The Lapidary

A Valuable Writing Exercise You've Probably Never Heard of . . .

Hello Everyone,

There are some big changes coming to this Substack, all of which I think will make the Substack more beneficial. As I mentioned last Tuesday, I took a bit of an unintentional hiatus as I finished my novel rather obsessively. Now that that’s done and the novel is being submitted to publishers, I have authorized my brain to make a one-time transfer of my obsessiveness to this Substack. So you can look for my posts every Tuesday. 

In addition, I’m going to add some “Subscriber only” features that I think will make the site more interactive and valuable to readers. These will include exercises, workshops, clinics, etc. For now, here’s a taste:

The lapidary

A number of years ago, I made an odd discovery in a small travel guide to a city. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what city the guide was from, and only one detail. The author claimed that Victor Hugo had invented a kind of writing exercise he called a “lapidary.”

Technically, a lapidary is the polishing of stones, but a lapidary style of writing is succinct and polished, both crisp and clever as in Franklin Roosevelt’s suggestion for public speaking: “Be sincere; be brief; be seated.” 

But any writer can benefit from a lapidary style of writing if we modify the notion of lapidarian prose a bit. Victor Hugo was a pioneer of this sort of lapidary. His version was a prose fragment in a short and simple style, that presented a kind of shard of life, without context. From Hugo:

“I am going to enter the ruin.  I am there.  I am writing on a little green velvet console that I have taken from the old wall.”

I doubt you’ll find the lapidary in anyone else’s toolkit, but I find it quite valuable as a way of not only honing my observation skills but also as a kind of quick check-in and memorializing of a moment in the world. The trick is not to look for anything special. The less special the better, I think. Recording makes it special.

The lapidary should be succinct, but let’s modify it further from Hugo’s version.  For us, the lapidary is a way to sharpen our skills of observation using sensory imagery.  Our lapidaries should be no longer than Hugo’s and should focus as much as possible on detail. 

You are entering the ruin.  You are there.  You have taken something from the ruin.  What is it? 

Perhaps it’s a candy bar wrapper or a fish floating in a pond or the cracked seat of an old minibus. The more sharply the shard is in the focus of your gaze and your writing, the more intriguing the fragment. 

Here are three I wrote on the Mekong River in Laos:

Flags of plastic bags in tatters waving from every dead stick poking up from the muddy waters of the Mekong.

Engine pulse and waters wash as we cut close to the bank. Green karsts with sheer walls draw nearer.

A blue and green tourist boat, our captain singing as we pass the red shell of a cement resort, a pile of rocks in the middle of the river, a whirlpool at which we point. 

Write between four and eight of these and post them in the comments section below. Feel free to comment on what you noticed from taking the time to write these. In the future, this will be something available to paid subscribers, but I hope you will try it out and see what you come up with. I’m eager to see them and I’ll comment on as many as I’m able.

I should add that this Substack won’t only be about exercises going forward. I will still write about all the things I have been writing about up to this point, including short essays about challenges in my own writing life and practice as well as the lessons I’ve gleaned from my mother’s long literary life.

In the meantime, I invite you to check out my revamped “About Page” to see the new benefits of a paid subscription. There’s more.

https://robinhemley.substack.com/about