I went back and forth in my head for days on what piece I wanted to use to kick off On Writing. Do I write a piece on every essay I’ve ever written starting with untruthful elegy? I don’t have much to say about that one, but since it’s my earliest piece, it’s the least read and I wish more people went back to it because I think it’s one of the better written ones. But if I write about all of my essays, I don’t think on holes and fathers is long enough for a full piece. But if I start off with stove still hot and decide I actually do have something to say about untruthful elegy, then the order of my posts will be messed up.
Hi. Welcome! If the title of this post didn’t give it away, I eventually did settle on stove still hot as a starting point. It feels like the most honest way to go about this, since I actually have things to say. So, today’s On Writing features:
i. blueprint of a stove
stove still hot feels like an in-between period. It was the first post that I’d written (at least in part) on the Substack platform, opposed to being copy-pasted from Google Drive. The very first draft of stove still hot still exists in my Drive and half of the version you see today is right next to it, titled stove still hot redux. (Although the original version is less an essay and more a half-drunk rant).
I think what makes stove still hot so difficult to write (and so difficult to write about) is how large the metaphor is. Most metaphors (to me) represent a single point in reality: a father is a hole because he is missing, my mother’s cooking is writing because I repeat it, anger is a knife because it hurts (and is dangerous). Of course, even some of these examples are a bit larger than that, but a metaphor builds clarity around a common point instead of confusion.
A stove, however, will generate smoke that completely fills your apartment until you cannot see anything except the smoggy gray. And then your smoke alarm will go off and you will run to every window to pry it open before your neighbors call your landlord who will use the fact that your smoke alarm has gone off three times in the past week as an excuse for increasing your rent. And by the time the smoke has gone out the windows and your stove is no longer on fire and you have two missed calls and five texts from your landlord…what were you even writing about again?
When I was in high school, an English teacher told my class that one of the biggest struggles with poetry is poets sometimes go in wanting to explain a very specific point and end up beating the horse to death. A metaphor needs room to breathe and sometimes you need to be comfortable with others interpreting your words differently. I think this is why I’ve always loved poetry and why I was reluctant to start this series: if I am explaining what I mean in each of my essays, I won’t get comments like A'Daja Chantrell’s anymore.
So, I won’t explain the stove metaphor or give a step-by-step SparkNotes of how to read stove still hot because this one isn’t meant to be read in a specific way. (And I love how people have built off of this metaphor! I already mentioned A'Daja Chantrell’s interpretation above, but I also wanted to highlight Untangled Knots’s comment and zef’s comment).
ii. burnt croissant at the bottom of the stove
I like long titles and I like even longer subtitles. Everything is a metaphor to me and I think that’s what makes me enjoy writing so much. But this post isn’t a love letter to metaphors (although I will write one of those at some point) and so I’ll explain what the burnt croissant at the bottom of the stove is.
The burnt croissant is all of the lines that didn’t make it into the final draft, but you sometimes look back on and think maybe I could’ve salvaged that. (See how most metaphors end up being a single point in reality? Sorry, I’ll stop beating this horse). The burnt croissant is no longer edible, but it still has worth in helping the baker learn from her mistakes. (See how a metaphor can grow? Sorry, I’ll stop beating this horse). So here are some of the burnt croissants from both stove still hot and stove still hot redux:
And what I meant was: when you grow up in a freezing house, you learn to set things on fire. And what I meant was: when you grow up in a freezing house, you learn to love the stove. And what I meant was: when my psychiatrist heard you called me, he said “I can’t stop you from touching the stove, but the stove will probably still be hot.”
(from the original)
