'That was the year I ...'
By Andrew Seguin
“One of the best pieces of advice that anyone ever gave me was: ‘Writing is not like needlepoint; you can’t just pick it up and put it down,’” Barbara Ascher said. “You have to devote time to it.”
Ms. Ascher, who teaches at Bennington College and is the author of four books, including Landscape Without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief, recently shared this insight with Upper School students who work on The Wheel, Chapin’s literary magazine. It was an opportunity for the girls, many of them writers in their own right, to learn lessons from a practicing author — not only the nuts-and bolts of writing, such as whether Ms. Ascher types or writes drafts out longhand, but also the more elusive truths about creativity that she has discovered over the years.
Ms. Ascher began by asking the girls what their lives as writers were like. “I start a lot of short stories but can’t seem to finish them, and I also write a lot of poetry,” one student said. “Poetry is a wonderful way to train yourself as a writer,” Ms. Ascher said. “It helps you to learn brevity. Something I tell my own students is: ‘Cut away the fat! Cut away the fat! Cut away the fat!’” she said.
Another girl described how she often made outlines for stories but couldn’t seem to stay focused on them. “Even if you just write a sentence a day, and this is so strange and so wonderful, your characters just take over the story for you,” Ms. Ascher replied. “I was working on a novel in the New York Society Library,” she added, “and I wanted to go across the street and get a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, but the voices in the book said, ‘We aren’t finished yet.’” She stayed. She kept writing.
Ms. Ascher even had the students do some writing of their own during her visit. She asked them to begin with the phrase “That was the year I …” and continue writing for 10 minutes. The task doesn’t allow anyone the time to be too reflective or too inhibited, as Ms. Ascher explained, and being unbridled can help one write what’s most imaginative and powerful. Editing can happen later.
Each student read her story aloud, the subjects of which ranged from riding the subway to forgetting time to learning how to forget. “Everything all of you wrote made me think about something bigger than what was on the page,” Ms. Ascher said to the girls. What was on the page was a group of young voices just getting started.
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