 Today at my workshop, our workshop, I think it was Eric who was saying he was going to write a story about the way these songs sometimes get stuck in your head so that you have to have them surgically removed. And there's some things, this melody's in my head, I don't even know what it is. But maybe later I'll hum it for you and somebody will recognize it. This seminar is called Building Scenes Using Objects. And here's the description of it that I put in the schedule. I'll start with that and then we'll go through some material, do have, if you're not taking notes, do have some paper ready anyway because there are some exercises that I'm going to ask you to do as we go along. And if I say anything that doesn't make sense, by all means ask me questions. I'm happy to try to move in that direction even before I'm done speaking. But if I'm in the middle of something, it usually means maybe it'll make sense by the time I get to the end of that particular section. How do I build a scene? These are all questions we so often have when we're writing. How does one scene connect to the next? How many scenes does my story need? A traditional story tests its characters, especially the primary ones, through the crucible of the plot. A central dramatic action that requires at least three scenes, a beginning, a middle and an end, to develop and resolve itself. And for that to happen, a story can be as long as the length of a novel, or it can be as short as six words. I've used before those six-word stories, Hemingway's is very famous, for sale, baby shoes, never worn. That's an object. It's a beginning, a middle and an end. And a very ambiguous or zero ending. And then there can be a six-word story with a beginning, a middle and an end that has a very emphatic ending. You can't miss what it says. Margaret Atwood did one. Long for him. Got him. Shit. You can't miss that one there. That's a strong ending like a Flannery O'Connor story. In this seminar, using that simple template, we'll examine how several writers build complex scenes and stories using objects to ground, structure and realize story. Objects for our purposes are the building blocks of scenes. There are many ways to think about building stories and this is simply one additional tool in the toolbox. They can be physical objects, a keynote ticket, I'll read you a story in a little bit that uses a keynote ticket as its central object, a wooden leg, the Flannery O'Connor story, good country people. What would it be without the wooden leg? Is this a death in Vietnam or occasions, a wedding, a funeral, a road trip? You can also use objectified states of being or emotions if you use a sentence like, he held his grief in his arms, then the grief is an abstract word but you're objectifying it, you're making it into an object. So when I say object, I don't necessarily mean just a physical object. This is a way of thinking about developing and writing stories and one thing that I'll be pointing out is that the idea is not simply to introduce an object, one or more objects in a story but you want to keep them in motion, develop them, allow them to transform, to develop or to deteriorate if it's that kind of story. We'll also brainstorm objects that give a story its body and movement and generate scenes or plot lines using objects that objectify the inner story or serve as objective correlatives to it. That's a particular kind of object story. The reason I read that story the other night, the movement of natural light with the aquarium as the central object is to illustrate what we sometimes call an objective correlative story. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. Finally, we'll discuss how this method can be, if we have time, we'll discuss how this method can be applied to longer prose forms. I should also put in play, I mentioned this in the workshop this morning, the idea that Chekhov brought forth. We call it Chekhov's gun. Most of you have probably heard it. Chekhov said, remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on a wall, in the second or third chapter, it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there. So first draft, second draft, third draft, we often have more objects than we need for the story. But by the time you write the submission draft, there should be a reason for the objects that remain in that final draft. You want to clean out details that clutter the story. So we'll talk a little bit about that as well. The world is full of objects, as you know. And people react to those objects as part of who we are. Why not use them to build stories? Let me read you a one-page story by Raymond Carver, one of my favorite writers. Some of you may know this one. It's called Popular Mechanics. Early that day, the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard, caused slushed by on the street outside where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside, too. He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door. I'm glad you're leaving. I'm glad you're leaving, she said. Do you hear? He kept on putting his things into the suitcase. Son of a bitch, I'm so glad you're leaving. She began to cry. You can't even look me in the face, can you? Then she noticed the baby's picture on the bed and picked it up, and noticed the first object is the baby's picture. But watch how that object gets transformed to make it more significant. He looked at her, and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room. Bring that back, he said. Just get your things and get out, she said. He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light. Then he went out to the living room. She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby. I want the baby, he said. Notice how that object is in motion. Very simple story. Just one page, first the baby picture. But what happens in the last part of this story happened with the baby's picture, it wouldn't have nearly the impact that it has once that object becomes not the picture of the baby, but the baby. Are you crazy? No, but I want the baby. I'll get someone to come by for his things. You're not touching this baby, she said. The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head. Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby. Ah, vodka. Just kidding. He moved to water. For God's sake, she said, she took a step back into the kitchen. I want the baby. Get out of here. She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove. But he came up, he reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby. Let go of him, he said. Get away, get away, she cried. The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle, they knocked down a flower pot that hung behind the stove. He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight. Let go of him, he said. Don't, she said, you're hurting the baby, she said. I'm not hurting the baby, he said. The kitchen window gave no light. In the near dog, he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand, he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder. She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her. No, she screamed just as her hands came loose. She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby's other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back, but he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back, very, very hard. In this manner, the issue was decided. And that's how the story ends. What we, in workshop, we talked about as a kind of zero ending. Culver leaves the conclusion to the reader. And we all know how that one's going to end, right? So, excuse me, without that object, without the baby, what's left to that story? A woman and a man screaming at each other. But with the object, it becomes this urgent, significant conflict where nobody has the wisdom of Solomon. And what happens to the baby is left to your imagination. Sometimes when I use that in a different kind of workshop or seminar, I don't read the last sentence. I work up to the last sentence. Then I ask each of you to finish that story. And usually, some people expand it. Some people go in a different way with it. But I think Culver got it just right. You can't take that any further. And you don't want us to watch the blood and gore. But in this manner, the issue was decided. He uses an object beautifully there. I'd like you now to do a very quick exercise. It's gonna be a list. And you can do it in one of two ways. You can think about yourself and the objects that you carry with you in your purse, pocket, wallet, et cetera. Or you can think about a character you're working with, a significant character. But of the various objects that you might carry in your purse, in your pocket, in your backpack, handbag, whatever, which of those objects could characterize either you or a character you're creating? If you've got keys or keys characterizing, any object, of course, could work as a significant structural object in a story. But which ones might have significance for you or your character? Pepper spray, if you carry pepper spray. Bible pamphlets with rubber bands around them. As last time I taught this seminar, someone had a packet of Bible pamphlets with the rubber bands around them and passed them out. Took over my lecture. No, just kidding. But that was something someone had in her purse. What characterizes? What object, in other words, might be not only episodic so that you can use it to get a story going, but also structural, where you can transform that object, develop it, deteriorate it in the way that the baby picture becomes the baby. So make a list, maybe two lists. One quickly, one list of objects you possess that are significant to you and one list of a character or we can get to the character in a couple of minutes. List your objects. Pocket purse, backpack body, a dragon tattoo, for example, gave an object to the woman in a best-selling book by Stig Lawson, Girl in the Dragon Cat Tattoo. And try to think which ones would be significant, not just objects that are there, but significant. If you're writing a short shot, it could be one or two objects. If you're writing a longer story, two or three objects. If you're writing a novel, you're gonna wanna have more objects that you can juggle as you move back and forth between plot and subplot. We'll take another minute or two, then I'm gonna ask some of you to share with us the objects that you've discovered or written down. There's an important object to somebody over there. And when we say that a human being can be an object, we're not talking about reality, we're talking about infiction. Sometimes it's another person that becomes the object. Anybody wanna share the objects you've come up with? Oh, are you running to the bathroom or something? By all means, we can wait another minute. Oh, go ahead then. Yeah. Okay. Sorry? My cell phone. Okay. Cell phone and journal. Okay. One thing, there are two different ways to deal with objects once you decide what they are. One is to think about the possible significance they have to you or to the character you're writing about. If you were going to go to the grave, for example, which objects would you want thrown into the grave with you? Most people wouldn't want money thrown into the grave with them. That would be the least thing on our minds at that point. Or to the story. Does an object provide a source of tension? Does it provide the source for a possible conflict or desire? We always say character is desire. Something that somebody wants. How about some more people with objects? And her objects would be her field aprons because there's a duality to it. It's like a noose in the field, but it also is a tether to her home because she cooks in it as well. So it's kind of got a duality. And then her determination as an object to do the work and provide for her family and then possibly complain that the idea of a gold chain, which is really common to the Hispanic culture with a tiny cross around it, because she's bearing a big cross in the story. So this is a field apron that she wears when she's doing work? Yes, so when she's picking strawberries, a lot of migrants, a lot of women will wear aprons that you put the stuff in and then gently dump it into your crate. But she uses the same apron to cook for her family in. So there's a duality there. She's gathering food for people that she doesn't necessarily like. And then she takes it home and it becomes an object of love for her. It kind of fouls her. Oh, very nice. And is this an object that she keeps clean that gets soiled with strawberry juice and so forth? Yes, and there's a section where I describe the hook that it hangs on and the puff flowers on it, but it always smells like strawberries. It's a good one. Anybody else? Lorenzo? So mine is actually important to me and also a character I'm writing about. One is a business car case. You carry your business cards, paint pen, it's my character as a lawyer. Reading glasses in the 50s, you gotta have reading glasses. Watch, even though no one needs watches any longer, still business people wear watches, it just looks professional. Mobile phone and briefcase. And you said something about what would you want to go in your casket with? In any way, maybe. And the business car case of my son's gave it to me. They were like eight years old and it was my birthday so I took them to the mall and they actually picked up, they had it inscribed and my initials were 100 and everything so I would take that to the grave. Okay, not to cause itself, but the case. The case, okay, good. It's all messed up and dented and everything but I actually keep it forever. Uh-huh. Good, okay. Others? Let's get some more in play. Lynn? I had, one thing was a key ring which has a house key, an office key, a car key, a hotel key and a safety deposit box key just as a start jumping off point for a story. Okay, and the trick becomes when you're writing a story, some of these objects sound like everyday objects. How do you make them significant in the story? I just thought when you were mentioning that and you mentioned the key ring, John Cheever has a wonderful story. I forget the title now but it's about a guy who goes to a play, an experimental play, comes from the suburbs, actually around here, Stamford and places around where you commute into New York and this guy goes into the city, New York city, to attend this experimental play and in the course of the play, although he's a suit guy, wears suits all the time and he carries his car keys and his wallet and so forth. There are no cell phones at that point of course. And during the play, he's supposed to take his wallet and take his car keys and leave them there and walk out of the theater or walk up to the stage. And so one of the complications of the story becomes letting that go, putting that aside, risking the fact that he could lose it or it could be taken, et cetera. So they're just ordinary objects but they become significant in the story. And if I'm remembering the story right, that's once he makes that first decision to let go, the other decisions come easily because the performance artists, I think it's taking place maybe in the village in New York at this particular time, they don't want you just dropping what's in your pockets. They want you stripping nude by the end of the play because that's part of the play to get everybody in the audience to reveal themselves in all their naked glory. And so that's one set, one complication as those objects before you go the rest of the way. So a very ordinary object can have a very strong significance psychologically or emotionally. If it's used in the right way. Some more objects. Okay, Italian rosary and then you said notebook. What did you say after notebook? Oracle cards? Oh, okay, okay. Well, you see, I'm starting to get a whole story here just from those objects. Those objects are beginning to characterize in a very specific way. Just tell us things about you as a person, what you care about, what you're drawn towards. Well, wait, let's come back to you, let's let her finish. What else did you put down? Let's do it. Okay. Two stuff. You've got a whole collection of stories there. Yes. I wonder who she talks to, one of them one. I don't know. Well, I'm sure the real story is very innocent. It's very innocent or something like that. I'm sure it's very innocent. In that she's revealing to us that she's got two. It's what people don't say that gives those secrets away. Okay, good. You've got a lot of material there that you could either use to write about yourself or to create characters with. You said you want to add something? I wouldn't care about losing everything. I wouldn't care about losing anything. But if I were to lose, I'd just search for that fact. So I figure out that it's hard for me to... Good point. By the way, one way to take an object and make it more precise or more exact, several of you mentioned cell phones. But is it the cell phone that's a significant object? Or a particular telephone number, a particular way to reach somebody or be reached by somebody? You know, think about the way you can move these objects. It's not just the object, but what they do or what they contain that becomes significant. Huh? Google logs. Yeah. Cross-border. A few more? I have a $2 bill in my wallet that I carry around. A friend of Marlene, her father's funeral. He gave them out to everybody. I don't see, believe they were off good luck. She had them on a stack of $2 bills which she just gave off. Wow. So a $2 bill used to be slightly symbolic of something false and untrustworthy. But in this case, you've turned that symbolism on its head. It's something to carry close to your heart. One or two more? I mean, we'll come back and do some more in a little bit. Okay. That you carry with you? Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, and wedding rings obviously have symbolism. We wear them. Who knows, there might be some people here who are married who stop wearing them and they come here. I have no idea. But the wedding rings actually have a significance which is obvious. So the other problem with a wedding ring is that it has an obvious significance. So if you're gonna use it in a story, you wanna be careful that you give it a particular significance. In a minute I'll read a quote from Plenty O'Connor where she talks about that. How you don't want objects that carry a traditional meaning. You want the object to have a particular meaning that accrues, excuse me, that accrues to it in the course of developing the story. So that as you go through the story, that wooden leg that she uses in Good Country People takes on a very particular meaning. You know, the traditional meaning of the wooden leg that Joy Hulga is crippled. All right, that's part of it. But there's something very particular too about who she is as an individual. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a little bit. Okay, keep this in mind. I wanna move on a little bit, we'll come back to this. Thinking of objects as ways to incorporate them into stories, to characterize, but also as ways to provide a conflict, a source of tension, a desire, something somebody wants. It doesn't have to be an object that's being fought over, but it can still have conflict attached to it. In the Ray Carver story, obviously they're fighting over the baby. The things they carry that we'll talk about in a little bit, the title of the story is the objects. In Flano-Connor, there's some wonderful objects, not just the wooden leg and not just her bad heart, but also, if you've read the story, she takes this Bible salesman up to the pail-off in order to seduce him to prove to him that he should believe in nothing like she does, thinking that he's just good country people. And when he opens his Bible, she's very surprised to see that there are no pages in it, no scripture in it, just a bottle of whiskey, condoms, and a deck of pornographic playing cards that he takes out for her pleasure and entertainment. So let me put another short story. This is another one that's only a couple of pages in its entirety. This is called The Beast Watered and it's by Sam Michelle. It's from his collection Under the Light. In this story, there are three objects, the keynote ticket being the primary object, two characters and one dramatic action. Notice how concise he is using his objects. We meet the first girl in the first six words and we also find out something about this character and what his character is like. Dan, she said. Yes, said Harry. What are you doing, said the girl. Putting on my shoes, Harry said. God said the girl, what time is it? Don't know, said Harry. Two, maybe three. The girl raised herself on her elbow. He saw her watching him as he buttoned his shirt. He saw her hair hanging down all on one side. God, she said, and blinked. He got his shirt tucked in. He stood with his arms hanging at his sides, considering then bent down to the girl and put his face next to hers. He lifted her hair up into his face. He rubbed her hair against his face. He breathed the girl's hair up into his face. Notice how the repetition here deepens the particular moment that's being experienced. The girl made a sound. He felt the bed heat of the girl from underneath the covers. Got to go, he said. Okay, said the girl. Dan, she said. Yes, said Harry. You'll call me, she said. Sure, you bet, said Harry, first chance I get. Scene ends, space break. He walked fast, crossing the tracks, crossing the bridge, trying to get things going. And notice even the syntax repeats the syntax we heard in the first scene. Everything's being carefully put together. In a sense, syntax becomes a kind of object. His breath came out in big clouds. His teeth chattered. He hunched his shoulders and kept walking along one full block of shop windows. He watched himself walk. At the end of the block, he turned, went past three doors and then went into the bar. Hey, Harry, said the bartender, what's shaking? Plenty, said Harry. By now, we know that Harry is a man of few words. He winked and rubbed his hands together. The bartender grinned and shook his head. Beer, said the bartender. Nope, said Harry, not tonight. I think I better have some of that whiskey you got. Coming up, said the bartender. And a pack of something, said Harry. I don't know, something menthol and matches. The bartender screwed up his eyes as he poured the whiskey. You don't smoke, do you, he said? Not much, said Harry. The bartender came over with the cigarettes and Harry took a $10 bill and a keynote ticket out of his wallet. First time we hear the keynote ticket. On the back of the keynote ticket, there was a telephone number written. And we don't need to be told whose number that is, do we? Harry studied the curves of the writing, just in case you wondered the word curves tells us. He lit a cigarette. He saw himself in the bar mirror lighting a cigarette. So notice this writer is using objects to show us that Harry is experiencing a kind of self-consciousness because of what he's just done. But we're not going interior, we're not getting thoughts. It would be the wrong move to say, Harry is thinking, oh, I'm guilty about this, that I died. Instead, we're seeing him through the objects. He lit a cigarette. He saw himself in the bar mirror lighting a cigarette. He held the cigarette near his chest and the smoke curled around his shoulder and passed the side of his head. He tried to smile in the mirror, but did not like what he saw there. He crumpled the keynote ticket in his palm. Then he held the cigarette down near his knees, watching the smoke split itself around his leg. He kept moving the cigarette to different parts of his body. First with this hand, then with that hand, to his lap, to his neck, his face. He did not let go of the keynote ticket. He watched himself. What the hell is he doing? Hey, Harry, said the bartender, you gonna smoke that thing? Harry looked at the bartender. He crushed the cigarette in the estre. Guess not, he said. I don't know about you, said the bartender. Harry filled his mouth with whiskey and puffed out his cheeks, rinsing. He moved his tongue over his teeth. Then he put his nose to his shoulders and to his arms. He pulled his shirt front up to his nose. He raised his knee to his nose. He checked once more in the mirror, then collected his change, left a tip, and kept the keynote ticket. Space break. Okay, we needed that transitional scene. Now we get the final scene with the second woman. And notice how things change. In the first scene, when she says what time is it, he says two, maybe three. Watch what happens in this final scene. He took his shoes off in the hallway and turned the key to the door. Notice again, the key is a very minor object. It doesn't have thematic significance, except that he has a key to this place. He belongs there. The latch clicked. He held his breath, pushed through the door, then closed it quietly behind him. He had nearly made it to the bathroom. Harry, honey, that you? And this woman knows his name, right? So he stood where he was. Yeah, he said. His voice sounded funny to him. It's me, he said. God said to the woman, where'd we hear that before? Two women are interchangeable. They're one object for the sake of the way the story's being built. What time is it? I don't know. One, maybe two. Turn back the clock a couple of hours. Why is that? You're getting it now, right? He hated his voice, not sure. He emptied his pockets, keeping the keynote ticket in his hand, and started taking off his clothes outside the bathroom. Where you, what you been doing? Said the woman, oh, you know, the bar. He moved outside the bedroom door. He could see her in there, propped on her elbow. Again, notice the repetition syntactically. Coming to bed, she said. No, he said. Nonetheless, you wanna sleep with a saloon. Think I'll get a shower. Pretty smoky in that place. Check these out. He tossed his trousers and his shirt on the bed and turned to go into the bathroom. Space break, here's the final, very short scene. In the bathroom, he took one more look at himself and squeezed the keynote ticket into a tiny ball. Here's where the keynote ticket takes on its final transformation and tells us who Harry is. Remember, plot is the crucible whereby character is revealed. So the keynote ticket is that structural item that's gonna reveal who Harry is to us. At least in this point in the collection. He got on his knees and dug through the bag under the sink. He dug through tampons, through disposable razors, through hair, and through wads of Kleenex before sticking the keynote ticket down near the bottom. He shaved twice. He turned on the shower and got the water very hot and waited in front of the mirror until the glass fogged. He stepped into the shower, bent his neck and felt the water wash down over his head. He tried not to think, not about his smell or about the keynote ticket or the cigarettes or the girl's hair. He let the water wash down over his head until he no longer needed to try not to think. Then he raised his head and let the water hit him in the head and the chest. He got out of the shower, but he did not get a towel. Instead, he dropped to his knees, pulled the bag from under the sink again and began going through the tampons, the hair, the Kleenex, the shit. He felt his hot beating, his ears filled with the sound of his hot beating. He dumped the bag on the floor and spread the stuff out, his eyes moving over everything, his fingers testing everything. He tried to remember the girl's face. He tried to remember her voice. He tried to remember anything she had said or what she had felt like when he had felt her, but there was only a funny smell. He kept pawing P-A-W-I-N-G on his knees, end of story. And notice how that last sentence takes us back to the title, the beast, watered. And it takes on a different significance once we get to the end of that story. So that's Harry, probably not an admirable character, a likable character, in terms of who he is. He does reappear later in the collection. Do you have your hand up? Yeah. It's Sam Michelle, M-I-C-H-E-L. And this is from his collection, Under the Light. Very good collection in its entirety. Alfred Knopf was the publisher. So two women in the story function as one object, all right? So it objectifies the two women, but doing so characterizes Harry. It's not a story about the two women, it's a story about what Harry's doing. And we see that these women are not irreplaceable, they're not interchangeable, but in Harry's mind, that's what helps us to figure out who Harry is. And there's a keynote ticket. Without that ticket, how does the story work? Without the object? Again, it would be less sharp, less focused, less exact, less precise. The objects help make the story. And there would probably be more telling rather than showing. We might have to get into his head and hear him thinking, which would not be the best way to go. By the way, I mentioned, aside from the object story, I've also mentioned the objective correlative story, which is why I read my particular story, the aquarium story the other night. Objects serve as signposts to the state of a character's inner life. So you use objects not only in their own right, but to give us a suggestion of who the character is, who owns the object, or gets associated with the object. And as the objects move through time and space, the characters either develop or deteriorate as well. It's a variation on the object story. A communion wafer, for example, is an outer manifestation of an inner transformation. If you're a devout Catholic, and many people on this island, I don't know about this room are, when you take the communion wafer, it's the body and blood of Christ. It means something when you take that into your body. You're not just eating a wafer of bread if you're an unbeliever. In a story, it's the outward set of objects, a situation, or a change of events corresponding to an inward experience and evoking this experience for the reader. The goal is to demonstrate, to dramatize, to show and not tell. Like with my aquarium story, there's a marriage that's deteriorating, there's the step son, there's the primary character, and without the aquarium, there might've just been these boring arguments where they go at each other in the language might or might not have carried the story, but the aquarium, I think, makes all the difference because then I can juggle this object throughout the story and make it move. The fish are in the aquarium, watching the fish, people move towards the aquarium, they move away from it. We can tell things about the characters by how they associate or react to this object. Did you have your hand up, Sam? Oh, okay. Some object stories might turn out to be objective Corellar stories. The object takes on that kind of meaning throughout. Okay, take a look at your objects that you've written down on your list and try to differentiate each one. Is it a unique object that characterizes in the way maybe that the keynote ticket does or is it an object that in some way might be a point of contention between characters like the baby in the Ray Carver story? How might one or more of those objects that you've put down be used as you write your story? Either insert it into a story that you're already working on or used to construct a story. Write a sentence or two about how the object could develop as part of the story. Baby picture becomes baby, for example, and they fight over baby, not over baby picture. Aquarium, various fish thrive or fail. People move away or towards the aquarium. Huh? It's like a lottery ticket, you know, by a keynote ticket. I don't know, yeah, it's probably an old term for it, huh? Yeah, I thought that was a Northeast thing, but maybe it's not. Oh, I'm gonna ask when we finish, how many people have heard that? Anybody wanna share if you have enough time? Sam? So the father has ruined the teddy bear or? He has to buy a new teddy bear. Oh, okay. Oh, so that she doesn't know the original one got lost or destroyed? Okay, okay. Uh-huh, he starts talking to the teddy bear? Oh, okay, okay. What's the tone of the story? Is it gonna be comic or? A little bit. Okay, good. Some others? Huh, did it work? Oh, nice. Sure. Yeah, yeah, the lavender oil becomes an object that takes a character through the story and has significance in the story. It seems maybe more like a sketch at this point if you told that anecdote the way you told it, but there's significance, there's emotional drama, there's connection, human connection, so it doesn't have to be a story with a grand free tag pyramid kind of thing. It can be more of a, instead of going like this, it can just sort of have an incline like this with a falling off a moment of illumination or maybe an image that heightens the emotion at the end of the story. Right. Right, an essay? Creative nonfiction, of course. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if your primary genre is nonfiction, there's no reason not to be thinking in terms of the kind of nonfiction you write, whether it's memoir or other kind of essay, if you're using objects, certainly the objects would work just as much in nonfiction as in fiction. I've written a few essays that I've put the Sun magazine, very nice magazine out in North Carolina, by the way. One, the primary object is a BB gun. It's about the time I shot my brother and they had with a BB gun. And how, thank God, it was only a BB gun, but it was all about, basically it was an essay about Southern culture and violence in Southern culture and also about my father and who he was like and how he would pit myself and my brother against each other. But that object, hopefully, is what held the essay together. There were a lot of other things I wanted to do in that essay, but the central anecdote used that instance to string the story, the essay along. Have you ever pulled out that lavender oil here to calm people down? I just got to calm people down. Oh, okay. Good. I have to look it up for you. I don't remember right off hand, yeah. BB gun, maybe. I don't think so, though. Uh-huh. Right, so it's the house that could keep the story going. If you just get trapped in memories and you just have the character sort of drifting between memories, it would be something very different from a story that develops and moves forward and tests the character against whatever's happening in it. Anybody else? I have some essays with one object throughout and then one transformation, but it was essentially this thing. I mean, it's the picture of the baby then the baby. Right. And thinking in terms of different authors and someone like Dickens, who uses food, but it's different kinds of food. Is it okay to use an object and then manifest it in different ways? Sure. Because that's still an object or if we then bled over into the, like the theme. Well, you know, they do bleed over into one another, but you're still using a series of objects. And if you're writing a novel or a novella or a long story, then you need to juggle several objects because one object, Ray Carver, couldn't keep that baby going for any longer than he did. You know, it would become ridiculous if he did. I grabbed the baby, he runs down the street with the baby. You know, and so it just goes on forever. So yeah, in a longer story, you juggle objects and often the objects are related to each other and they can also bleed into theme as well. How many of you, by the way, know what a keynote ticket is? What is it? Yeah, yeah, lottery ticket. Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding because Peter asked me what it was and I said I wanted to know how many people knew what a keynote ticket was. Did they still use the purest up here? Nothing like that. Is that phrase still used or is that out of date? Yeah, yeah, right, right, okay. Okay, let me move on, I want to read, here's a quote from Flannery O'Connor from after her death, someone collected her assorted essays. It's a wonderful book called Mystery and Manners if you don't know it. And some of the essays in that book are specifically about writing. And here's a quote from one called Writing Short Stories. I'm just gonna quote a few paragraphs. The peculiar problem of the short story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space, and she's using the male pronoun because that was just the convention at the time. He has only a short space to do it in and he can't do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete so that his problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him. In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the action of the story itself. And when this happens, they become symbolic in the way they work. I once wrote a story called Good Country People in which a lady PhD has her wooden leg stolen by a Bible salesman whom she tries to seduce. Now I would admit that paraphrased in that way, the situation sounds like a low joke. The average reader is pleased to observe anybody's wooden leg being stolen. But without ceasing to appeal to him and without making any statement of high intention, this story does manage to operate at another level of experience by letting the wooden leg accumulate meaning. Early in the story, we're presented with the fact that the PhD is spiritually as well as physically crippled. She believes in nothing, but her own belief in nothing. And we perceive that there is a wooden part of her soul that corresponds to her wooden leg. Now, of course, this is never stated. The fiction writer states as little as possible. The reader makes this connection from things he has shown. He may not even know that he makes the connection, but the connection is there nevertheless and has its effect on them. As the story goes on, the wooden leg continues to accumulate meaning. And this is what you wanna do if you think of an object as a way to construct and develop a story. The reader learns how the girl feels about her leg, how her mother feels about it, and how the country woman on the plane feels about it. P-L-A-I-N. And finally, by the time the Bible salesman comes along, the leg has accumulated so much meaning that it is as the saying goes, load it. And when the Bible salesman steals it, the reader realizes that he has taken away part of the girl's personality and has revealed her deeper affliction to her for the first time. If you wanna say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that, that it is a wooden leg first. And as a wooden leg, it is absolutely necessary to the story is what I wanna emphasize here. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. And the best objects do that in stories. I mean, if you think of the most ambitious novels and stories, Moby Dick, The White Whale, Huckleberry Finn, The Mississippi River, et cetera, et cetera. It increases the story in every direction, and this is essentially the way a story escapes being short. One more paragraph. Now, a little might be said about the way in which this happens. I wouldn't want you to think that in that story, I sat down and said, I am now gonna write a story about a PhD with a wooden leg, using the wooden leg as a symbol for another kind of affliction. I doubt myself if many writers know what they're gonna do when they start out. When I started writing that story, I didn't know there was going to be a PhD with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women that I knew something about. And before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. As the story progressed, I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn't know he was gonna steal that wooden leg until 10 or 12 lines before he did. But when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable. This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason for this is that it produced a shock for the writer. So that's a very interesting way of explaining, and a very honest way, I think, of explaining how we write stories. You can only figure out so much in advance. In fact, you wouldn't wanna figure out too much in advance because then you'd know everything you were gonna write down. The process of discovery is very important. In case you didn't read, didn't have a chance to read the story, here's the end of it. She's the one that gets him up in the hayloft. She wants to seduce him so that she can teach him how to believe in nothing. And so they start to make out. And his whole point is to get her to allow him to unscrew her wooden leg. Very gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. Now show me how to take it off and on. She took it off for him and put it back on. And again, he took it off himself, handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. See, he said with a delighted chow's face, now I can do it myself. Put it back on. She starts to get anxious. Not yet, he said. Leave it off for a while. You got me instead. She gave some along, but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again. Without the leg, she felt entirely dependent on him. Put it back on me now, she finally says. Wait, he said. He pulls the ballast toward him, opened it. He takes out a Bible, opens it up. It's got a blue box that said this product to be used only for the prevention of disease. She dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He also pointed to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck, but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. Take a swig, he said. And then here's where her own pride and limitation is revealed to her. Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. Aren't you, she murmured? Aren't you just good country people? The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he was just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. Yeah, he said, curling his lip, but it ain't held me back none. I'm as good as you any day in the week. Give me my leg. And of course now they're fighting over the leg in the way that they fought over the baby and the other story. He pushed it further away with his foot. Come on now, let's begin to have us a good time, he said, we ain't got to know one another good yet. Give me my leg. She screamed and tried to lunge for it, but he pushed her down easily. What's the matter with you all of a sudden? He asked, frowning, as he screwed the top on the flask and put it back inside the Bible. You just a while ago said you didn't believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl. Her face was almost purple. You're a Christian, she hissed. You're a fine Christian. You're just like them all. Say one thing and do another. You're a perfect Christian. The boy's mouth was set in an angry. I hope you don't think, he said, lofty and indignant tone that I believe in that crap. I may sell Bibles, but I know which end is up. And I wasn't born yesterday and I know where I'm going. Give me my leg, she screamed. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and blue box back into the Bible and throw the Bible in the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then saw it for an instant, slanted for lonely across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its ends. And then before he leaves, he says, I've gotten a lot of interesting things. One time I got a woman's glass eye this way. And you needn't think you'll catch me because pointer ain't really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and I don't stay nowhere long. And I'll tell you something. Another thing, Hulga, he said, using the name as if he didn't think much of it. You ain't so smart. I've been believing in nothing ever since I was born. He disappears and leaves her up there in the hayloft and we meet her mother and the other woman, they see the guy walking away. They say, he must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple, but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple. Mrs. Freeman's gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil smelling onion chute she was lifting from the ground. So it's an ecstatic and festive use of objects for very significant effect. Flannery O'Connor's was a devout Catholic and although many fellow Catholics accused her of being some kind of degenerate because of stories like this one. They say you're making this Christian, this is a hypocrite. You're making us all look like hypocrites when we're Christian. But her whole point was the sin of pride is what usually destroys people. So character after character we see have to end up facing their own lives because of their own pride. They basically create their own problem by situating themselves as they do. And that certainly comes through here. But again, those were serious issues that she wanted to confront. But if she had simply done it without the objects, what kind of story would we would have? See objects that make those things come alive for us. Another example are the things they carried. There would be no story without the object. Take the title. They carry everything. I mean they carry incredible weights, actual weights, but then they carry metaphorical weight, emotional weight, psychological weight, spiritual weight. All these things they carry become the story. And then my own story, Growing Wings. Obviously without the wings, I would be trying to tell a story about this girl who's lost her sister, her beloved sister and spiritual mentor, and then also her father. And I wanted to write a portrait about grief. How can you grieve in your own way without the traditional ways, without grief counseling or this or that? So this is a portrait of stubborn, disciplined grief. But if I tried to do that without the object, what would I have? I have no idea. So I start with the mirror, the wings, and the wings become a symbol of her grief. All I'll read to you from this story is the first and last paragraph. Hopefully a lot of you have had the chance to read it. Diane stopped using her full-length mirror when the small white feathers on her back were large enough to see from across the room if she twisted in her nightgown like a dancer. Close up, the feathers were invisible. The angle of vision all wrong. So she turned the mirror around and stared for hours at its black paint. She also made regular retreats to a large utility closet full of baggy flannel shirts and large woolen socks. In class, sitting against the back wall, she wore a faded gray trench coat to hide the feathers, but her teacher, Mrs. Haynes, often made her hanging up in the coat room. And then the last paragraph where, well, she gulped down the water in turn to go back to her room. Instead, she slipped off her gown and opened the medicine cabinet over the basin. She took down a pair of scissors with blades the color of graphite. I'll trim my wings, she thought, beginning to cry. I'll have baby wings. Some people have read that and think that I'm having their killer cell. But in fact, what I'm trying to do is say that she's reached a point where she can move on from the deepest stage of grief and trying to have baby wings allows her to become a baby in the sense of growing in a different direction and moving on from what's happened to her sister and to her father. So again, I don't know how I could have written a story without the object. I mean, I could have used different objects, of course, but without the object, I would have been using abstract language. I would have been suffering the reader through the usual things that we talk about when we talk about grief with a grief counselor. And that wasn't my purpose here at all. Did any of you have a chance to read any of those? Do you have anything to say about them that you'd like to? The objects, the way they're used? The additional element being her smart alecky? Yeah. Yeah. Well, she has a way, the idea is that she's deflecting other people's attempts to comfort her. That she's determined to stay with her sister in this spiritual world, not to give up the idea that her sister's still alive. And it's not until the last paragraph that she can finally accept the idea that wherever or whatever her sister is after her physical death, she can't pretend any longer that she's still there in the world with her. So she has a smart alecky way of, I mean, I tried to introduce a comic element with her smart aleckiness, yeah. Is that what you were asking? Yeah, I think I just did something interesting to me to have both of those. Because I get that she's not actually growing away since we're in this thing that's happening anytime. And I don't have a perfect place off of the same way that she's confronted me. Yeah, maybe another way to explain this is if you start a story with something that sounds fantastic like wings, the best thing to do after introducing the fantastic element is to make everything else as realistic as possible because that grounds the fantasy, like metamorphosis, Kafka's metamorphosis, first sentence, the guy wakes up, he's a dung beetle. But after that one fantastic moment, everything else plays out realistically. What would happen if you woke up and you were lying on your back on a carapace and you were a dung beetle? And he works it out all very rigorously and logically. So maybe something like that as well is what I was trying to do. And the other thing is with objects, I'm not suggesting that you limit yourself in these stories only to the object. The object is one element among other things you're juggling. The object can serve as a central way to help readers understand the story that you're telling, the conflict that's playing out and to give more urgency perhaps to the conflict. But all these other things go on to conversations. You know, like in my aquarium story, hopefully you're not, it's not just the aquarium that's in your mind, there's also, well, there are other objects would be the Yogi school where the mother sends her son and a few things like that that are going on. So I'm not saying that when you have a story, unless it's very short, like the Ray Carver story where there's not time for anything else, you use the object, but you also bring in other elements of craft as well. This is simply one way to think about writing fiction, to structure and compose and develop the stories that you've written, not the only way, but certainly one way to think about it. Okay, one final exercise. Take what you've been doing on the page and using a single object or juggling two or three objects begin a story, write a paragraph or so, paragraph or two, or continue a story if you're thinking about somewhere in the middle of things, but somehow put the dramatic vehicle of your story and motion using your object. Are you chilly? It's a little chilly in here. We'll go another minute or two and then hopefully a few of you will share and some closing comments and we'll go out to the heat. Anybody wants to volunteer to read what you've written? Maybe tell us what your objects are and then read the paragraph or two over here. Knowing that in a few moments, the path of the priest was going to be sitting in the chair next to her. Many reasons have brought them together. The murder mostly, but the tarot cards laying on the table covered with an Italian rosary split apart their secret meaning. She took another sip. Nicely done. Anybody else? Lorenzo? I have to move the cart, take it from the back pocket and open it. He was in. No card in it. Just like his Ben Macaulay cards. Can't be. Why do you continue this shitty life you wanted to himself? Selling, not selling, not selling, and selling again. 40 years of being broke or halfway broke. Realizing that a man's best days are behind was like running out of business cards. They streamed, they struggled. Huh. Okay. Want a tube or? Sean? I used to fence, so I used to carry blades around with me everywhere. Yeah. Not only did he use to fence, I found out today he was an alternate Olympic guy in 2012. Oh! Oh! So welcome. What's particular about my blades? There was an attachment that came to, there was an attachment that came to them whenever I put one together. I built them one by one, choosing the proper felt thumb guards and maxi pommels and the right brand of steel that bent at just the best angles. I traveled the world with them, I fought and cried and bled with them, I dashed them against walls and floors and shattered them into pieces in my hands when I lost, but they were mine. I'll never forget on a bothering summer afternoon in Manhattan, when the first third of my blade tore through the frayed fabric of my teammate's glove through layers of skin and bone and muscle to come out the other side. I guess part of that one belongs to him now. Ah, nice work done. Wow. Anybody else? Okay, nice. Think of it this way, following Tim O'Brien. The objects are the things we carry when we tell stories. They don't have to be consuming the story, but they're carried throughout the story and they become increasingly important as the story progresses. One or two more, anybody? Peter? Been in my wall for 10 years now, a tattered $2 note. I take it out and wonder at luck, I want changed, and if a bill in such a state has any currency at all. Good. Anybody else have their hand up? I've been wearing this here for 28 cents. I thought about it in such a way. It's not the cost, it's the significance. Anybody else? If you're thinking, well, I mean, first of all, I'm glad you made that point that using objects for nonfiction makes just as much sense as using it for fiction. And if you're writing novels and not stories, you can use smaller objects chapter by chapter, but the larger objects are going to have to be powerful and resonant to zing and ring throughout the entire novel. I mean, think of the objects that come to mind from the classic novels, the Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn. They become not just objects, but strong, powerful symbols that still have a very specific scene-by-scene place in the story that's being told. So when you're writing a novel, you can either think of a larger object like that that gives resonance and structure to your entire book, or you can think in smaller ways of balancing and juggling a number of objects to keep the story going and to braid one into another. When you've used up one, you introduce another and you keep them moving so that they might reappear later in the book. That would be probably a notion for another seminar or workshop to kind of work our way through particular novels. But the same principles apply. You simply have to have stronger objects with more resonance and more power if they're gonna last throughout an entire 300 pages. I mean, you can probably think of your own novels that are novels you've read that do that. As well, the Scarlet Letter. I mean, we know what the Scarlet Letter is. Thanks to Demi Moore. No, thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne because it still resonates for us. It's still there and it still has significance to our culture, but more than that, it's a book we remember. Catcher in the Rye. The voice that stays with us perhaps more than objects, but there is that central image that Salinger used, the catcher in the Rye, catching people so they don't fall off the cliff that remains very powerful in our minds and gives him a way to find his cadence and his voice. There are novels and stories as well, of course, that are more interested in voice and cadence and rhythm than in objects. But even in those kinds of stories, sometimes the objects can be useful to you. So I don't mean to suggest that you should focus entirely on objects. Obviously, it's only one tool in your writer's toolkit. But think about objects, especially if you get stuck with a story and you've been working at it from a different direction, step back and think, well, what are the objects here? How might those objects display character, provide an impetus to plot, move things forward, help me to resolve whatever conflict I'm trying to work out here? Questions, comments? Well, thank you. Appreciate it. I hope you've gotten something out of it.