On life in miniature

reading obits and asking questions

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Approximately a million years ago, I took a workshop on how to write flash fiction. Instead, I found myself writing obituaries.

The teacher, Lyle Rosdahl, had us read a few more traditional story texts and a few obituaries from The Economist. At first, I was confused. They weren’t fiction, and obits are not generally what I think of when I think “I want to find inspiration to write.”

But for those who don’t know, The Economist has published some beautifully written encapsulations of lives lived. A well-written obit has to tell an impossibly large story and honor humanity while also focusing on craft, concision, and compassion.

Photo by Muhammad Irfan

I studied these obits and tried this exercise a few more times after the class because I couldn’t figure out how to distill something as complex as a human life in so few words. The examples, which I believe are from this book, were balanced and beautiful, like a powerful still photograph that truly “captures” a person.

If you’ve been a writer for a while, you’ve probably run across prompts that suggest writing a letter to your former or future self or writing about yourself from the perspective of another. But writing your obit is a whole other ballgame. For this reason, the prompts must be approached with care so as not to feel like a hollow self-help tool but something that can go deep and excavate something that lives beneath the surface of life. The shared experience, as told through the lens of shared and strategically unshared details.

The short form can offer magic when delivered with balance and written with constraints. If an entire life can be glimpsed in so few words, after all, big topics can be explored. Fictional worlds can be properly introduced. Constraints provide a writer with unexpected freedom.

I identified as a fiction writer when I took Lyle’s workshop and started reading obits as part of my writing training. I was writing short stories about made-up people who were painfully and beautifully ordinary, and I limited myself with word count and perspective.

So now, as I shop my memoir (another agency just requested the full!), I realize that the biggest obstacle in writing this book was similar—examining my life in a way that took my 385,400* hours on this planet and distilled them into a few-hour read.

Here are a few things I learned to ask myself, a million years ago (don’t check my math) and again in the past few years. I asked these for every single essay/scene. They can be helpful for fiction as well.

1. Did I get vulnerable? It’s easy to attempt to detach so much that we overcompensate with journalistic tones and cross out the “I” where it only makes sense. What makes a good obit also makes a good essay or short story—a glimpse at the narrator’s vulnerability.

2. What did I want at the time of the scene? What do I wish I had wanted? Think about the be and the do of the piece, but let the questions drive the narrative. How accurate or numbed were senses then? How complex and (in)accurate are memories about events?

3. Where can I make interesting connections? What did a smell/sound/symbol mean to you/your character in 2000? In 2010? In 2017? In 2020? Now? What images seemed to repeat in the life explored?

With these explorations, any attempt to write a scene of something complex (such as a life, made up or real) will become a little more vibrant. It sure worked for me anyway. And as I try to figure out what I’m going to write next, I’ll return to this technique myself.

So if you’re in, let’s do one together. Write an obit — either of your future self or a character. See where it takes you. Want bonus points? Keep it under 800 words.

*eegads