How to Pick a Lock

We had a little extra time at the end of my Friday afternoon Advanced Memoir class at The Writers Studio, so I looked around the Zoom room at my beloved group of fine, resourceful writers and suggested we try something we’d never done together: with our cameras on but our audio muted, we would all do a 20-minute free-write. At the end, I told them, we could read aloud what we’d written, or not. I always cede the spotlight to my students, but I thought it would be a copout if I sat out the exercise, so I told them I would join them and share whatever emerged after they read their writing. 

 I have found that working across genres has a way of cracking open the imagination and infusing sentences with lyricism.

To reduce blank-page paralysis, I sent around an assignment I had designed for my Introductory Memoir students that had yielded startlingly fresh results. In the introductory level Writers Studio workshops, we teach craft via weekly written assignments that we create ourselves. Each one includes a short piece of published writing, either prose or verse, along with analysis that pinpoints the elements of craft that make the piece effective. Students spend a week studying the text and trying out those narrative strategies with their own material. This assignment used a Pushcart-winning poem brimming with images and energy called “How to Be a Cowgirl,” written by Ann Chinnis, one of my former students (Pushcart Anthology XLIX). I love asking prose writers to work from poems, because I have found that working across genres has a way of cracking open the imagination and infusing sentences with lyricism. 

Here’s the first stanza of the poem:

First, don’t call yourself Cowgirl.
Shove your sockless feet
in the red leather boots from last summer. 
Ignore your brother’s laughter.
Then go find a pony. 
Snake through a break in a fence, 
dare the brambles to stop you.
Sing towards the pasture like you are a siren
and your Ulysses—any friendly pony.

The assignment I came up with was inspired by the poem’s “hermit-crab form,” so called because it borrows the structure of some familiar form of (non-creative) writing, such as a recipe or a Q&A, or, in this case, a mock how-to manual. In other words, an easy, ready-made structure ripe for play or parody. I was excited and confident as I sent us all off to bang out a draft of something. 

When I did this assignment with my intro students, they dreamed up the lives of hellcats, sailors, sex workers. Here are a few favorite lines from one student’s piece, titled “How to Be a Recycled Materials Artist.”

Plunge your naked fingers into whatever detritus catches your eye on the sidewalk. Pay no heed to passersby giving you the skank eye.

But as I wrote in my quiet corner of the Zoom room that Friday with my advanced class, panic and woe set in. I had chosen the first idea that popped into my brain: How to Be a Poet, reasoning that I would have loads of lyrical things to say about the completely unexpected way I had pivoted, deep into my writing career, from fiction and personal essays to poems. 

What happened instead? Everything I tried felt stale. I was bored by each line I started before I got to its predicate. I pressed on, but the situation didn’t improve: no story, no imagery, no energy. The closest thing to a clip-clop of pony hooves was me trotting out my tropes in ballpoint. 

The timer went off. We all looked up nervously from our notebooks. As I said, these people are some of the best writers I know; Wednesday evenings, when their new pages arrive in my inbox, are a highlight of my week. Often I’m more engaged and inspired by their storytelling than I am by whatever best-selling book I’m reading and whatever hot series I’m watching on Netflix. 

They took turns reading aloud. As I listened, I wished two things: one, that I had copped out and read the newspaper for 20 minutes, and two, that I had thought ahead to announce that I wouldn’t offer any feedback. This was in part because I’ve never felt nimble at on-the-spot feedback when I don’t have the words on the page to refer to. 

But really, it was because their work wasn’t so hot either. They mostly wrote about their usual big life subjects—career, parenthood, art— but it didn’t stir me the way their stories almost always do. One student politely declined to read aloud, and I envied her as I kept my promise and, cringing, read my piece. 

Worried about the ticking clock, we had all skipped an essential step, the one where we come at some deep desire obliquely instead of head-on, figuratively rather than literally.

All weekend I thought about what had gone wrong and how I could make it better for us all. It finally hit me: most of us wrote about things that we actually are, whereas Chinnis is most decidedly not a cowgirl. Worried about the ticking clock, we had all skipped an essential step, the one where we come at some deep desire obliquely instead of head-on, figuratively rather than literally. I ransacked my mind for a fresh “how-to” metaphor that might unlock my imagination. 

It just so happened that back in my mundane daily life that week I’d been dealing with a glycol leak in the baseboard heater in my office. I had to clear out the tiny, tightly packed room to make way for the plumbers who would be coming in to sever an old metal pipe and weld in a new one. The three deep filing cabinets stacked nearly to the ceiling needed to come out on dollies. In the process of hoisting them, I had shut the drawers of the one filled with folders I use all the time, forgetting that I had no key. 

Thus ensued a few hours of Googling lock-picking videos and fiddling fruitlessly with paperclips in the lock mechanism. Then I called in the super who, of all the crazy things, had just bought a set of locksmith tools the day before. He jiggled away with various picks in his fancy kit, also with no success. He came back with an electric drill that sent vicious little coils of steel flying until, finally, the lock gave way. 

And then it hit me: How to Pick a Lock! My dormant imagination perked right up. You and I can do something with this, it said to the other half of my brain, the half that botched the free-write because it doesn’t know from creativity. My imagination continued: You feed me some facts you learned from those nutty strangers who are so hungry to teach the world how keys work that they create cross-sections of locks with the innards in full view. I’ll take it from there. 

I’m still picking my way toward a first draft, but, speaking of nutty, here are some of the lines so far:

Carry your own cushion by keeping a little meat on your keister.

Now: target practice. Find a girl or former girl. A quiet one may be best; she’ll keep secrets. Get a hold of her diary, probably pink. Simple mechanism. Key lost sometime late in the last century. Speaking of girls: get a bobby pin.

Be one with metal. Steel maintains its figure. Brass doesn’t sag. Nickel never lies. Desire the mechanism’s hidden passages as one body desires another.

Notice that I don’t actually instruct aspiring lock pickers. Notice that I think a lot about human bodies and not so much about cabinets and doors. Notice that I’m having a grand time pouring out stuff that came from who-knows-where: keep a little meat on your keister?! This was decidedly not how I felt  when I wrote these lines during class, lines I’m forcing myself to transcribe now: 

First, listen. To the way your mother says washcloth and your father says facecloth and ask why you and your sister say washcloth, though from early on you didn’t want to be like her and your sister didn’t want to be like either of them.

Meanwhile, back in my life as a philosophical lock picker, I’ve finally come around to keys: 

Now meditate on your house key’s rugged terrain: mountain ranges, foothills, valleys.

Like everyone else I’ve spent a lifetime pocketing and unpocketing keys, running my fingers over them. Having the kind of brain that’s wired for words and not engineering, I never gave a thought to what goes on inside once you put the key in the lock. Now I started thinking nonstop about the cleverness of those hidden pins on springs, each one mounted at a different height, the secret world inside every keyhole. I felt a weight lift inside me. Looking anew at the physical realm with the eyes of a poet, I saw everything was potentially fascinating, gorgeous, metaphorical.

Looking anew at the physical realm with the eyes of a poet, I saw everything was potentially fascinating, gorgeous, metaphorical.

My struggles with this assignment led me back to a familiar question: how to get from the bad, self-defeating state of mind into the realm of wonder. We writers feel we’re supposed to approach the page with gravitas and bravery; we’re supposed to aim dark and deep. I’ve never found this a winning strategy. My defenses get in the way. My language grows plodding. I start judging myself every which way, and often the ways contradict one another: I’m afraid of what I’ll uncover. I’m superficial and have nothing to uncover. I’m not trying hard enough. I’m trying too hard.

Better to start with a feeling of curiosity about something, anything. I don’t think it much matters what. The mating habits of the cardinals outside your window; the whereabouts of that kid with the flat top who grew up down the block; the process for extracting seeds from the sesame plant. 

All of a sudden the key, slick with your sweat, will glide right in. The stolid sentries guarding the hidden fortress will step aside and say welcome. 

Featured photo by Judah Wester on Unsplash.