Dani Shapiro Virtual Writing Retreat
October 1, 2022
Signal Fires, Dani Shapiro
Writing and Secrets: On Writing into What We Don’t Know
Excerpts:
Dani Shapiro: Writing is an act of discovery, discovering what we don’t know. We don’t write what we know. What would be the point of that?
Prompt One: What are three stories from your life you’ve always wanted to write into?
Prompt Two: What is the story you feel you could never tell?
Shapiro: [It’s] scary. “Will anyone understand? People won’t identify with it.” That’s never the case. Underneath secrets are shame and fear. That is precisely when people say, “Me too.”
Prompt Three: Who are you afraid would read it?
Shapiro: You’re not necessarily writing for the masses/the public. But if you don’t write it, you won’t know what it is. It won’t magically leap off your page into your local independent bookstore. Allow yourself the opportunity for discovery and permission. Write your way into it.
Prompt Four: What is a character you’re not allowed to write (fiction or nonfiction)?
Prompt Five: Why aren’t you allowed to write them?
Shapiro: It all boils down to permission. Writing fiction vs. fictionalizing: Fictionalizing is essentially memoir and tends not to work well as fiction. Allow it to become fiction if it’s thinly veiled memoir. You’re holding back. A novel will take on a life of its own.
[In my first novel, the car accident was true,] but the most resonant part was the fiction part. Allow characters to take on a life of their own. It’s thrilling.
Grace Paley said, “When you’re writing a story and you’re stuck, just have somebody walk into the room.”
[In fiction], allow the form to be everything it wants to be.
What gets in your way? Who are your inner censors sitting on your shoulder that get in the way? The inner censor keeps on shifting and changing. It doesn’t keep whispering the same thing over and over. It evolves. It changes from story to story, book to book, year to year. It’s just a voice in your head.
Prompt Six: What has surprised you about these prompts?
Shapiro: What I’m most afraid to write is what must be said. When you bury a secret, you bury it alive. They don’t go away. The page is the first and safest space.
Prompt Seven (ten minutes):
Options:
Write into that thing that surprised you.
Begin with this sentence: “That was the year that . . .”
Write about something that could have happened but didn’t.
Shapiro: I’m a private person. Shaping your experience is an act of control: a shape, a narrative, an arc. I pick and choose exactly what goes into those books. There’s no contradiction between being a private person and the impulse to write.
What we think is shameful isn’t that bad. It is just human.
Inspiration comes in the form of recognition—a feeling. “I need to write that.” I can’t force it. I live with it. I allow it to build and grown inside me. That feeling is always worth pursuing. (It’s like Joan Didion’s “shimmer.”)
Audience Member: When do you know the full memoir arc?
Shapiro: If you know the container/parameters, then why tell it? [I have a] sense of a shape of an arc, but it is a lot of discovery along the way. What associations/memories belong to what? It’s one of the joys of writing memoir. [I’m] making an inquiry into something I’m interested in.
[When I realized I wanted to write about] marriage, [I knew I had to write about] my marriage. [I thought,] “Uh oh.” I got my husband’s permission. I started with no arc or structure.
Assemble puzzle pieces as you write, solving as you write. Hunch and instincts are closely related.
Writers are their own instruments. Being a writer is walking through life being porous, a little raw, in an open, receptive state, observing. You can’t be in that state all the time.
Follow your instincts; it’s the greatest way to live. “Write into . . .” (Annie Dillard: “Follow a line of words.”) You do not know what the end of the sentence will be.
If you write, “I remember . . .” you will finish that sentence.
Move in the direction of the unknown until you get there.
Audience Member: How do you distinguish what is gold on the page and what’s potentially hurtful?
Shapiro: One way to check yourself: “Why am I writing this? Am I writing this out of revenge?” Writing out of revenge never produces good work. The writer has an agenda. Writing out of revenge reeks of revenge.
Things I worried would hurt my mom didn’t; other passages did. You don’t know what will hurt someone. There’s no gaming this. It’s none of your business, but that doesn’t mean you can let yourself off the hook.
Andre Dubus III (on his childhood): “What happened on my brother’s side of the door is his story to tell. What happened on my side of the door is mine to tell.”
[There’s] no choice but to find the way to tell the story.
Reading great work is always incredibly nourishing. We learn to write through reading. But when you’re deep inside your own work, it’s not helpful to read in the same genre; it triggers the censor: “Why should I even try? Someone else already did this?”
Keep good sentences in your ears. They may change your writing. For me, reading for pleasure and reading great work are the same thing.
Get your butt in the chair and stay there. It’s okay to be uncomfortable. You should be uncomfortable.
Don’t have your phone near you. Turn off your notifications. [Get the app] Freedom. It turns your computer into a typewriter.
Just begin.