Writing and You - a Sixty Second Writing Lesson - and a Chunk of Flights

I’ve noticed something.

When people are telling a person story, one that costs them something to tell, they do this thing. It looks like this:

I stole a car when I was eighteen. I stole another one when I was twenty-two. Then I got into stealing refrigerators. Then, later, I went for diamonds. You just need to get the shiny. You can’t stop yourself.

When people write (and talk) about themselves, I listen for the you shift because i know the person has lost the ability to claim their own actions at that point, and that’s where the story is going to break down because the person doing the actions is no longer the narrative: the main character has suddenly morphed into the world.

And a story about everyone is often less compelling than a story about you. Because, dear writer, not everyone stole the frig. That was you.

When you own your behaviors, your writing has the chance to soar.

As, of course, do you.

Here’s the first section of Flights, a novel by Olga Torkarczuk. I think I have read it a hundred times. I would give all my furniture and my shoes to have these words in this order have come out of my body.

Here I Am

I’m a few years old. I’m sitting on the windowsill, surrounded by strewn toys and toppled-over block towers and dolls with bulging eyes. It’s dark in the house, and the air in the rooms slowly cools, dims. There’s no one else here; they’ve left; they’re gone, though you can still hear their voices dying down, that shuffling, the echoes of their footsteps, some distant laughter. Out the window the courtyard is empty. Darkness spreads softly from the sky, settling on everything like black dew.

The worst part is the stillness, visible, dense—a chilly dusk and the sodium-vapor lamps’ frail light already mired in darkness just a few feet from the source.

Nothing happens—the march of darkness halts at the door to the house, and all the clamor of fading falls silent, makes a thick skin like on hot milk cooling. The contours of the buildings against the backdrop of the sky stretch out into infinity, slowly lose their sharp angles, corners, edges. The dimming light takes the air with it—there’s nothing left to breathe. Now the dark soaks in to my skin. Sounds have curled up inside themselves, withdrawn their snail’s eyes; the orchestra of the world has departed, vanishing into the park.

That evening is the limit of the world, and I’ve just happened upon it, by accident, while playing, not in search of anything. I’ve discovered it because I was left unsupervised for a bit. I realize I’ve fallen into a trap here now, realize I’m stuck. I’m a few years old, I’m sitting on the windowsill, and I’m looking out onto the chilled courtyard. The lights in the school’s kitchen are extinguished; everyone has left. All the doors are closed, the hatches down, shades lowered. I’d like to leave, but there’s nowhere to go. My own presence is the only thing with a distinct outline now, an outline that quivers and undulates, and in so doing, hurts. And all of a sudden I know: there’s nothing for it now, here I am.

Sweet lord. This is why we read, why we write. Because the written word reveals the power and beauty and grace of the world that we often miss as we make our way to work.