Write or Die 2.0

I invented Write or Die almost ten years ago when I needed money for food. I’d come home from writing You Don’t Look Adopted excited about having finished something I’d wanted to write for over thirty years and nervous about how I was going to make a life with no money in my bank account.

(Broke and broken are not the same, but they can feel the same. I learned recently that nervousness and excitement stem from the same place in the brain, and so if I’m not sure which I am, nervous or excited, I can repeat, I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited to tell myself how I am feeling.)

I metaphorically spread my talents and loves on a table in front of me, and I took stock of what I had. I’d been teaching writing in one form or another for most of my adult life, and while I detested grading papers, I loved being part of watching people say things they hadn’t been able to say before. I loved the sacredness of being with a person who shared their work with me. I just didn’t want to give them a grade. Who am I to say what is “good” and “not good”? To write isn’t to follow a bunch of rules. To write is to use the alphabet in a way that represents what the story or feeling you carry inside of you.

I realized I didn’t want to read someone’s work, maybe ever, and critique it. What I wanted to do was listen to someone read their writing to me and feel for the truth of it in my body. If I didn’t feel it to be true, I could ask questions and see what was underneath the original writing. It’s not the my truth is also someone else’s truth. But in the relationship of listener and reader, there is the magic of the shared space between them, and a heartfelt question can open all sorts of creative doors.

To use language in order to get to the felt truth rather than to mask the truth was a life that thrilled me.

I thought about what I hadn’t been asked in graduate school when I was getting my MFA in creative writing that had allowed me to stay on the surface with my stories. It wasn’t about style or form or grammar. The questions centered around why of why are you writing about this? Why do you want to tell me this? Why is this important to you? What is it you really want to say? What is it you want?

Workshopping a story can be like a beauty contest—each reader’s preferences affecting what they think you should be doing in your story, Each reader holding in their mind their own standard of beauty and consciously or unconsciously looking at your writing through that lens. What if the reader’s job is to ask questions about what you wrote in order to lead you to your own deeper truths? Tell me more about this character. What happened then? Why is this meaningful to you? Why does this feel important to you?

I created a list of five questions that I imagined could function as a car wash for a person’s dirty windshield in how they saw themselves, the world, their gifts as a person with a story to tell. I called it Write or Die because I believed my mother might have lived a longer life if she’d not chased her dream of writing a little earlier, before the cancer had taken root. I wanted everyone to be able to see the gems they carried within before they died. I thought Write or Die could be a part of this great reveal. Look! This is who you are! Look! This is what you want to say!

I posted and ad for Write or Die on Facebook, and I was off and running. I did Write or Die one on one, and I did Write or Die in groups. I did it in people’s homes, in bars, in hotels, on the phone, on Zoom. In the last few years, I kind of forgot about Write or Die as I focused on doing writing groups for adopted people. It’s like a dear friend I just didn’t call because I was busy, not because I wasn’t thinking about her.

But yesterday someone asked me why I hadn’t been doing Write or Dies recently, and I didn’t have an answer. I guess I forgot.

The irony is I just drove across the country because of Write or Die. One of the exercises is to describe a photograph, real or imagined, that shows the essence of who you are. When I did Write or Die myself, the photograph I saw in my mind was me at about 6 years old standing on a white gate in Martha’s Vineyard, watching the hippies across the way come out of the chicken coop converted into a place to sleep.

When I had the thought I wanted to write a sequel to You Don’t Look Adopted, my mind remembered this exercise and told me I needed to get back to Martha’s Vineyard to find or be that girl. So I packed up my stuff and got a place to stay on the Vineyard for March and April. Until then, I am close to the Vineyard in Provincetown. Following the muse of the mind is a wonderful adventure. Who knows why we are doing the things we are doing when we listen to the voice within. We are listening. That’s the game.

I have revised Write or Die because I’ve learned a few things in the time since I first put it on paper. It’s seven questions now, and the purpose is to have you feel excited to be yourself in the body that you have with the life that you have. The purpose is to set your curiosity and wonder on fire so you want to see more, write more about what you are seeing. Ultimately, I don’t care whether people write or not. Writing is an exercise to bring you into your eyes and body as well as an exercise to bring you into your mind. Write or Die is about seeing, most of all. Seeing that you are powerful. Seeing that you have agency. Seeing that you, by being you, make the world come alive.

A session of Write or Die is 90 minutes long and costs $200.

My goal is to change your life.