Write Along with Me #2 : Tell It Slant

On By Lois RoelofsIn aging, Health, memoir, writing

When I read that a suggested reading for my recent Write-by-the-Lake workshop with Amy Lou Jenkins was Miller and Paola’s Tell it Slant, I immediately got gut pain. Some years ago, during a writing workshop, the teacher had shown a page of an essay I’d written on a screen and asked the group of about fifty attendees to read it. Then he asked, “What’s missing here?”

I knew only a few in the group, but had felt safe in submitting my piece for scrutiny because I’d felt it to be my best work. Now, I didn’t feel confident at all.

When no one responded, the teacher said, “Does anyone know what telling it slant means?”

One gal shot her hand up and said something like my piece was just a recording of facts.

Well, yes. What was wrong with that? I was supposed to write about something that had happened and I did. What I didn’t know was that Emily Dickinson originally coined the term: “Tell the truth but tell it Slant / Success in Circuit lies…”

Miller and Paola nicely explained Dickinson for me: “We think she meant that truth can take many guises; the truth of art can be very different from the truth of day-to-day life. Her poems and letters, after all, reveal her deft observation of the outer world but it is ‘slanted’ through the poet’s distinctive vision.” (p. xiv)

They go on to describe exactly my problem: I had told the truth, but I had to “become more that a mere transcriber of life’s actual experiences.” (p. xiv)

One of my former writing teachers, Carol LaChapelle, hammered the same notion in her discussion of writing as art. Facts are important but the “What about it?” is more important.

Yes, indeed, what about it?

My materials from the Write-by-the-Lake workshop are still on my bar. I’ve not taken the time to put them back in my study, because I got the greatly-procrastinated idea last week of sorting all the boxes of photos I’ve accumulated since 1991. So, pile upon pile of memories sat next to my Tell it Slant book screaming at me to not only remember the event taking place on each photo, but the what about it? Why does it matter?

Take this photo for example:

It’s a typical Thanksgiving Day at my brother’s house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We gathered there on that day for over thirty years. Each year, I’d take photos of different family groupings. This photo shows my mother on the couch, with one of my three sisters next to her and one next to me. The missing sister lived on the West Coast.

If I were to tell you just the facts, I would describe how we traveled there every year, what we wore, what we ate, how we spent our afternoons after the one o’ clock dinner, and how we said our good-byes. And you would traipse along with me on our usually snowy roads from Chicago, perhaps feel my discomfort in my fitted clothes after gorging myself on the staples of Aunt Esther’s turkey, Aunt Kay’s mashed potatoes, Aunt Kay’s (the second) broccoli, and my veggie tray; and maybe sit on my shoulder as I went around taking family photos.

At first, you might think my listings interesting; you might even find comparisons to your own Thanksgiving celebrations. But, eventually, you would tire and wonder, so what? Who cares? So you drove 180 miles in snow to pig out and take photos. Well, hurrah for you.

But look at the photo again. When I unearthed it last week, among the hundreds of others, I spontaneously burst into tears.

Now that’s the beginning of the What about it? Why would I cry some twenty years later? If I were to write, “Come with me to my Thanksgiving of 1994.  See me with my mother, along with two of my three sisters. Now picture me in 2017 finding this photo, glancing at it, realizing I’m the only one still living, and bursting into tears for what was and what might have been.”

Now you’d be hooked because you’d want to know more about these people. More than what a listing of travel, wardrobe, and menu plans, and a stack of family photos could tell you. More than just the facts. The telling it slant through my “distinctive vision.” How my brother and his wife welcomed us into their home every year. How my mother instilled in me I could be successful at anything I chose to do, how I followed my nurse sister (on the couch) in her profession of teaching nursing, how I am acutely feeling the missed planned visit last month by the sister standing next to me because she unexpectedly died in April after successful surgery for cancer. How my only brother, the host of this event, is no longer alive, either. How cancer took all of these siblings.

In other words, the meaning of those yearly events and those relationships to me.

At the Write-by-the-Lake workshop, we also learned about using photos as writing prompts. Amy even suggested writing about what’s not in the photo. Looking at this photo alone, I’m sure I could write a book exploring what each of these relationships meant to me, and how blessed I was to have them, including how I wish we could all gather at a Thanksgiving one more time.

Try this—take a photo, stare at it a few minutes, and start writing. Tell yourself, after describing the facts—the who, what, where, when, to dig deeper and explore the so what, what about it, and tell it slant.

***

Advance notice: An anthology of essays written on “transitions” for this Write-by-the-Lake Writer’s Workshop & Retreat will be published late this fall by our teacher, Amy Lou Jenkins, at Jack Walker Press. As students, we are a part of this daunting, but exciting, process. I will keep you informed of our progress!

20 thoughts on “Write Along with Me #2 : Tell It Slant”

  2. Thanks, Lois
    I also have the book, Tell It Slant. Your essay is a good reminder about how to write in an interesting style. I will get the book out again.

    I’m sorry about your loss. I have lost my parents and a younger brother. It never becomes easy.

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  4. “I knew only a few in the group, but had felt safe in submitting my piece for scrutiny because I’d felt it to be my best work. Now, I didn’t feel confident at all.”

    I feel like this all the time in school! It’s so disappointing to find out that, in fact, it’s only mediocre at best — or completely wrong at worst.

    In my experience in elementary school classrooms, they work on the “So What About That” (I think there is another name for it, but this is what the students are taught to remember) method of writing that I remember learning as well. I like the concept of telling it “slant” to make it more personal, which is a concept that some kids struggle with when first learning to write.

    Your example of the photograph (the facts vs the emotions) was incredible. And you’re right– the facts were nice, I guess, but the “slanted” version stuck with me longer and made me (like you wrote!) want to learn more about the others in the picture.

    Looking forward to progress posts!

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  5. Ann Brody

    Thanks for your slant on the workshop and your family photo. It inspires me to tackle my family photos some writing, not just scanning.

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    1. Ann, I’ve been thinking of you the past few days as I drown in my photos. I remember your scanning endeavors a few years ago. I had to make it a time-bound goal to empty three computer paper boxes full of mostly loose photos. What I don’t have done by Friday gets dumped in boxes for each of my family members. Miss you!

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  6. Roger Van Buren

    Good stuff! I like people who “do the slant”not just because I want to know what they think but why and what’s the difference. Life is that important! Thanks!

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  7. Great post. I’ll have to read it several more times. So many ideas as to how to approach old memories.
    I use my iPhone constantly to remind me of people, places and things I find along the way during any mundane day.
    Kudos!

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  8. Lois, that’s how I feel about writing-with a different slant. You lay out the facts that are captured by the photo. But your writing of those facts is measured by how much you make those (sometimes mundane) facst, jump off the paper. They’re measured by the emotion they conjure up in the reader, do they make the reader want to join you for your next Thanksgiving hike in those hills. The slant isn’t your opinion, but they are how you present those facts. Do you recite them by rote, or do you throw in a little of ‘grandmother’s house we go’ (no, that’s Christmas), but you can make it a flat recitation or an exciting story that the reader can’t wait to hear the end!

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    1. Exactly, Annie. Jump off the page! Students in my recent class had the most interesting essays that they said were about everyday things. But it was how they said them that grabbed readers in.

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  9. Lois,
    Your experience and talent in teaching nursing shows itself so well in explaining the art of writing. The forever professor. I am going in my closet right now and grab an old photo and start to write and possible cry, also.

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