A JCPL librarian interviews published writers about their favorite writing prompts—exercises that can help inspire, focus, and improve your creative writing. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, a novelist, essayist, or poet, you’ll find ideas and advice to motivate you to keep writing. A partnership with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
PtoP Ep. 40 edit 1
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Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page Podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Keri Green. Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Jessica Handler.
Jessica is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize, and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, a 2019 Books All Georgians Should Read, an Indie Next Pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 Pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 Pick, and a Southern Independent Booksellers Association Okra Pick.
Her memoir, Invisible Sisters, was also named one of the Books All Georgians Should Read, and her craft guide, Braving the Fire: [00:01:00] A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss, was praised by Vanity Fair Magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Full Grown People, Oldster, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.
Her novel, The World to See, is forthcoming from Regal House Press. Jessica lives in Atlanta with her husband, novelist Mickey Dubrow. Welcome, Jessica, and thanks so much for joining us.
Jessica: Carrie, thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.
Carrie: You mentor writers with the Carnegie Center's one on one Mentor Writing Service.
How would you describe your role as a writing mentor?
Jessica: Oh, I love that question. I do mentor writers through Carnegie, through the Carnegie Center, and elsewhere. And my role as a writing mentor is, I think, to [00:02:00] help a writer find their way into what it is they want to say. What it is they're getting at in their story, be it fiction or nonfiction.
I'm a big believer that when we write well, we're writing about what matters to us. So when you put words on paper, pen to page, fingers to keyboard, yeah, you're telling a story and you've created characters or you're working with real people, you know, as characters. But what is it you want to convey about your understanding of the world and how does that underlie the plot?
So that's what I'm, that's what I'm after. And that being said, I also want writers to understand their voice, right? And to have confidence in their voice. And the way they write.
Carrie: Yeah. Kind of sounds like a way of coaching, or
Jessica: It's very much coaching. I like that. I like that word. Because, because coaching is helping a person understand their skills, their abilities, [00:03:00] and put them to, to the best use.
Carrie: Yeah. And was that kind of mentor relationship, was that important to you as you developed as a writer?
Jessica: Oh, good question. Very much so. I came to writing or writing professionally or semi professionally, I guess, kind of late. Writing is my second career. I was a television production manager for about 25 years in Los Angeles and Boston and here in Atlanta, which is where I live.
And I always wrote. I'm one of these people who, if you ask my friends, I have friends who have been my friends since first grade, which is really rare. But when I was in high school, I would write these like two page short stories or essays recapping everything we did in the summer, right? Like who was held hostage summer camp, or, you know, who stole eyeliner from the Rexall or whatever.
But in terms of coaching, I went and got my MFA, a low residency MFA in my, I think I was in my 40s, my early 40s and the program and any good, I think MFA program [00:04:00] or MFA style program, was all about coaching. What are you trying to write? Here's who you should read. Here's how you should read them and study them and focus on my development as a writer and a storyteller.
So, yeah, I think I learned from that.
Carrie: Yeah, that's great. In addition to your memoir, which is about illness and loss of your two sisters, you've also written Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss. And what made you realize that that was something that writers might want help with?
Jessica: You know, when I was reading from Invisible Sisters, and the reason I wrote Invisible Sisters, I have to back up a little bit and tell you, is we all ask or are asked the question, do you have any siblings? And for me, that was a very hard question to answer because if I said no, I was lying about myself and people I loved, and if I said yes and they're deceased, [00:05:00] I've kind of wiped mess on you that you didn't ask for.
So Braving the Fire, when I was touring with Invisible Sisters and reading from the book, so many people, Carrie, came up to me and said, almost like they were confessing this shameful secret, you know, I'm an only one left too. And that kept happening. And there are so many really, really good writing craft guides out there.
I teach with Situation in the Story by Vivian Gornick all the time. But at the time there really weren't any craft guides specifically about how to write well about loss and trauma. And loss and trauma, you know, death and dying are the heavy hitters, but anything that changes your narrative, you know, is it the loss of a marriage or a relationship?
Is it the loss of a home or a job? Is it a difficult coming out experience? Is it illness or addiction and recovery or not? What is it that you thought your life was going to go this way, and it's gone that way. And how do you make a narrative [00:06:00] out of it? So, Braving the Fire was, at the time it came out, the first craft guide specifically focused on that idea.
And there's a lot of prompts in that book, because one of the things I did was interview so many mentors of my own, Abigail Thomas, various people like that, about how they do it, as well as looking back at the work of people I couldn't get to like Joan Didion or Montaigne. Right. So, yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. And thanks for bringing that up, because I was going to ask you about those prompts.
Did you, when you were writing your memoir, did you use any of those types of prompts as you were writing?
Jessica: I did. And I'll talk about one of the prompts that I used in writing Invisible Sisters and that I also use in my classroom. I teach in a couple of low residency programs as well as mentoring. And I also, you know, do workshops and stuff.
Invisible Sisters, I used a lot of real life materials. I've kept [00:07:00] journals. since I was like nine, right? Starting with that one we all had with the kissing puppies on the cover and the lock that anybody could pick with a toothpick, right? All the way up really to now. And so I have in a room in my house, a floor to ceiling bookcase that is filled with my journals.
I need to do something about that because they're running out of room. But I also wrote away to five different children's hospitals in the U. S. and requested and got multiple thousands of pages of medical records. And so I had all this material and
one of the things that I use a lot is a freewrite as a prompt.
And I'm sure you know what a freewrite is. It goes to another prompt, but what I would do is I would ask myself a question when I was confronted with a piece of research or a piece of emotional, difficult emotional terrain. And the question would vary, but it would be like, why does this matter to me? Or what do I want to understand about this?
Or on a [00:08:00] more surface level, why did she behave that way in that circumstance? Or why did he say that to her? Or, why can't I remember X thing? And then I would set a timer. I actually use a kitchen timer, a wind up kitchen timer, so that I'm not looking at a clock. And I would write by hand, which is, if you've ever seen my handwriting is a sad thing.
Um, and I would ask that question and then I would write by hand for 10 solid minutes. Anything that came out of my head, including this is stupid. I hate this. When I go to the grocery store, I need to get orange juice. Anything that happened because I'm going for the subconscious and after those 10 minutes I would go through the the whatever I'd written with a highlighter and I would highlight anything that resonated with me As what I was going for and I would find in that freewrite prompt,
oh I didn't realize but this is why that happened or this is what I feel about it or I didn't realize until this minute, [00:09:00] but such and such. And that would allow me to move forward with that difficult part of the writing. So I used that a lot in Invisible Sisters.
Carrie: So then your freewrite kind of serves as a way of finding an additional prompt.
Jessica: Yes, yeah. I would also type them up because after about five minutes, I can't read my own handwriting. And, actually in the, the file matter for that book, which is sort of the detritus of writing a book, there are files that are inches thick of my, typed up and printed out free writes. But yeah, they would create a different prompt because then I would be able to write a scene or write some interiority.
So they're prompts that allow me to investigate what I'm going for. What is it I'm trying to really do here?
Carrie: Right. I wanted to mention, I really liked in Braving the Fire how you mentioned that people might be writing about their loss for different reasons, like not necessarily for publication.
Jessica: Right. [00:10:00]
Carrie: I feel like that is something that often gets overlooked and so I appreciated I've had, you know, we've had writing workshops here at the library.
I don't know if you know, Martha Greenwald's Who We Lost Project, but
Jessica: yeah.
Carrie: So she has led some writing workshops here, and one of our participants lost a loved one in the pandemic. And, you know, she just wanted to collect her own memories, not necessarily publish them.
Jessica: Yeah. And there's one of the people I talked to for that book is a man named Dr.
James Pennebaker, Jamie Pennebaker at University of Texas, Austin. And he, does a lot of work with the neuroscience of writing about loss. And sometimes what this is, is our brains just need to make story out of it so that we understand it, or so we have a way to understand it. Doesn't mean you have to publish it or make a bestseller just means you have to find your way to, [00:11:00] to comprehending it.
Carrie: Did you want to go ahead and talk about your writing prompt?
Jessica: Sure. Let's see. I'm trying to figure it out. I had a couple of them. There's two. I'm going to talk about a short one and then a longer one. Um, by the way, you've had such amazing authors on this podcast. And one of the prompts I want to talk about is kind of like one that Silas House talked about in his episode, although his is so much more, more dense.
I'm really going to use it. What I do. And this helps create scene, is I will ask my writing students or my writing mentees to make a grid five columns in the grid. And across the top of the grid, you put the five senses, right? Sight, sound, touch, taste, and hearing. No, hearing. Sight, sound, touch, taste.
What am I not thinking of? Oh my gosh, I should have just pulled a grid.
Carrie: Oh, [00:12:00] gosh, I don't know.
Jessica: Smell, smell, smell. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. There you go. Well, I'm getting over a cold, so I'm kind of missing smell in my life. And so we put those five things across the top, and then down the side, we put one, numbers one, two, three.
So you'll end up with 15 spaces on a grid. Five times three is 15. And then what I ask a writer to do is think about one moment in their story, particularly one that they feel they're not fully inhabiting. And it could be non fiction, or it could be fiction. Think about that one moment. And then we take, depending, but we take about 10 minutes, maybe 15, and write as specifically as we can, not full sentences, but one or two words in each block.
What are you seeing in that moment? What are you hearing? What are you smelling, tasting, touching? And, you know, hearing, if you say music, is it Rachmaninoff? Or, you know, is it Taylor Swift? These are different. What are you tasting? Is, if you say dinner, is [00:13:00] it fried chicken? Or is it, I have a bowl of yogurt right here.
These things taste different. Smell is really interesting. Um, smell. Touch too, that's not just fingertips. Is it the feeling of tears on your cheek? Is it the feeling of a, a cold bench under your hind end? And what this does when you come up with the 15 of them, is it creates a full sensory experience of a moment.
Then what I ask the student to do, because 15 senses is too much to put into a scene. So what are the one or two senses that really convey how that character, and if it's memoir, that character is you, and if it's fiction, that character is whoever your character is in that moment, that really convey what matters to that character in that scene, what's happening in their mind, their heart, their world.
For example, if you have a character who is perhaps. Thinking about a child, thinking about a pregnancy, [00:14:00] maybe wanting to get pregnant, maybe losing a pregnancy, whatever it is in your story, and they hear laughter, and they hear a child's laughter, that is going to be an element that can matter in that scene.
So then it becomes a moment of authorial choice. You're essentially harvesting out of those 15 senses.
What one or two things matter the most in moving your scene forward and inhabiting your scene. That's, that's my primary prompt. That is a prompt I love to do and I do it myself a lot too. And it helps me when I'm writing, if I'm kind of losing, losing my focus,
it
helps me re enter what I'm doing.
Carrie: So would, that would be kind of a prompt you would use like in, in process, like in progress, if you're already working on a piece, kind of?
Jessica: All the time. All the time, yeah, throughout, throughout the piece, I'll work on it, you know, when I need to, and we know as writers when we're really in it, and it's just clicking along, and also we [00:15:00] notice, it's like, I'm not feeling it today.
But I want to be feeling it. So maybe that's when you try and use, use that prompt.
Carrie: Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah.
Carrie: And that seems like a prompt you could use no matter the genre as well.
Jessica: Oh, absolutely. Fiction, non fiction, poetry. I've just written some lyrics, apparently I've started doing that, and I used it, yeah, and I used it in that as well.
So it's applicable cross genre, I think.
Carrie: Yeah, great. And you had another one?
Jessica: Well, you said that this one, you said accurately that this one is, for when you're in process. But let's say you're starting a project, you know, let's say you come to a workshop, or you're starting your MFA, or you've just made a connection with your mentor through the Carnegie Center, and you want to write something, but you're not sure.
Start at the top of a piece of paper, and again, I'm a big believer in doing this by hand, if that is something you can do, because from a proprioceptive standpoint, hand to heart, but, you know, you can also do this on the keyboard, or you can do it into a [00:16:00] voice recorder, depending on your preferences. Start with the sentence.
"I am obsessed by" and hit the timer for five minutes. Don't look at it. And again, brain dump everything that you're obsessed by in your life, you know, and then when you're done after five minutes, you probably, I hope, my intention is, that you will look at that and go, Oh my gosh, I am really obsessed by the story of such and such or whatever happened to or You know, how do they make shoes?
I just made that up,
but you'll, you'll find that you are obsessed by something that will then drive you to the page over the course of the long road of writing. And again, you've got to write, or I think one has to write what matters to them.
So I, I am obsessed by.
Carrie: Yeah. That's a great one.
Jessica: I saw you light up.
Yeah. Try it. Yeah.
Carrie: I know. I have like, I go through spells of different obsessions, [00:17:00] so, you know, which, you know, you sort of end up writing about those obsessions anyway, but that's a good way of like checking in with your obsessions.
Jessica: You know, it's funny. And I find that retrospectively, when I look back at my books or at the new book that's coming out, they do each address a particular obsession at that
point in my life in a broader way, but I go, Oh yeah, I was kind of really focused on that particular issue. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give?
Jessica: Write out of order, and I tell this to people I'm mentoring all the time because I feel that because, and most of us know better, but you know, you read in order.
A book starts at page one and ends at page 300, whatever. But write out of order, allow yourself to do that. If you're not sure what the first scene is, but you're really, really focused on that scene where, you know, they're making spaghetti in the [00:18:00] middle of the night, write that and get started that way and that may lead you to another scene.
And I know in my case, it's not until I have 40 or 50 pages done. I start seeing the order. So give yourself permission to write out of order, write what you feel like writing today and let yourself see where it falls in the overall narrative arc.
Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. That makes me think of, Eudora Welty and how she apparently like stitched her stories together.
Jessica: Oh, I know. I've read that. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah, that's true. Like she literally took a, what do you call it? A sewing needle and did that.
Carrie: Yeah.
Jessica: Mm hmm. I do it with tape, but.
Carrie: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. You've given us really three great prompts, so we appreciate you being here.
Jessica: Thank you so much, Carrie. I had a great time, and I'll continue to listen and refer my students to this podcast as well.
Carrie: Thank you so much.
[00:19:00] Thank you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit JessPubLib. org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning at CarnegieCenterLex. org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington based university professors.
Find out more about Archipelago, Songs from Quarantine Volumes 1 and 2 at the links on our podcast website.