The Key to Writing Intimacy Lies in the Spaces that Make Us Weep
Mid-week inspiration from Stacey D'Erasmo and Carol Shields
Hi Everyone,
It’s another week of political suspense, action, and anticipation here in the USA. I’m writing this hours before the debate that could re-galvanize the presidential election. Or not. But I’m mindful that politics is not what this Substack is all about. So, with encouragement and admiration for those of you who are able to stay the course with your own creative work through all that’s happening in the world, I offer this week’s inspiration for paid subscribers.
Our subject is intimacy, or what my MFA faculty colleague Micheline Aharonian Marcom used to call “heat.” Taking as our starting point the understanding that all compelling writing is about relationship, intimacy can be considered the energy that defines and binds the relationship not only between characters on the page but also within themselves, as well as between the author/narrator and reader.
Novelist Stacey D’Erasmo does a brilliant job of explaining all this in The Art of Intimacy, and Carol Shields in The Stone Diaries wrote one of the most heart-breaking portraits of intimacy that I’ve ever read. So those are the texts from which we’ll draw inspiration— for writers of both fiction and nonfiction — today.
What are we talking about when we talk about intimacy?
Your first thought when you hear the word ‘intimacy’ is probably closeness, as in love, sex, affection, family. But it’s not all eros and roses. Hatred is also intimate. Murder is a far more intimate act than lovemaking. Work is intimate, as is thinking. So is control, the exertion of power over something or someone.
Intimacy could be summed up as the tension between attraction and repulsion. If you picture two individuals as a figure-ground image, intimacy percolates in the ground — the space — between the two figures:
For a deep dive into writing with intimacy, including a slew of masterful literary examples, I highly recommend Stacey D’Erasmo’s title in The Art of Series. D’Erasmo teaches writing and publishing at Fordham University and is the author of five novels. The Art of Intimacy focuses mostly on fictional examples, but everything she describes applies to the writing of relationship in memoir, too.
The subtitle of D’Erasmo’s book is The Space Between, a core concept that she unpacks in the excerpt below and which I find absolutely vital in the eternal struggle to bring relationships to life with meaning and authenticity on the page.
I’ve bold-texted the points that I find most essential:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Aimee Liu's MFA Lore to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.