Structure Discovered
The structure of a creative work is discovered, not imposed. Consider the architect’s mantra, “Form follows function.” A skyscraper exists because of land limitations, population density, and the nature of business relations; its inherent qualities (its purpose, its limitations) distinguish it from a bungalow or a Carnegie library. Likewise each piece of prose has a unique being—a focus, an exploration, a heartbeat. We don’t know when we start if our subject has sharp corners or curves, if it’s solid or fluid, if it needs many compartments or just one. We discover the container that will hold our material as we discover the material. How distressing! Particularly when writers set out on longer projects, they want—even need—a structure to help them get going. But nothing is more deadly to creativity than a strict plan. An outline, a story-board or any scheme will only serve a creative writer so long as he…
Process & Product
I’m a tender-hearted gardener. When last year’s cherry tomatoes reseed themselves, I don’t have the heart to pull them out. And so I end up with an abundance of late-ripening cherry tomatoes. What to do? Make tomato sauce. But cherry tomatoes are a hassle to peal, even after blanching, so I choose the lazy route, slice them with skins on and throw them in the pot. The resulting tomato sauce is tasty, but a bit watery and swimming with skins. The process by which we create something helps shape the final product. Our exuberance, laziness, playfulness, discipline, patience, bull-headedness, kindness, skill, and all the other qualities we bring to the writing process play a part in the text we finally create. Just as my choice to give the cherry tomatoes room in the garden rather than planting good saucing Romas contributes to the quality of my spaghetti sauce, each choice…
Revisiting the “So what?” Question
“So what?” Insidious, persistent, biting, the simple question is a brain-bug infecting every writer I’ve ever met. It gnaws at our confidence. It stops our pen mid-stroke. It’s a plague infecting whole classrooms—whole cultures, even, undermining the generative instinct because it assumes a vacuous answer. There’s no justification for creative work, it seems. And it’s the most important question a writer should ask. Only the crassest teacher scrawls “So what?” in the margins of a student’s work. Any mentor with half a heart knows that red ink seeps right through the paper and leaves an indelible mark on the writer’s sense of self. Now that I have twenty years of teaching creative writing under my belt, I know my primary job—if I care about the quality of literature emerging in the world; if I care about the well-being of the humans emerging from my instruction—revolves around the “So what?” question. …
Inevitable “I” Part 2
In Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, she writes: The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts. The world—the context within which the author’s life plays out—must show up in our story as well, and this inclusion requires memoirists to “move toward wisdom”, or, as I would put it, draw connections between one’s private life and the human experience. The connections are both inherent in the lived experience as well as created in the writing experience. Gornick goes on to say: A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will…
Inevitable “I”
If we show up in our stories as a character, our memoirs are stronger. Why? A reader entering a story needs shoes to walk around in and a pair of lenses to see through. We are embodied creatures. Even in the two-dimensional world of language, we need bodies or, at the very least, personality. Every reader of creative nonfiction is aware of the author lurking behind the story and brings to reading the expectation that the author will appear, either as character or narrator. Graham Swift wrote this about his fiction: “I favor the first person. One reason I do so is that I do not want simply to tell, out of the blue, a story. I want to show the pressure and need for its telling—I am as interested in the narrator as in the narrative. I want to explore the urgency of the relation between the two.” Swift’s…
On Length
I’ve been surprised by how many beginning writers have a strange notion that whatever they’re writing—say, a chapter or short memoir or essay—must be certain length—say, twenty pages—and get tied in knots when their writing doesn’t conform. Ironically, everyone’s assumptions about the proper length for a piece are different. Where do these ideas come from? And why? I suspect these assumptions have their origins in twelve-plus years of schooling, during which every bit of writing comes with page expectations. Our five-paragraph themes had to be three pages long. Our college essays had to present our response to certain texts within twelve pages. When I taught creative writing at a seminary a few years ago, I was amazed at how many times my students asked me how long their assignments had to be. “As long as they need to be,” I answered repeatedly. In the freewheeling world of creative adulthood, guidelines…
Tie-backs and Through-lines: Writing as Weaving
I grew up a mile from Philipsburg Manor, a restored colonial farm and mill in the Hudson Valley. The summer between seventh and eighth grades, I volunteered there as an apprentice to the weaver. I got to wear a bonnet and bodice, milk the cow, card and spin wool, and I learned to weave. The loom filled an entire room; the beater was the size of a roof beam. I slipped the shuttle back and forth, watching the home-spun wool unravel and gradually fill the warp with color. I pulled the great beam forward and beat each pass-through into place. As I continue to work on my novel this summer, I’ve been thinking about that apprenticeship. The initial drafting of my story was very much like carding. When you card wool, you use these crude paddles with metal teeth to brush out all the seeds and tangles that sheep accumulate. …
Removing What’s Not Story
I’ve just cut fifty pages from a polished, 400-page draft—that’s one-eighth of what I’d considered a completed book. What was in those pages? A few scenes that slowed down the plot, a lot of unnecessary dialogue, whole paragraphs of exposition, and hundreds of extraneous words extracted from too-long sentences. Everything I cut was not my story. As it’s very possible there are remnants of not-story remaining, I still have some final combing to do. And I’ve no doubt my agent and eventual editor will cut even more. I began working on this novel in 2005, and I am humbled by how much of the volume of what I’ve written has not been my story. Perhaps other writers are more efficient and economical; perhaps others have the capacity to anticipate the essence of an emergent story, or focus their work during the initial drafting, or otherwise find shortcuts that don’t shortchange…