daniel prazer

I feel awful that I’ve let this blog fall by the wayside.

Yesterday, though, I got news that my essay “Firefighting” placed as a runner up in the inaugural Knee-Jerk Magazine Essay contest. If you click the link (and you should), you’ll see that not only is it a placement in a writing contest, a publication, but money. Money! For writing! Gasp!

So I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the judges. Because it wasn’t an easy essay to write.

It started off as a series of vignettes about covering house fires when I was a journalist. I wrote it during the summer, and eventually, it dawned on me what I wasn’t writing about: my dad sold firefighting equipment for years—as long as I can remember, in fact—so that got folded into the essay. And it’s impossible for me to write about my dad without getting into his decline into alcoholism and eventual suicide.

So like I said, not easy to write. But what story worth writing is easy to write?

When I was a senior creative writing and journalism major at Miami University, I had the fortune of taking a week-long writing class with Richard Bausch, which was a beautiful week that made me much more cognizant of my own writing. I have a journal full of things he said during that week, and he’s since started posting pearls of wisdom on Facebook. This is one of my favorites:

You don’t have to be so terribly smart, or fast. You only have to be willing. You get smart going through it and through it after being open to what it is tending toward. Don’t worry about what you will finally say; it will tell you.

This happens every time somebody sits down to write. It certainly did for me in my essay. The key is to let the story tell you what it’s about, not the other way around. Try to manhandle the story, and it won’t ring true. So when you sit down today to write—a fictional story, a blog entry, a piece of breaking news—remember this. Let the story tell you what it has to say.