Dust Particles and Particularities
I spent a summer working in Phoenix, Arizona, which I would not recommend to anyone who doesn’t mind permanent sweat stains. While driving there from Texas, I saw dozens of signs dotting the highway: DUST STORMS MAY EXIST NEXT 10 MILES. These signs, bright yellow with black letters, freaked me out. What was I supposed to do if I was caught in a dust storm? The least the signs could have done was tell me how to react should a DUST STORM EXIST.
Luckily, I never got caught unprepared in a dust storm. I asked my coworker about the storms, and he described them with awe. The sky, he told me, gets dark like it’s dusk, and the birds get confused and chirp evening melodies. He said the dust comes rolling in and overtakes everything. It swirls around you for a while, then settles; daylight seeps back in. We looked at pictures of dust storms billowing through cities—giant burnt-orange clouds engulfing entire landscapes and coating everything in a layer of sand.
Though being outside during a dust storm would be dangerous, I was intrigued, and I wanted to see one.
***
That same summer, I learned that it’s tempting to write towards the Big Themes, to declare, “This is a story about Ambition! About Betrayal! About the Necessity of Courage!” and then try to stack my words towards that lofty goal. I went to a writing workshop and analyzed the essay I’ve included here, Brian Trapp’s “Shower Songs.” As we talked about its themes, we discovered that between the poignant details about his brother—pimpled back, caterpillar brow, crystallized urine—we’d learned about intimacy, brotherhood, suffering. No one could say exactly why or how. We just knew that by the end, we’d been touched. I pictured Brian Trapp in his study, taping papers with the words “intimacy,” “brotherhood,” and “suffering” to his walls to guide him as he wrote. Surely, that must have been his tactic for so pointedly arriving at those themes.
So when I sat down to write my piece for the workshop, I had my own figurative papers taped on my walls. I thought I knew what my story or essay was really about, what I was aiming for. I knew the Big Themes. I worked towards them.
That approach became problematic, though: I wanted my writing to arrive at my themes so badly that I ended up with paragraphs of reflection instead of story. I was ruminating on Love, giving my reader a generalized idea about this Big Theme with no evidence to support it. The essay became a think piece discussing the contrasting comfort and intrusiveness of a deeply caring mother, which, while I know my therapist would love to discuss it, I realized wasn’t really going to intrigue someone who didn’t have a stake in understanding my psyche.
***
That sort of writing is like wind: large and billowing, but entirely meaningless unless animated by something else. When the breeze blows through a field, we only know it’s there because the long grass bows to its gusts. Walls of wind chopping the ocean into waves are invisible but for the buffeted water.
The Big Themes, too, are invisible forces in the world—Love, Death, Pain, Longing—that only take shape when seen tangibly. It’s one thing to talk about Love as a concept, what with its Sacrifices and its Emotions; it’s another thing entirely to love a disabled brother, to know him well enough to tease him about his penis, to wash him with Johnson & Johnson shampoo, to remember his “pink and complete” body. Here, love is on full display without ever having to announce its presence. Rich experiences make invisible concepts into concrete realities.
Big Themes, like wind, need something tangible in order to become visible, and honestly, I’ve never seen the wind more clearly than when I saw a dust storm.
***
Luckily, I was safely indoors, and luckily, some friends and I got to experience it together: the dark sky, the birds’ evening songs, the wind whistling between houses, trees bending to the breeze then disappearing in an auburn cloud. The world outside my window became one blur of dust. Yet, I could still see individual movements within the larger haze—flicks and curls of sand, the particles dancing in unpredictable patterns. This giant and invisible force was made visible by specks of earth. While a single leaf being twirled in the breeze would show me only one unraveling ribbon of air, the dust storm showed me everything; it painted a massive gust of wind into observable existence.
***
Good writing, too, requires particles. It requires particularities. To convey a Big Theme, we cannot just toss a single leaf into the Big Theme breeze and expect our audience to see the whole atmosphere (or worse, try to convince them that the air is moving without even a single leaf as evidence).
It’s the little dust particles that most fully animate the wind. It’s life’s little instances and details that reveal lofty ideas. Brian Trapp’s minutiae build an immersive world, give life to large concepts, and entirely envelop us in the story. If he had been using some Big Themes tacked to his wall as his guides, he probably would have parsed his details more during the writing process, fearful that he wasn’t arriving at the inner meaning soon enough. But I’d posit that, especially in early drafts, meaning could arise from the details we don’t plan.
In creative writing, it’s not my job to philosophize or theorize or even know the exact point I’m trying to make. I must observe the memory, write it all, and hone the meanings that emerge. With my own piece about my mother (titled “My Mother’s Shopping List,” if you’re interested), I finally arrived at the deeper story when I brought the reader into rich scenes, letting layers of meaning emerge naturally as the details compounded, and when I whittled it down to a final draft, I discovered which particularities served my story. The detail about my mother cleaning my bloodstained underwear said more about intimacy than I ever could. A few reflective, revealing sentences were all I needed to lift my particles and send them dancing.
My goal in writing an essay, then, is to do for my readers what a dust storm did for me: to change the atmosphere, even for a moment; to capture their attention, to make them acutely aware, and to animate what once was invisible.
An Exercise in Particulars
Free write about an experience of which you believe you know the meaning. Maybe it’s something from your childhood that you think you’ve analyzed completely, or a topic you’ve already written about extensively. It may be a challenge, but keep writing and let new details arise. Return to that memory. What didn’t you see the first time you looked at it? Is it a color? The weather? A person you forgot was there?
Re-read your writing, and take note of a new theme or concept emerging from these particulars. Maybe those contain a whole new story.
Brian Trapp, Brevity, May 14, 2017