Anyone who has been on Zoom has seen interesting, sometimes funny things in the background, from a cat walking across the top of the piano to a college roommate bending over washing her hair in the sink. I notice everything, from what the Zoomer is wearing, to the posters on the wall, to the knickknacks on the table.
I imagine I am learning a lot about a person from the book titles I can sometimes read on those bookshelves. Of course, I am always looking for one of my books on the shelf of a student, teacher or writer. No luck yet. If you have one, please send me a “shelfie.”
Just this week I was invited to visit a writing class at Emory University, taught by two of Atlanta’s best journalists, Hank Klibanoff and Michelle Hiskey. My job was to help students complete their final assignment, the crafting of a human-interest profile.
I had prepared a few tips but decided to try something different. I gave them a tour of my workspace, the background they could see via Zoom. I suggested that all the objects they could see had stories hiding inside of them. I knew some of the writers in the class wanted to write poetry, and I cited T.S. Eliot, who said the writer was always looking for the “objective correlative,” that is, the object that correlates to the idea or emotion the poet is trying to express.
I also told them that when they conducted an interview, say in a person’s house or office, they should get there early and stay late, so that they could record details within a person’s nesting place that had special meaning.
In my inventory of meaning, I showed them:
- My 100-year-old piano and new electric keyboard, signifying my membership in garage bands since 1964 when I was in high school and the Beatles arrived in America.
- My Atlanta United soccer hat, which I wore in their honor, and because the girls I coached when they were 10 years old would eventually win a high school state championship.
- My wall full of new pelican art because I led an effort to have the brown pelican declared the official bird of the city of St. Petersburg.
And much, much more. There were a hundred objects within my reach, each with a story hiding inside. I argued that if they could enter my space, see these objects, ask about them, they could fill their notebooks with “characteristics,” the little tiles that form the mosaic of my character.
I took some excellent questions, one of which was asked by a student named Sari. She sat in a mostly white room, with nice light shining on her from a window. The room looked mostly undecorated, until I noticed a piece of furniture against the back wall. It was white, camouflaged by surrounding colors. I realized it was a piano.
Before she posed her question to me, I asked her about it. Yes, she said, it was a piano, styled to look like an older spinet, but actually a new electric model. I asked her if she played, hoping she would say yes, in which case I would try to persuade her to play something for the class. (I had already played something for them.)
She smiled. She said that, yes, she did play, she loved to play, but that she was recovering from a repetitive stress injury above her wrist in her right arm.
I called a time-out. I had not planned it, but I had demonstrated the lesson I had tried to teach earlier in the class. To write a profile of Sari, it would help to find an object special to her with a story hiding inside of it. That’s not what I had intended to do. But I’ve come to see the world as a storehouse of story ideas hiding in plain sight.
There on my Zoom screen was Sari, the light shining on her injured arm, and her piano waiting patiently in the background for her return.
It occurred to me later that we had, at that moment, rediscovered an essential move for curious writers, be they reporters or poets or both. Not Eat, Pray, Love. But See, Ask, Write.
First you see it, whether it’s the intriguing tattoo, the old photo on the wall, or that decal on the back of the station wagon. But seeing is just the first step.
You have to ask about it. If you do not ask, you may wind up making assumptions about the significance of a detail that are probably false or at least misleading.
After you ask, you write it, but the writing comes in two stages. The first, most important, is to get it in your notebook. If it is not in there, there is little chance it will wind up in your story.
