Larry M. Coleman

If I should pass the tomb of Jonah

I would stop there and sit for awhile;

Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark

And came out alive after all.

—Carl Sandburg, “Losers”

This is the opening to a brilliant one-page poem by Carl Sandburg, a poet among poets. There are five more stanzas after this, and throughout, Sandburg demonstrates not just the mind and eye of a genius, but the craftsmanship that separates the modern “just jot down whatever comes to mind, don’t punctuate it, and it’ll be fine” and the art that endures and is still praised over a hundred years later: “Losers” was published in 1920.

Each of the stanzas have their own form of pique and cleverness as he in his mind encounters other famous people throughout history. His craft shows in that of all of them, each noteworthy in their own ways, he placed this particular one at the beginning.

Friday’s posts aren’t intended to be heavy on the literary analysis (that’s more in a Monday post vein); they’re supposed to give you some spark to work on over the weekend. So let’s get to why is it important that this stanza is first: because being swallowed by the dark and coming out the other side has been driving stories since stories began.

Jonah’s story dates all the way back to the Bible. Odysseus goes on, well, the Odyssey. He almost dies several times (most of the people he started out with don’t get the “almost,” unfortunately), nearly loses his faithful wife Penelope, then returns triumphant. Lancelot goes on quests in the name of his forbidden love, betrays everything he believes in to end up with her, and almost everyone dies… except those two so they can come out the other side apart and broken. Emma Bovary gets swallowed by the whale of vanity and ends up digested so her husband can come out the other side alive, but a dead man, so Flaubert drags one of them through the whale and kills two characters with it.

These are only a few examples plucked from the pile of story. Going from despair and out the other side is the core of story. Some emerge better, some worse, some devastated, some as heroes, but all were swallowed by the maw of life and came out the other side changed.

This is the heart of all stories in that great pile. It’s the reason memoirs are written. Hundreds of millions of people want to write a book, and when they tell you what kind of book they have in mind, 99% of the time it’s their memoir. People go through things, they change, and it’s a story—it’s their story, and it’s the heart of all stories.

Find the change. Write about it. If it’s not in your writing already, add it.