“Audition” as Cheryl Strayed, Joan Didion, and Jessamine Chan
The difference between learning and ripping someone off.
To be a good writer you need to be a good reader.
But what does that mean?
It means auditioning your favorite writers’ words as prompts for yourself. “Stealing” another writer’s format or structure or even their words as inspiration is not wrong. That’s how we learn to write. That’s how we understand what works. That’s how we develop our own voice.
Take the opening pages of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, for example. The prologue ends with this beauty:
I looked north, in its direction — the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I'd been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.
Here’s a moment where Cheryl drops the reader into the middle of the action. She’s standing on the hiking trail looking in both directions—where she’s come from and where she’s going. And at this moment she has a choice: go back to where she came from or keep walking forward into the unknown.
AUDITION 1: Bring us into a moment where you had the choice to go back to where you started or to move forward. What did you choose? And why?
Here’s Joan Didion in her essay, Goodbye To All That.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.
AUDITION 2: Show us a moment when something began. The first time you [fill in the blank]. There is power in firsts– and lasts. Joan writes about the first time she saw New York. She tells us her age, her outfit, the smells she remembers, the season, where she was. What first reaches out and grabs you? What did it smell like? What were you wearing? How old were you? What season was it?
Writing auditions work for fiction too. Here’s a line from the opening page of Jessamine Chan’s The School For Good Mothers:
It’s the first Tuesday in September, the afternoon of her one very bad day, and Frida is trying to stay on the road.
AUDITION 3: Write about your one very bad day. Where were you? Was it day or night? What made the day so bad? Did it start off bad or did something happen that made it veer off course?
Oftentimes, my clients come to me and ask: What should I write about? These are some of the prompts that get at the juiciest stuff.
When did your story begin?
What happened when you got to that point in the middle where you were stuck?
What did your worst day look like? What happened on that day?
Now try some of these writing auditions on your own!
In Community,
Ruthie
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