This kind of relates to my last post. My struggle with non-fiction. It's an odd thing to look at your life and go "that, that is a story." It's even more odd when you are able to look at different pieces of your life and string them together with a common theme. It's like assigning meaning to something that may not have meaning. Someone's obsession with nature may just be an obsession with nature instead of a complex revelation on what nature truly means to them. Someone who scabbed their knee a lot as a kid, could have just been clumsy or really liked riding their bike down hills without using the breaks without any other significant value. Neither or those instances really has meaning behind the story, so how does someone change that in order to write about it?
Another difficult part about non-fiction is feedback. How do you tell someone what to edit when you have to stick to the truth? You could tell them to describe something more, but maybe they don't remember anything else. You could tell them you really like one character, but maybe the character didn't say or do anything else in real life. Non-fiction limits the options for feedback in workshop as the writer is they only person there who knows what happened outside the story.
Reply to Cara
ReplyDeleteYou hit a lot of good points about non-fiction writing/analysis. Everyone’s perception of a moment or situation is going to be different. Some people will see a beauty that others may try to pervert. We all have our comfortable lens/genre that we us when writing no-fiction. There are those who want to dissect every word that is written or typed by us because they feel it makes them clever or educated. Criticism is a form judging, one that can be taken positively or negatively. There is usually only one person who can truly express the feelings at a particular moment (those shared with loved ones being the other possible one) and that is you. If I perceive something in a story that I read, I try and go into it without any preconceived notions.
Is it an obsession or chance meeting? I liked how you touched on the obsession subject. I think I danced around this when I was speaking after I read my story. Sometimes I feel like I am obsessive about being prepared. This did happen to my girlfriend this weekend and when she came back from her trip she credited my attention to detail (not always). It didn’t make e feel better that she forgot something, it was actually funny for me being that she ended up being ok. I know I got off point but I mean is that if no one gets hurt then criticism should be welcomed. Most people want to always be right, and personally I don’t want to be around you because you have to have stepped in shit to be able to smell the roses.
When personal opinion stops one from giving unbiased feedback, well, it’s a sad day. It’s the hard road that is less traveled but where the views of splendid beauty awaits.
It can seem, sometimes, that part of essay writing is an attempt to impose meaning on experiences that may or may not have them. It's quite true that sometimes a skinned knee is just a skinned knee. That's why I think it's so important to gravitate toward the material that is itchy, that raises questions for us because it is when those questions come into contact with the particulars of our experience that insight might arise. Sometimes we don't know what those questions are at first, which is why it pays off to experiment with material. Sometimes, though, we see or remember something and immediately think, "oh, that's weird?" Or "that makes me feel something." The worst thing we can do is muscle material around to conform to some preconceived "theme"--where's the discovery in that?
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