Shoes, Writing, and Shoe Writing
I was in a writing workshop, and that was our warm-up assignment. A stream of consciousness exercise.
“Shoes are fascinating,” the teacher said.
Shoes? Fascinating? Not to me, I thought. Unlike most women, I’m not crazy about shoes. Why shove my feet (the foundation of my body) into pointy-toed, 4-inch, ciggy-heel stilettos, known to cause bunions, hammertoes, and nerve pain? I feel similarly about platforms and peep toes, which are linked to other painful ailments. I scribbled all this down in my notebook … and kept writing. On second thought, maybe I did have something to say about shoes. My essay “Shoe Love” is running in the back page column of Modern Woman, on newsstands now.
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Speaking of shoes, in her book Still Writing (a wonderful memoir on craft), Dani Shapiro suggests shoes as a possible way to begin a story. Shapiro writes: “Just the way we put one foot in front of the other as we get out of bed, the way we brush our teeth, splash water on our faces, feed our animals if we have animals, and our children if we have them, measure the coffee, put on the kettle, we need to approach our writing one step at a time. It’s impossible to evoke an entire world at the start. But it is possible to describe a crack in the sidewalk, the scuffed heel of a shoe. And that sidewalk crack or scuffed heel can be the point of entry, like a pinhole of light, to a story, a character, a universe.”
Well said. Now go ahead and pull out a pencil and paper and get to work. Write about the shoes you wore.
