THE CITY IS OUR WRITING TEACHER: Extravagance Reminds Us Who we Are

By Mary Rakow

I’m waiting to get a haircut at Atelier Emanuel in that time before Covid and in the lobby they’ve installed this completely over the top mannequin with this completely over the top hair. It isn’t that anyone’s going to walk out of the salon looking like this. But it’s an idea that stretches my imagination, I feel excited, I start thinking about my novel and take the shot. Then, even cooler, the next moment I get a text from Garth Greenwell, my friend, that FSG is buying his novel What Belongs to You !! And for six figures!! A completely extravagant moment!  An extravagant joy! 

Extravagance makes us feel big and expansive and hopeful and glorious. 

The first City as Teacher post was about minimalism and the amazing Wegner chair. But minimalism needs its partner, in our lives and in our writing. Minimalism nees extravagance, excess, the flamboyant, the wild and voluptuous, the sensation that maybe nobody is in control but things are okay anyway. Extravagance is a vision of hope, energy, bounty, having more than we need.  Way more. For writers, extravagance gets us to think outside the box. And without doing that, we simply cannot make art. We can make stuff, but we can’t make art.

So we want to have minimalism AND extravagance in our work. We want our imagination, like a muscle, to be strong and flexible and be able to do both. I want us this month to include a moment of extravagance in our work. To flex this muscle. 

In the minimalism post, I showed the first page of The Memory Room with its single line floating on the white of the page. Here’s another page from that novel. There are only two such pages in a book of 430 pages— so, not a lot! But these two moments of extravagance add an important texture. The first is early in the story when the protagonist Barbara has just gotten herself into therapy and sits at the beach, angry, that therapy is hopeless because so many things frighten her. She gives herself five minutes to write down things she’s afraid of. When the time is up, she’s just begun. So, a kind of proof of the extravagant challenge she faces in therapy, to heal. The items are very particular. But mostly note how the ink fills the page. You don’t even have to read it. Just look at it. Words, words, words, words. Like those curls in that hair above. Over the top.

Near the end of the story the therapist gives her 5 minutes to write down things she loves. She can’t think of anything at first. Then the words come. She scribbles faster and faster.  She’s so surprised. It’s a moment of extravagant hope.  The items are particular, again, while at the same time, the page, as a whole, is just words, words, words, like the curls. It looks like this:

The look of our words on the page matters.  The story is like a body.  It moves.  The actual words themselves, how we position them, when we have a few or we cram the page, all of this is the skin of the body. It’s the surface.  And it matters.

Walking home from the salon that day, I saw this bush covered with an extravagance of blossoms and took the shot. 

Extravagance matters. What has the pandemic given us? Shortages. A shortage of touch. A shortage of hope. Shortage of laughter. A shortage of movement. 

But as writers our job and our privilege is to put into the world something that is not there yet. To enlarge the world. And we do this because whether we are writing a nonfiction self-help book or a thriller or a memoir, we have the tool of imagination. It is life-saving.

Extravagance reminds us of our nature. We walk upright. We have walked on the Moon. We are a noble creature. We have an interior life that no other creature has. Extravagance reminds us of that. It brings us back to our true self.

Writing Exercises

1. Close your eyes and think of some instance of extravagance you’ve experienced since our last blog post. An extravagant collection of objects, an extravagant act of kindness, the extravagant coat of a dog on a walk on your sidewalk. Just find that thing that makes you feel that there’s an abundant life around you. Even if the feeling passes. Located. Write it down. And give it to your character.
2. In five minutes write all the things that your character is afraid of.
3. In another five minutes write all the things that your character totally loves.

Begin to look for and enjoy these moments of simplicity and moments of extravagance. They occur all around us all of the time. They occur in the music we listen to. In the way we eat. They occur in the way we groom ourselves and the way we dress. They need to be inserted in our work. Write an extravagant moment. Why? Because art isn’t alien from our life. It’s a conscious and mindful taking from the things in life and mindfully arranging them for the purpose of a story. 

So look at the city with the eyes of a writer. Look and feel and smell and taste with the body of a writer. The rest is downhill.

See you next time!

Mary

© Mary Rakow 2022

A freelance editor living in the Bay Area, Mary Rakow, Ph.D. works with clients who are both local and global. She is both rigorous and encouraging, insightful and kind.

A theologian with graduate degrees from Harvard Divinity School and Boston College, Rakow’s debut novel, THE MEMORY ROOM was shortlisted for the Stanford University International Saroyan Prize in Literature, a PEN USA/West Finalist in Fiction and was listed among the Best Books of the West by The Los Angeles Times.

Mary writes with deep feeling and a questioning faith. Her second novel, THIS IS WHY I CAME earned excellent reviews in The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Commonweal, Christian Century, O Magazine, Ploughshares. It appeared on reading lists for courses at both Princeton and Yale.

Interested in the visual arts, Rakow received two Lannan residencies and two residencies at Whale & Star, in the studio of visual artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, where she was commissioned to write the first book-length treatment of the artist’s work, MARTINEZ CELAYA, WORKING METHODS. 

Mary is a beloved editor and writing coach.  She enjoys working with writers who are just starting out and those with publications and writing accolades.

For inquiries: maryrakow.com

See also:

thisiswhybook.com

https://www.instagram.com/prayers_for_our_time/

https://www.facebook.com/Psalter 

© Mary Rakow, 2022

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