Miracles Out of Sand

And an Update

It starts with you

How do you make a miracle happen on the page? Whether it’s a miracle or a disaster, look for it in your own life first. For example, I recently needed to depict a character undergoing a huge shift in her perception. In the break between one chapter and the next, she had to suddenly see her world in a marvelous new light—of course, without simply using the words “marvelous new light” or “epiphany” or any of the endless cheats that would be “writerly.”

Where to start? In my own life, certain moments stand out, for good or bad. For bad, I look back on the Glenda Haas Moment. Glenda had enrolled in our small school around seventh grade, her with her long, straight hair and her Southern accent. She fascinated me, but we never spoke until the moment she opened her locker in the school hallway, and a book tumbled out. The book caught in the long string of love beads she was wearing, sparkling, faceted beads of lead crystal. The necklace snapped, and beads scattered, and seeing my chance I knelt down and helped her gather the beads. There we knelt, nose to nose, and as my hands scooped up beads and put them into her cupped hands, Glenda, fascinating Glenda Haas drawled, “You’re so sweet, thank you.” She said, “Why, when I first moved here, everybody told me ya’ll was retarded.”

Until that moment my place in the school pecking ordered had seemed okay. I was middling popular, but after that I saw that I wasn’t. If it took a new kid to clue me in, sobeit. On the opposite end of the spectrum was getting eyeglasses.

Around second grade I got my eyes tested and came to school wearing my first pair of prescription glasses, at maybe seven years old. Solid in my mind is the moment I walked into the gym and saw that the basketball hoop had a net. The hoop itself had been largely a rumor. Teachers said it was up there and told me to shoot the basketball toward it, much like how Father Schmidt told me to pray to God. None of it made any sense, but I did what I was told.

However, getting my first pair of glasses was akin to meeting an angel in person. There really was a basketball hoop up there. And a clock. What’s more, people had faces. This cannot be overstated, until then no one had a face unless they leaned kissing-close to me, meaning that I read people by their broad gestures, their voices, their smells. Editors remark that my books are chock-a-block with smells and active verbs, and that’s why: Because until the age of seven my world was nothing but gesture, sound, and smell. Very few visuals.

To give my character her marvelous new perception, I only needed her to compare this new awareness to the moment when she’d first gotten glasses as a small child. To fill out the details I picked the brains of everyone I met who wore glasses. What did they recall from when their world first came into focus? One man said he hadn’t been able to see far enough to finally distinguish three dimensions. With glasses, his world had gone stereoscopic. Other people said the effect was similar to when television programs moved to high definition. Or switching from the fuzz of AM radio to the clarity of FM. For everyone I talked to, the moment was astonishing and permanent. And it wasn’t just sights that became clear. Now inexplicable actions made sense. Dogs were actually chasing thrown balls, not just running away and running back to their owners. People made eye contact for attention, and they weren’t automatically angry and waving their hands or shouting.

I’ve touched on this before, but the road to the miraculous begins with recognizing the ordinary. In cathedrals, the artists who made stained-glass windows began their story at eye level. There, close up, the faithful would see the fine details of the feet and sandals, the weeds, and the folds of hemlines, so all of these ordinary items had to be realistic. As people’s gaze moved upward, and focused farther away, the windows could depict faces, and eventually halos, angels, miracles.

Keep all of this in mind when you want to sell the reader a miracle. Look back at your own life, and find the earliest event that generates that effect. People aren’t so different that your “miracle” won’t resonate with a large portion of your readership. Likewise, to sell a tragic moment, bridge it back to the earliest similar moment you can dredge up from your own life. It’s said that people only really experience extreme joy or despair or whatever once, and that every subsequent experience is simply revisiting that first event. Whether or not that’s true, the culture accepts the idea, so you can sink the knife deeper into the reader’s heart by showing a character as a very, very young child experiencing the strong emotion in question. Make the present big moment an echo of the larger initial joy or tragedy.

Our heart will always engage more readily with a child. And if you do this trick right, the reader will automatically connect with and feel at one with the character.

So, whether it’s eye glasses or whatever, a good event or bad, a good way to access the feeling and articulate it is to find that feeling in your own early life. Once you identify the event, ask other people about any similar event from their lives. Most people are flattered to recount their childhood, especially to a good listener who’s delighted to hear details. It’s a spooky exercise: When you begin to tug at a thread of memory, it quickly becomes a rope. In Tom Spanbauer’s workshop, his first writing exercise was always: “Write about something you just barely remember.” Just by jotting down one small detail, you free your mind to recover the next and the next until you’re astounded by how much you can recall. Stephen King describes writing as archeology, and how if you’re careful you can unearth the artifact of the story in one solid piece. Most people will be thrilled as you listen intently and coach them to remember finer and finer details.

When you use such details to create a character’s experience you’re not just writing your own life into the story, you’re wrapping in similar aspects of many, many people. Doing so, it’s much more likely that readers will see themselves in the character. That, and the so-called research gives you an opening to meet and engage with people.

While asking people about their eye glasses, I met a young man who told me he’d ruined his sight intentionally. In grade school the man’s friends had all been prescribed glasses, so to feel included this man had read books in bed all night by the faintest light possible. This, he said, had wrecked his vision enough that he got to wear glasses. Since that age his eyes have stayed the same. What struck me is how his story resonated with stories told to me by champion wrestlers. Many of these Olympic contenders had wanted to belong in the wrestling world so badly that they’d lain in bed at night and pounded their fists into their ears. Such pounding built up the scar tissue and the trademark cauliflower ear faster, to suggest to their peers that they had much more time in the ring.

Being a unique snowflake might seem special. But finding the common ground between people is far more interesting and effective when you want to communicate something that seems special or miraculous in a story.

And the update

Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing a novel called Shock Induction. It’s built out of the sparest ruins of Greener Pastures, with only a couple key scenes surviving from the previous book. My editor at Simon and Schuster was so happy with the book he’s fast-tracked it for an October hardcover. The process of rewriting and editing that normally takes months, well, we did it in days. Less of a feat when you consider that I’ve been housebound by ice storms and Covid.

My training with a master hypnotist is going swimmingly. To my surprise he’s a big name and presents regularly at continuing education seminars for clinical and stage hypnotists. His name is Scott Duvall, and he spoke to the Portland writer’s workshop last week, and people loved it. Such is the mystique of hypnosis that almost half of my students had asked to be excused from the talk beforehand. Those same writers had the best time being induced into trances and taking part in induction exercises.

To my bigger surprise, hypno seminars and conventions are a sizable thing. This July I’ll be attending the biggest, Hypnothoughts, in Las Vegas. What could be a better way to learn skills that will induce readers into a fictive trance? I’ll keep you posted as my understanding deepens to the extent that I can articulate it.

Many people in my generation dreamed of becoming participatory journalists. Think of George Plympton playing football with the Detroit Lions, or Nellie Bly¹ getting herself thrown into prisons or mental hospitals, or Sebastian Junger being embedded in a military battle or a perfect storm. Or Gloria Steinem as a Playboy bunny.

I don’t want to sit around getting high on the smell of my own farts, so to speak. I suspect neither do you—smell your own farts, that is, not mine.

Whether it’s learning hypnosis or asking strangers about their glasses, as a writer of fiction, you get to have a participatory life.

1. In The Great Gatsby the character Ella Kaye is based on Nellie Bly, although not a flattering characterization.