Making something of it

I attend a writer's workshop sponsored by a local library and led by a writer friend. Why, you ask, do you attend a workshop when you have ghostwritten twenty-one business books and published three novels? For what do you need a workshop?

I do not believe I need a workshop. I do believe I can still learn something, that I can be stimulated to try something new. One of the new things I tried is an exercise called "Make Something of It."

Take a list of random phrases and turn them into sentences in a poem, a story, an essay. In each case, the subject and verb must appear in which they appear in the list. Their relationship must remain the same and they must appear in the order in which they are listed. Beyond that you are invited to decorate or elaborate upon the sentence as you will. Can you make something of the following?

Springtime mattered.
Sophie recoiled.
The twins bled.
The Volkswagen lurched.
The mountains glowed.
The children wept.
Wayne stole.
Alice tripped.
Run Sue.
Bruce felt down.
Scott breathed.
Darkness fell.

Not easy, is it? Here—without boring you about my struggle to hammer the phrases into some semblance of sense and coherence—is what I was able to come up with:

Springtime mattered because without it
We perish in the boundless ice.
Sophie recoiled at the vision
Of winter interminable.
As the twins bled, their feet raw,
And the Volkswagen lurched
Through slushy ruts,
The mountains glowed, indifferent,
While the children wept in the dusk.

Wayne stole kindling, firewood.
Alice tripped at the threshold.
Run, Sue, run! Fetch a burning ember!
Bruce felt down at the sight of living flame.
Scott breathed wood smoke, perfume
In the warming air.
Darkness fell.

Good luck coming up with your own version.

The story begins with 31 wonderful stories by Tobias Wolff

I tell people who tell me they want to write to do two things:

(1) Write something every day.

(2) Read the best stuff you can get your hands on. Our story begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff is one of the best things I've gotten my hands on recently.

The book published in 2008, contains 21 stories from earlier collections, plus 10 new

stories. In his author's note, Wolff asked himself about this book: "Should I present my stories, of whatever vintage [some are 30 years old], in their original form? Or should I allow myself the liberty of revisiting them here and there?"

I am sure every writer, looking at earlier work, sees ways to improve, to tinker, to touch up. While there is a good argument for leaving the published text alone, there is, I believe, a better one to edit. "The truth is that I have never regarded my stories as sacred texts," writes Woolf. "If I see a clumsy or superfluous passage, so will you, and why should I throw you out of the story with an irritation I could have prevented? Where I have felt the need for something better I have answered the need as best I can, for now."

Because Woolf wrote the 31 stories over a 30-year period, they cover an enormous range of subjects, themes, and settings. We are in the peacetime Army, in prep school, teaching college, married, single, a child. "For two days now, Miller has been standing in the rain with the rest of Bravo Company, waiting for some men from another company to blunder down the logging road where Bravo waits in ambush."  So begins "The Other Miller" putting the reader into a muddy foxhole with Miller.

"'A prep school in March is like a ship in the doldrums.' Our history master said this, as if to himself, while we were waiting for the bell to ring after class." So beings "Smorgasbord" putting the reader into the head of a prep student narrator.

"The number 64 bus stops at St. Peter's, so it's always crammed with pilgrims or suckers, depending on your pont of view—a happy hunting ground for pickpockets. Mallon was not a pilgrim, or by his own reckoning a sucker." So begins "The Benefit of the Doubt," in which Mallon, in Rome, indulges the Gypsy who has attempted to pick his pocket.

Although Wolff is widely anthologized, I recognized only one story, "A White Bible," perhaps because I read it in Best American Short Stories; it is unforgettable. A female schoolteacher is accosted at her car and forced to drive to a remote spot by a man who turns out to be a student's father. The confrontation between a single American woman who has actually had an alcoholic drink on a Friday after work and a puritanical immigrant Islamic man who only wants the best for his son is powerful, convincing, and moving.

All I can say is, see if you can get your hands on a copy of Our story begins.