allanhunter.net Blog

I’ve just finished teaching at the 2007 Institute’s Summer session - a week of workshops, celebrity presentations, discussions, readings, laughter, and good old fashioned hard work inspired by all of the aforementioned items on the list.

This year I worked with my writers on the notion of ‘listening to you life’.  I’ve found so often that once we listen to what we say in our writing, rather than worrying about what we think we ought to say, the writing tells us two things.  First, it tells us what we need to say next - it directs us to the road ahead as new ideas come to mind that stem directly from the piece we’ve just written. Second, as we follow this road we discover that the writing will tell us how it needs to be written.  It tells us what tone to use.  The key in every case is to start with an event that feels to the writer to be filled with energy; so filled, in fact, that we feel we have to write it no matter how it comes out. Elegant writing is not the goal at this point.

I was blessed with a small group this year, which meant that I was able to work more intensively with the people I had, and I have to say it was a real privilege to be able to do so.  That’s not an empty statement.  When people take their courage in their hands and write what they feel to be their truth some remarkable things can happen.  And they did.  Not only did the writing become vital, but it really did tell each writer what needed to be done next.  And - God Bless them - my writers did listen to their own stories and went ahead and wrote the next section, and the next… and the next. By the end of the week we had pretty strong ideas as to how each of them could shape the whole trajectory of their Memoirs over the coming months.  We’d identified a framework.

I’ve taught large groups for years, so I know my insights work.  But to teach a small group in such a concentrated time period showed me just how startlingly well the system can work and how far writers can move when the fires are stoked, when the furnaces are roaring.

Perhaps we were just lucky.  Writers are a little like eggs, I sometimes think.  Nothing much seems to happen to an egg for some time until suddenly one day it hatches and you’ve got something much more active to deal with. So, to my newly-hatched writers I can only send my congratulations, because these were not chicken eggs that produced cute fluffy chicks.  Nope.  These are strong, imperious-looking fledglings.  I reckon they could turn out to be eagles.