battlegrounds

every (un)imaginable kind

“Has this year made me a better lover?
Will I understand something of hardship,
of loss, will a lover sense this
in my kiss or touch? What do I know
of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have
to say of the dead - that it was it worth it,
that any of it made sense?
I have no words to speak of war.”
― Brian Turner, Here, Bullet

INVESTIGATION

Only war is war, but there are battles everywhere

War metaphors fill our stories. They’re present everywhere in our media. Why do you think that is? I don’t know the answer, but I dig holding up the question and looking into it, examining it like a kaleidoscope. And I have some theories. 

In some ways, I think humans might have always been fighters. Like wild dogs and wild horses and all other mammals. Something in our skin tells us that we are temporary. We know it in our bodies. And we fight for it. There’s some great existential push to fight, to survive, and I think that fight is embedded in our language. Hence, war metaphors, the way they feel in our bodies. When I’m at the gym, my coach crouches beside me yelling “fight it out!” as I struggle with my last push ups. We call arguments with loved ones “fights” too. We talk about markets and business meetings as “battlefields” and difficult conversations as “minefields.” We go to battle, we stand in “superhero” pose, we talk about the busy moments of our lives by saying we are “in the trenches” and talk about people we trust by saying that we’d be comfy “in a foxhole with them.”

We use these words casually. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but worth noticing.

We are writing about raw moments in our lives - or as Tom Spanbauer puts it writing your shame or as Lidia Yuknavitch puts it writing your bodies inside of moments of terror and heartbreak - it can be helpful to view our most difficult or traumatic scenes as little battles.

Check it out:

Battles have a beginning. Sometimes they are a surprise, they blindside you. Sometimes you march into them: This is your opportunity for exposition. This is where you describe the scene you are about to drop the reader into. In screenwriting, we are told to establish an initial normalcy that will change pretty fast, creating the tension that keeps people watching. This is where the first normal is established. Begin your difficult scene with the facts, the direct language.

Inside the battle, the world is all sensory. Big sounds and big smells and colors and pain and dialog. The world smashes into you: This is where the writing can get urgent and fun. Make lists of sensory details. Use the techniques we worked with before: a series of short sentences or one long run on sentence that has a nice BANG at the end of it. 

After the battle, the fallout: You can write a whole book about this. This is where you learn who you are. This is where you unpack the “new normal.”

Example:

The day September 11th happened, I was skipping school, sleeping in at my dad’s house. He woke me up with a tray of banana pancakes and orange juice. Was there a flower in a little cup on the tray? Was he singing along to some annoying southern rock music when he walked into my bedroom? I think I’m making up those details, but I can’t know. I can’t ask him.

I had enrolled in the IB program closer to his house a month before. While I was there, some boys followed me to Spanish class and pushed me against the wall touched my face touched my hair lifted up the hem of my skirt telling me you wear them tight like that for us huh and I don’t remember much else. 

I left the school three days later. While we waited for my enrollment to go through at the other high school, I slept in at dad’s house, and he made me banana pancakes. I didn’t tell him about the boys. I put it out of my mind. And on September 11th, after Dad delivered me the banana pancakes, he said, the twin towers exploded. I asked him what the twin towers were. He laughed at me. After the pancakes, I sat with him in the living room, watching the news, not really seeing it, not really knowing that the world, my world was changing. 

I didn’t know the country would reel from this. War would be born from this. So many boys I knew would be destroyed by this. 

I didn’t know that right there beside me on the couch, my dad was dying. I didn’t know that two months later, he would be dead, and I would be back at mom’s house, alone again, cooking for my brother.

I didn’t know that the moment’s with those boys outside of Spanish class would be the least of my scars, something I would roll my eyes about, pass off like seriously not a big deal just boys being stupid, young, not knowing the world either. Besides, the whole world was grieving right just then, and their grief was so much bigger. Whole towers fell on top of the people they loved. Whole buildings fell down. Where do the hearts and bodies of a small town fire alarm salesman and his daughter fit into that world? And how do you grieve the loss of your small town family and all its peace  when the whole country is screaming and raging and packing up for war?

:::

EXPLORATION

This month, there are a lot of little readings. I hope you enjoy them. The essay by Emily Rapp Black is one of the most gorgeous pieces of writing I’ve ever seen. Jerry McGill writes a letter to the person who shot him in a drive-by shooting when he was a child, paralyzing him. Ocean Vuong writes a letter to his mother, who hurt him. Eula Biss writes about a war zone she does not belong to (one she is distant from). Ashli Taylor writes about another kind of distance in the military. Brian Turner writes an explosion right in the belly of a recent overseas war. 

So, your first mission in these weeks is to take your time with these readings. As you read, take note of two things.

If you wish, dedicate your first page of this month’s work to these notes. For each reading, write:

• What is the war zone the writer is INSIDE. What words really land with you when they describe their zone?

• How did they or how could they WRITE THEMSELVES OUT OF IT. 

Try to excavate the readings to see where these things fit and COPY the techniques that you find. 

Readings:

Here, Bullet

Incoming - Sex, Drugs, and Copenhagen: "Sand Love" by Ashli Taylor

"Exquisite Creatures" Emily Rapp Black

Dear Marcus Jerry McGill

Time and Distance Overcome Eula Biss

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong

If you go through the readings, you can find MANY more examples. The “battle” in my example is the difficulty of processing a “small assault” when the world - both mine and in the country at large - were falling apart.

The “battle” for me was not the assault itself. My fight was and is the terror and heartbreak of trying to make that assault matter in my own mind and body. 

WE MUST LOOK, hard, AT OUR OWN WOUNDS

It is sometimes brutal, so very often necessary, and at least - usually - kind of cathartic, for us to put our vulnerability to the page. There are scenes in our lives that feel untouchable AND scenes in our lives that we cannot stop writing about. Writing these scenes is kind of like digging up dinosaur bones: you need the right tools and the right pacing. If you go too heavy and hard, you'll smash the bones before you even get to see them. If you go too light, you might never get there. And our tools are our techniques. The technique for this month is the battle approach.

enter.

be.

remember.

ACTIVITY: the battle approach