Good Writing Doesn't Flinch

Recently I was at a party and spent some time talking with and getting to know a firefighter. Given my early experience as a reporter, I'm comfortable asking probing questions of strangers.

Since this firefighter was female, I indulged my curiosity about the aspects of the job that require physical strength. She gave her height and weight: a couple of inches shorter than me, and only five pounds heavier, definitely not a thick chick. Yet she said she could deadlift 225 pounds, which just astounded me. (By contrast, I can probably deadlift forty pounds max, unless I have to lift a car off of a baby, in which case I would run like hell to find somebody with muscles.) (A deadlift is where the barbell starts on the ground, and you bend down and lift it with straight arms until your back is straight, which makes the bar end up around your knees. Lower it and you've completed one rep.)

The firefighter said that her strength strategy, to keep up with the guys, was to acknowledge that she couldn't lift as much as most male firefighters at one time, but she had trained so that she could repeat lifting heavy weights more times than most of the male firefighters. "So I can't lift as much, but I can repeat and endure as long or longer than they can, and a lot of the job is endurance, rather than explosive strength."

(OK, I didn't have a picture of a female firefighter. These guys work putting out flames in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Don't you love the Spanish word for them?: Bomberos!)

Then I asked the firefighter how she copes with the emotional vicissitudes of the job, thinking of the broken bodies she deals with, being that firefighters do a lot of EMT work as well.

Here is what she said: "We get there after it's over. We don't see the trauma occur, so we don't get that shock. We don't see the leg breaking, we don't see the stroke happening."

And I realized that that's a huge difference, one I never thought about. Certainly the job can be traumatizing, but it's not like I thought.

She went on, "And if somebody's dead, they're dead, and it's all over for them. Nothing's going on."

What about the survivors? I wondered how she deals with their grief and shock.

"We get in, we do our job, and we get out."

In other words, they don't stick around.

Because, really, the only way they can survive is to not become emotionally involved in the dramatic, often defining moments, of other people's lives.

What does this have to do with writing?

As writers, we must be like firefighters and we must not be like them.

We must be like them in that when the shit goes down, we have to jump in our truck and rush to it. But of course we must create the shit that goes down, and we must be different from firefighters. We must stick around.

We must be there for the tough stuff, we must be deeply involved in it, we must not gloss over trouble, agony, difficulty. We must be there deeply because we want our readers to be there deeply. So we have to show the leg breaking. The heart breaking. The bullet piercing the flesh, the fire licking the Picasso, the floodwater inching toward the nostrils. And we must show these things as vividly as possible, discomfort bedammed.

Of course, we as writers also get to indulge in the flip side: We get to be there for the ecstasy, and we must not only let our readers know it's happening, we must portray it as deeply as we portray the pain.

Sometimes this is even more a challenge than portraying suffering! Why is that? I think it's because suffering is drama, while joy is…well, joy is nice.

Which is why novels go like this: "Once upon a time, a dreadful thing happened. But they lived happily ever after." instead of like this: "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after."

Gotta have that drama, gotta have that suffering!

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My First HCM (Heart-Clutching Moment)

When I was visiting my mother about five years ago, she handed me a piece of paper and said, "I think this is the first thing you ever wrote."

It is a half sheet of lined paper on which I had written an account of an important event in my mother's and my life, that is the death of her father. I titled it, "My Grandfather's Furenal." It wasn't really about the 'furenal'; it was about the news of his death. I was six when this occurred, and the moment impressed itself on me deeply, as did the three days I spent with the family hanging around the mortuary where Grandpa was laid out. I'd only met my grandfather a few times (he lived in another state), but he had been a friendly presence. The transcription is at the end of this post.

I must have written the account when I was eight or nine, on one of the two impossibly heavy typewriters we had in the house, secondhand models that were old and outdated even then. (One was an Underwood, the other probably a Remington.) But boy, were they satisfying to use! I can still smell the machine oil and the ribbons, can still feel the resistance of the keys, that smooth progressive weird sensation that ends with a dry pop! and a release, over and over.

Not everything about progress is good.

My point is this: we all respond to significant moments in life, whether we are children or adults. Moreover, we respond to them vicariously, in the books we read (fiction and nonfiction), the movies we see, the jokes we hear at the tavern.

In my articles for Writer's Digest and in You've Got a Book in You, I call these heart-clutching moments, or HCMs. They tend to be the more genuine, intense moments of life. Birth, death, betrayal, a stroke of luck, a bolt of passion, an instant of grace, a pang of conscience, a disaster—these are just a few sorts of heart-clutching moments.

HCMs are the fuel that drives stories forward, and they are the string that binds your readers to you.

The little six-year-old me was so impressed by a message of death that the little eight-year-old me felt compelled to document it. I don't know who I expected would read it, but somehow I felt it was the most worthwhile thing I had to offer the world.

Grownup writers sometimes feel that to put in HCMs is to be exploitative, and so they tone them down. To heck with that! Let 'em out, write 'em fully, give your readers all the meat and bones of it. We're in the business of making readers feel.

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My Grandfather's furenal

When my mother got up one morning, she answerd the telephone, and I knew that my grandfather was sick of a blood clot in the leg.

But anyway it was on the telephone my grandmother and she said that grandfather was dead, and mommy started to cry. And then she told me that grandpa was dead.

Then we both started to cry. So my mom woke up dad. And that very next day we went to grandma's house and she took us to my cousin's house. And the next day and the day after that and the next day we had to wait for the furenal. Then the furenal. And my uncle gave a big cross of flowers. I was very sad.

THE END