Five Keys to Writing Across Difference: by Elizabeth Stark

This morning, Leo would not wear his rain boots, the ones he loved so last year, because they are polka dotted and have “girl colors” on them. It was clear to both Leo and me that he still loved them, that he was censoring himself because of others’ ideas—ideas he knows I do not condone, but which both of us recognize as having real consequences and, hence, reality.

This week in the Writing Craft Class, we are focusing specifically on writing across difference. At first, when I started going through my bookshelves (which, since my move, are organized in no particular order at all), I immediately came across many examples of white men writing white women with vivid voice and prize-winning success.

Moving upstairs—where again, the only note of organization may be that these are books from which I teach most frequently—I was relieved to find more variety in my examples, including Rabih Alameddine’s marvelous I, the Divine, a novel in first chapters about a woman’s attempt to write about her own life; Thaisa Frank’s male Midwestern vampire in her gorgeous collection Enchantment, Jennifer Egan’s many point of view characters in A Visit from the Goon Squad, John Fowles clever look across time and gender in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Patricia Duncker’s fascinating book Hallucinating Foucault, with its male graduate student progagonist, Annie Proulx’s fabulous characters in Close Range, even Dorothy Hearst’s point of view character Kaala—a wolf—in her wonderful trilogy The Wolf Chronicles.

Toni Morrison’s essential book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination notes that

Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the paces where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability. (xi)

One of the exciting prospects of tackling writing across difference in class this week is breaking through those locks on imagination’s gate, and seeing what we can do to mindfully clear the pollution that blocks our vision.

For what we require as writers is, first and foremost, vision—access to all the senses and their vivid literal effects as well as the resonances that grow from the literal, the meaning that, well rooted in the actual, swells to something more.

We must find our ways into each other without recourse to cliché or myths of unimpeachable differences.

Toni Morrison challenges herself—and therefore the rest of us who aspire to write—to reach beyond the limits of our socialization, our language, perhaps our understanding, and find originality, authenticity, the stamp of truth only fiction can attain:

The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains. (xi)

These, then, will be the keys to writing across difference:

• to maintain self-awareness about our own assumptions and the place from which we write;
• to work against laziness: to remain alert, willing to work hard and to get it wrong and to try again and to push hard against what is stuck or overwhelming;
• to be willing to be aware of the sinister and the lazy in our language, perhaps in what we most love about what we hold dear;
• to fight against what is predictable, what is known, to route out the easy untruth, the cliché, the unquestioned assumption and try again;
• to travel at the edges of safety and comfort and familiarity, and then step beyond (ideally in polka dotted rain boots or whatever your own self requires and loves).