Prompt 158: Lesson Learned
Novelist Chris McCormick on the particular as universal
Hi friend,
In 2017, I had the good fortune of going to Ucross, an artist residency located on a historic 20,000-acre ranch in northern Wyoming. For months, I’d been trying to write Between Two Kingdoms—my post-treatment road trip in particular—but I was struggling to find the right way into the story. I wanted it to be more than an episodic tally of I went here and met this person, I went there and met that person. I wanted to get to the heart of the matter, to distill the larger lessons that we are all learning and relearning in this life, to uncover the why.
The month I spent at Ucross was transformative. I didn’t have any distractions—no dogs to walk, no groceries to buy, no dishes to wash. But more than the quiet, more than the spare studio space with a desk and a reading chair and strips of corkboard along one wall, more than the basket of lunch that appeared every day outside my door, it was the sense of community that changed everything.
There were eight of us, a mix of artists, musicians, and writers. After working all day, we’d gather in the evenings for gorgeous, candle-lit dinners, then sip whiskey and spend hours talking. In those conversations, I began to understand that the troubles I was facing with my book were not unique to me, and that they weren’t just the challenges of a novice. Finding the way into the story is the hardest part—and it looks different with every piece, every book, every idea. With that in mind, I tried an experiment: Could I start by writing twenty moments from my road trip as scenes?
It ended up being the most glorious month, where I entered a kind of creative fugue state. I had my list of twenty moments, and I would choose one and begin to write into it. Soon the moment would blossom into a scene and then a whole chapter. After each one, I would print it out, then tack it to one of the cork strips. At the end of my time there, I had one hundred pages that I liked. More importantly, I had learned that by burrowing down into the particulars, I arrived at the bigger ideas without even trying.
Today we’re sharing a prompt that explores this same concept—it’s from my Ucross pal, the fiction writer Chris McCormick. In addition to being kind and brilliant, he’s one of those rare people who is both an exceptional writer and a truly exceptional teacher. When I shared some pages of Between Two Kindgoms with him, he wrote me a multi-page letter with the most helpful thoughtful comments. One night while we were at dinner, he learned he’d gotten a tenure track job at Minnesota State University in Mankato, and I remember thinking his future students were very lucky. And lucky for us, he’s sharing some of his teaching brilliance with us today.
Sending love,
Suleika
P.S. This afternoon at 1pm ET, I’m so excited to host a Studio Visit with the author Nadia Owusu. I just finished reading her stunning debut memoir Aftershocks, our August Book Club pick. It’s a poignant, lyrical, at times devastating and deeply resonant book, and I can’t wait to talk to her about writing ourselves home and whole. Become a paid subscriber to join us!
158. Lesson Learned by Chris McCormick
Teaching creative writing—even over Zoom, where the connection can be faulty in more ways than one—is an exhilarating exercise in warping time. I’m constantly forced to reflect on the distance I’ve travelled as a writer, remembering and reshaping all the lessons I’ve learned (and am still learning) in the hopes that they’ll be as useful for my students as they’ve been for me.
One of the frustrations I had as a beginner, I tell them, was that I really wanted to write about big ideas and feelings—universal abstractions like love, trust, grief, shame, and respect. My thinking was: we’re all human, and we all experience this stuff, so drawing on these enormous concepts will minimize our differences and help readers connect to my writing. But I hadn’t yet realized that these large abstractions were arrival points, not departures. Whenever I spoke from the treetops, no one seemed to hear my instructions to climb up and join me.
What I had to learn was that the most memorable writing (in my opinion) moved from the ground up, rooted in concrete particulars. If the specific choices—vivid images and telling, sensory details—were purposeful and sturdy enough, the reader would happily do the heavy lifting themselves, grafting their own memories, ideas, and feelings to the specifics of the concrete language. In other words, the more particular your writing, the more likely it is that your readers will arrive at—and co-create—its deeper meaning.
Your prompt for the week:
To practice this upward movement from the concrete to the abstract, write into a particular memory you have with a teacher (school teacher, music teacher, sports coach, dance instructor, etc.). Focus on a specific moment in your memory—it can be positive or negative or more ambiguously in between. Bring that moment to life in all the concrete, sensory detail you can remember. Focus on that moment and that moment alone—try not to say too much about what it meant to you at the time or what it means to you now. After bringing that memory to life on the page, I want you to read what you have a few times over. Then add this one final sentence, filling in the blank with your choice of an abstract, universal concept: “This is one way to learn about ___________________.”
Today’s Contributor
Chris McCormick is the author of a novel, The Gimmicks (Harper, 2020), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a short story collection, Desert Boys, winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, and Ploughshares. He earned his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MFA from the University of Michigan. He is associate professor in the creative writing program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is at work on his next book.
Thank you for this prompt. I have been trying to focus on the details as my entry point, and this was a great addition to a series of lessons from TIJ on that practice.
I am sweat. I am lactic acid on simmer. I am ripped muscle tissue, gasping for protein and rest. My adolescent body wants to burst out of this leotard and tights, these hairpins and hairnets, this sweat-stained skin gasping on the upper story of our city studio. I eye the company director, Draper, with the gravity of a mission impossible as he completes his instructions. With all of myself, I turn at the bar for the twentysomething-th bar exercise en pointe of the day.
Debussy strides out of the cheap speakers like a too-familiar guest and begins to hammer on wall, roofbeam, mirror, floorboard, with a taunting sweep through the chalk box in the corner. Draper follows in close step, making his way down the rows of dancers executing his just-summarized exercise with the energy of a WWI command two weeks deep in the trenches. Our dulled eyes stare forward, determined to ignore him and so show our respect.
After one round of the room he sweeps by the stereo and cuts the music. Who now, I wonder. What’s the critique? The catastrophe? Somewhere in my mind, defiance puts one foot on the stand. In this heatwave, I can provide nothing more.
But Draper takes the stand, with his arms open and his eyes searching ours - perhaps the first time I notice he wants our eyes and not our perfected feet. The heat, the professional pressure, the last week of training, the end of the day - he nods to all of these and then tells us that now, here, under the burden of all this, is actually where we must make the choice between strength and status quo. Only at this point does choosing to do more make a difference. Everything before this point was maintenance.
This is one way to learn about determination.