THE CITY IS OUR WRITING TEACHER: A Chair Can Teach Us Courage

By Mary Rakow

The 3 tenets of the 2022 San Francisco Writers Conference are Learn. Connect. Publish.  I focus on the Learn tenet. Last year we looked at the visual arts. This year, the city. 

The City as Teacher will be 11 monthly posts:  How can street musicians help us improve our dialogue?  What can a staircase teach us about story and plot?  How does a mannequin in a retail store window teach us about backstory? In the city our writing teachers are everywhere!  We just have to pay attention.

We need discipline, patience, hard work, talent and a writing community to make good work. But we need courage to make great work.  Work that lasts.

How does this Wishbone Chair designed by Hans Wegner teach us about courage?  

Wishbone Chair by Hans Wegner, 1949

The Wegner Chair

Here’s the backstory:

In my own writing and spiritual practice I have gone from living in a home with five bedrooms, three baths, swimming pool, tennis court, exquisitely beautiful furniture and artwork, to what is now a monastic cell. Meaning everything is removed except what I really want to focus on. I sleep on a floor mat. My clothes are down to 10 hangers. I have one bowl. Each step is scary. But again and again the more I create emptiness, the more that emptiness is filled with something I cannot name.  Something I was designed to pay attention to.  And is priceless to me now. It’s a great privilege of my life to be at a point where I can engage in this such a journey.  

So why buy something?  And why this chair? Wegner designed over 500 chairs.  He was a genius. The Wishbone Chair is gorgeous and incredibly comfortable, but those aren’t the reasons. It’s that the chair frames emptiness for me.  I see it a million times a day and it reminds me of how I want my life to be, my work to be. 

See how it floats in the home of the astonishing architect Claudio Silvestrin in this 3 minute video of his own home. See how edited his spaces are. The Wegner chair appears at around 35 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=oLaDJvB7BwY

We want our work to be like Wegner’s and Silvestrin’s. Where each thing matters. Where there is a feeling of openness, of entering that zone where our deepest hunger is acknowledged, is fed. 

The writer’s emptiness is the sacred white of the page or the blank space of the screen. We need to respect this as a character and stop cluttering it up.  We need to make room for the visitor, the reader, and all that each reader brings to our work. 

Here’s the first page of my first novel, THE MEMORY ROOM. Don’t read the words, just look at the page. 

We pay attention because of the white.  Because of the emptiness.  And we expect, then, that the words will really matter.  And that is our job, too, as writers.  That what we write is as beautiful as a plain blank white of the page.  Silvestrin has to make sure his select furnishings are as beautiful as the empty rooms he builds.  It’s all the same thing.

I edit a lot of manuscripts. For every one time I ask for more information or indicate this is a “door in” and could be explored, they are 10 times when I’m saying “you can cut this.” I am editing a strong memoir now. On one page, halfway through, I put boxes around the words that are essential and asked the author if she could imagine only these words on a pristine white page.  What happens?  The story is suddenly much stronger. We really feel the story more deeply. And a very strong memoir becomes a great memoir. 

Why are we afraid to do this? Maybe we’re afraid to lose the reader? My second writing teacher, the passionate but tyrannical Kate Braverman would say, “Write for the 10 smartest people you know.” And, “Write for someone on their death bed.”  In other words, take out the junk.  And if we do, we find our readers are super smart. We can stop explaining everything. We can be brave and let the emptiness reside in our work, actively shape our work as if it, itself, is a character asserting itself. 

Wegner was brave. At the forefront of the mid-20th century design movement he took away practically everything. The upholstery, the tufting, the padding, the cushions, the carved wood legs, all of that stuff. Because it was stuff. And in so doing, he created over 500 chair designs, exquisitely beautiful and comfortable and practical chairs that have never been out of production. 

You don’t have to buy a Wegner chair. Find ways to remind yourself that, “Less is More” (to quote Mies van der Rohe, another masterful architect). 

And here, Connect also comes in. This would never have been the opening line of THE MEMORY ROOM  without the candid advice from the amazing writer and teacher Sam Dunn (FAILING PARIS, IN SEARCH OF CARLOS GOMEZ, etc.) that I cut the first 50 pages (!). So I did. I kept those 50 pages in a box like a coffin. And truth is, I never opened the box. She was absolutely right.  So connect with others.  With writers who are better than you are. It’s golden. 

WRITING EXERCISE 

Swap 7 pages with a writer you know and put squares around what is essential. Get your work back and be brave.  On a blank sheet, or in a new file, rewrite your pages using just those lines. Don’t look at what was cut out. Just at what remains. See if you miss anything. Look at the Wegner Chair you just made.

What teaches you courage as a writer? Maybe share in the Comments below? 

If you need an editor I’d love to hear from you. I give a discount to SFWC writers and anyone who comes through this blog. maryrakow.com 

See you next time!

Good writing!

Mary 

© Mary Rakow 2022 

A theologian with graduate degrees from Harvard Divinity School and Boston College, Mary writes with deep feeling and a questioning faith. She is a beloved editor. This Is Why I Came earned outstanding reviews in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Commonweal, Christian Century, O Magazine, Ploughshares. It appeared on reading lists for courses at both Princeton and Yale.

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