Tacking: A Sailor’s Guide to Writing Against the Wind

“I can’t tell you what your difficult material is,” I tell my students, “but you know. And if you don’t know you know, you have an inkling. Your body is trying to tell you. Your sentences are trying to tell you.”

Together, we talk about that moment when we’re writing and suddenly, like a jolt to the nervous system, we have to get out of there. We jump up and make another cup of coffee or get the dog a biscuit or write something on the grocery list stuck to the fridge—anything that requires moving away from the words emerging on our screens or notepads.

(Writing About Your Childhood in Memoir.)

Maybe when we return, we can pretend we hadn’t come so close to writing something hard. Perhaps we can write something else.

In 30 years of writing and teaching personal essays and memoir, I know one thing to be true: Ignoring the tough stuff doesn’t make it go away. The tough stuff is patient. The tough stuff knows how to wait—but if we learn to listen, these gut-punch moments of avoidance are gifts to us as writers. “Once you identify your tough material,” I ask my students, “what happens if you don’t leave? What do you do with this tough material you’ve come up against?”

At this point in the lesson, the writers in the room are looking a little wide-eyed and nervous. Time to tack. I head to the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker, lightening the mood by doing some drawing. First, I define my canvas by outlining a body of water—an ocean or channel or a great lake, depending on my mood. On one side of the water, I draw a little sailboat with a triangle sail. “Here is your boat.”

Then I draw a stick figure in the boat, arms up, tiny mitten hands. “Here is you. Speaking of difficult material, fingers are hard to draw, aren’t they?” (Chuckles.)

“Here comes the wind,” I say. “A mighty wind.” (More chuckles.)

I leave a span of empty space off the bow to give our boat space to navigate and then I draw a cloud-like wind blob with puckered fish lips. I sketch in cyclonic swirls and dangerous-looking arrows of wind emerging from the lips and blowing hard towards our little boat. “Uh oh,” I say, but the difficulty is clear from my excellent drawing. “Let’s make this wind more menacing.” I sketch in some scary eyes and then step back so we can all assess the situation together.

“Okay,” I say, pointing at the stick-thin, mitten-handed human standing in the stern. “Here you are. . .” And then I point to the other side of the body of water. At this point I might draw a tree, possibly a picnic basket if we’ve got the time, to make the opposite bank look extra inviting. Tap tap. “You want to get over here, but...” I darken the arrows of wind blowing on the little boat. “But the winds are blowing straight at you. The wind is your difficult material. The wind is your tough stuff. Honestly, you’d like to avoid the wind altogether, but if you do, you’re not going anywhere, right? So what can you do? How do you get to the other side?” (Stunned silence.) “Any sailors in the room?” (There never are. I live and teach in the Midwest.) “No sailors?” (None.)

“You want to get to the other side, but if you try to sail directly into that wind, you’re not going anywhere. That wind—the hard memories, the unexplored fears, the panic about what people are going to think about you—will stick you in place like an anchor. Or worse? That wind will flip you right over. We don’t want that. So we’re going to do a thing that in sailing is called tacking. We’re going to adjust our sails across the bow back and forth, angling our boat first starboard, that’s to the right for you landlubbers, and then to port. We’re going to zig and we’re going to zag... “ Here, into the space I’ve left for this purpose, I draw in the reversing lines of the little boat’s jagged path. “... and in this way, we’re going to make progress across the ocean, we’re going to sail right into and through the fierce wind that is our difficult material. And we’re going to make it to the other side.” If I’ve drawn the picnic basket, I circle it triumphantly. After all, there should be some kind of reward.

I put down my marker. The lesson works because it affirms that we all have our own difficult material, our hardest stuff that something in (or outside) us is trying to keep us from writing even as something else in us is desperately trying to say that thing. Together, we acknowledge that while our difficult material is deeply personal and varied, we all hold the hard stuff that drives us to the page.

By hard, I don’t mean only those subjects that we collectively recognize as traumatic—addiction and alcoholism, neglect and abuse, illness and death—but also that material that might surprise us with its difficulty. These subjects are as vast as the deep blue sea—certain relationships, all species of loss, failures and missed paths and choices of every description. Memories that wake us up at night. Fears that won’t let us move forward. Shame that anchors our tongues. Angels in our houses who come into our rooms without knocking, sit on our shoulders, and remind us not to speak: shhhhh.

There be dragons.

In practical terms, in writing, tacking can look like a lot of things, but first you’re going to need a boat. Find—or build—the right boat for the journey out of something sturdy (a scene, an artifact, a memory, an image—or?) and climb aboard, remembering always that nothing is bigger and more important than the tiniest sensory detail. Don’t try to explain; just observe. To get across, you’ll need to pay close attention. Also? In that first draft, you’re writing only for yourself. Ask everyone else to get off your boat.

With the wind coming at you, there are many ways to adjust that angle. Maybe you study an artifact related to the hard stuff (a photograph or a toy, a letter or a tooth, a picture book or a video of a sloth climbing a cecropia tree). Be open to what you find there—a metaphor that makes sense of a fear? Language that gives love a new shape? Think about how you can move beyond the center of the circle where your own experience lies: Tell other people’s stories that somehow illuminate or inform yours, conduct interviews, look at maps, try thinking like a private investigator, a chef, or a psychologist instead of an artist. Zig.

Follow your curiosity into research. Maybe you’re writing your abortion, but you’ve been thinking about stratovolcanoes in Costa Rica. Read about those volcanoes and borrow their fire. Take a zag.

Or maybe you need to take this tacking business out of metaphor and into the wild. Take a walk in the woods. Keep your eyes and ears open to things that have nothing to do with your hard stuff and then carry them home to the writing.

Writing the hard stuff doesn’t need to be grim. Explore! Try out different points of view (third person? first person plural?), temporal positions (10 years ago? right now?), and forms (an onion, a journey, a math equation?). Sailing into the wind depends on changing the angle. We zig and we zag. Try using artful speculation to turn your bow 45 degrees into imaginary seas—such as In a different version of the past, the girl I was... or If this were fiction, perhaps...

Tailwinds are fantastic because who doesn’t love some smooth sailing? But we have to practice becoming writers who can make progress in any kind of wind—even the tough stuff blowing right in our faces.

“You got this,” I tell my students. And they do. They always do.

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