158. Lesson Learned – Chris McCormick
If the specific choices—vivid images and telling, sensory details—were purposeful and sturdy enough, the reader would happily do the heavy lifting themselves, grafting their own memories, ideas, and feelings to the specifics of the concrete language.
Teaching creative writing—even over Zoom, where the connection can be faulty in more ways than one—is an exhilarating exercise in warping time. I’m constantly forced to reflect on the distance I’ve travelled as a writer, remembering and reshaping all the lessons I’ve learned (and am still learning) in the hopes that they’ll be as useful for my students as they’ve been for me.
One of the frustrations I had as a beginner, I tell them, was that I really wanted to write about big ideas and feelings—universal abstractions like love, trust, grief, shame, and respect. My thinking was: we’re all human, and we all experience this stuff, so drawing on these enormous concepts will minimize our differences and help readers connect to my writing. But I hadn’t yet realized that these large abstractions were arrival points, not departures. Whenever I spoke from the treetops, no one seemed to hear my instructions to climb up and join me.
What I had to learn was that the most memorable writing (in my opinion) moved from the ground up, rooted in concrete particulars. If the specific choices—vivid images and telling, sensory details—were purposeful and sturdy enough, the reader would happily do the heavy lifting themselves, grafting their own memories, ideas, and feelings to the specifics of the concrete language. In other words, the more particular your writing, the more likely it is that your readers will arrive at—and co-create—its deeper meaning.
– Chris McCormick
