew Ellie was angry at her mom for all the ways in which she’d failed her, for all the ways every mother ever fails; I knew Ellie was angry at her mom for being her(s). I knew Maya was intense, obsessive. She channeled this energy out towards her children as often as she used it to burrow back into herself. I knew Ellie had this energy also. She channeled it into self-destruction, into wanting, needing, but never feeling confident enough to know what or how.
What I did not know was how to put it all together, how it might be contained.
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I read and reread To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway as I tried to find the right container; I reread each of them four, perhaps more, times. I noted every moment something happened: every time I felt a shift within the characters, I felt I knew them better, or that their knowledge of themselves or others had come into conflict with the world. I held their parts in front of me and attempted to make sense of them. It was all subtler; it was seldom war or death (though that was there as well) it was a perceived slight, a misunderstanding, a want that was felt but not known sufficiently to satiate.
With Woolf’s help, with all the thousands of other books I consumed in the time since I decided to declare that I might want to write (in all the time before that, when I was just trying to figure out how I might live), I began to define this action as the moments when something of us, the thing that feels most sure, perhaps, most solid, surprises or betrays us; I defined conflict as all those moments when what we think is firm or true in our version of the world is problematized.
Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, sitting with Nina, the anorexic girl, eating a donut, saying, quietly: we’re all hungry, honey ; how clear it is she’s right. Lily Briscoe sitting at Mrs. Ramsey’s knee, wishing she could feel close to her, knowing that she can’t, not the way she wants to, even as she’s next to her, right there, her head resting on her knee. Iris, in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold , certain that the photograph that George has taken of her has “dismembered” her, done a sort of violence to her, even as she continues moving through the world intact.
What mattered was that the writer showed how deeply, surely, sometimes irrevocably, these small actions were felt.
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I built more and more life around Maya and Ellie. I gave Maya a room with a door that locked, where she could curl in on herself and seek refuge in the other worlds of books. I gave Ellie drugs and boys instead. I let them feel the things we often feel when we can’t quite get hold of our feeling, when we fail to notice the world is happening around us—lost, confused children, misled students, detached husbands, vulnerable friends—as we try doggedly to avoid all that’s being felt.
I gave them a concrete event. The chapters of my book alternate, between the before and after of an extraordinary occurrence: the most, perhaps, reprehensible of crimes, of which Ellie is guilty, of which Maya might be guiltier still. The chapters also alternate in perspective between Ellie and Maya. You see, I hope, that they are both—often with the help of books—trying to keep on loving one another; like Clarissa Dalloway, they are, right to the end, trying to figure out how to live, go back out.
The thing is made now, my hat. It has life inside of it, and people; small actions that are surely, irrevocably felt. It is a hat made for readers, a hat to make you, I hope, feel seen and understood, to help you go back out.
