Writing is prototyping: Dear Sugar

“what happened in this story and what is this story about?” – Sugar

Have you read the Dear Sugar column on The Rumpus?

The Rumpus is a literary blog, and Dear Sugar is an advice column by an established author writing anonymously as “Sugar.” On Feb. 14, Sugar will reveal her identity. Whoever she is, Sugar is a writer’s writer.

In the world where she is a known author, one of Sugar’s genres is memoir.

It’s one of her sharpest tools as an advice columnist, too. In most of her columns, she tells a story from her life that somehow ties into her response.

She is not a therapist. The Dear Sugar gig is unpaid. Sugar holds herself up (past sex escapades and drug use, abuse she experienced as a child, messy finances) as a work-in-progess for all to learn from.

But when she teaches about memoir to writing students, Sugar doesn’t let her students get away with simply transcribing their experiences, though that is part of the process.

“You get no points for the living . . . It isn’t enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life . . . For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.”

Sugar’s other main technique is to send the letter writer back to their own words for meaning.

The above quote is her from her response to a father who is worried about living too far away from his daughter.

“There’s a sentence in your letter that matters more than all the other sentences: I don’t want to be like my father. . . I don’t want to be like my father is a story I know. It’s code for a father who failed. It’s what your story is about.”

This past year, I have done more journaling than ever in my life.

This was mostly a result of my involvement in Havi Brooks’s Kitchen Table course (the course is closed, now).

This journaling has guided me through some major decisions: starting graduate school, moving, leaving graduate school, and my current job search, to name a few.

Using various writing techniques that Brooks teaches (though I don’t think I’ve ever seen her refer to them as “writing” techniques), I was able to move beyond reacting to these situations to finding the thread of my own story.

Prototyping is a way of learning from experience, and writing is a prototyping tool.

By first transcribing my experiences, and then asking myself what I saw in them and in the words that I chose to describe them, I derived meaning from this year, and I learned things that helped me decide what to do next.

I made a kind of prototype for my life.

Sugar observes that her letter-writers are very often looking for permission; permission to feel the way they feel, or to be what they want to be. Sometimes her mini-memoirs illustrate that she believes that they can grant themselves any permission that might be needed, and sometimes the theme is reaching, pushing, transcending.

Sugar holds up her story next to the letter writer’s own words, and the answer is written there between the two.

I’m starting with a lofty example because it’s the most important thing writing has done for me.

But there are so many little ways that writing is like prototyping. More on that another time.

PS. This post was sitting in draft and then someone posted a link to Seth Godin’s piece about writing like we talk: without being so afraid of messing up. Learning from the process. Hello, prototyping.