So what?

Yesterday my friend Lee, from my late, lamented writers' group in New Jersey, and I had a phone meeting to discuss our writing. She'd given me an assignment to come up with three new essay topics. I'd thought about this and had a vague idea (very vague) of something to write about. She hadn't. But that's OK, instead we talked about writing and how hard it is to come up with endings that mean something. What Ann Hood kept pounding us over the head with at my Writers in Paradise sessions:

1. What happens?

2. Then what?

3. Then what?

4. So what?

So what? This is what really matters in a personal essay. Otherwise, it's just a moment in time, a slice of history, a fun story I might tell my friends and family in an email. Not that interesting to the rest of the world.

So this morning I took out my notes from that conference and reread Day 1 with Stewart O'Nan, and I stopped at this quote:
"Start big, finish big, in the middle go as deep as you can."
He was quoting short story writer Lorrie Moore but the same applies to any good writing.
Figuring out those endings, though, that's the hard part about writing personal essays. I said that to Lee yesterday and she laughed. What? she tells me, Did you forget writing's supposed to be hard?

Then I kept reading my notes from O'Nan's lecture and he said the same thing. Writing is hard work. But he also said we need to learn about writing from reading- reading best sellers, poetry, great fiction and bad fiction. So that's the fun part. The reading. Today I'm reading every personal essay in my vast files and figuring out the So What.
Otherwise, I think I could ask another question about these proposed essay topics of mine:
Who Cares?

3 Sweaters...

The good thing about travel delays is that I can lose myself in a good book. When you fly in and out of Newark, mostly standing by, hoping to get on the next flight somewhere, you have lots of reading time.

On my trip South to visit family this New Year's, I read detective fiction- pure escape. But on the trip to New Jersey today, I finally let myself read my Christmas gift to myself-- Stewart O'Nan's Songs for the Missing. So far, all I can say is WOW. I'd been saving it, having heard such great things about this novel that I wanted to read it carefully, without airport distractions, but there I was, on a delay in Baltimore, stuck in the terminal with only one book. Fortunately, the writing is exquisite. So far, I'm loving this book. More on this one later.

So now I'll put on another sweater-- my comfort zone has narrowed since moving to Florida for most of the year-- turn up the thermostat a degree or two, and get back to that book.

Here's hoping all of you found the perfect book in your stocking. Leave me a comment and tell me exactly what Santa brought you to read!