By and large, creative non-fiction has frustrated me. And not just every now and then, but almost universally. It all started way, way back in the beginning of March. I still remember sitting dumbfounded in a circle trying to figure out the answer to the question “what IS creative non-fiction?” with the rest of my group. We were reaching around in a dark room trying to find the light switch, and at the time we might have found the switch but definitely missed the dimmer slide. That room of creative non-fiction never fully lit up for me. When I was thinking about what to write for my long piece, I came up with an idea to write about crusading. However, just because I could create a historically correct crusader in terms of psychology, sequence of events, primary sources of other characters etc., the crusader I was going to be creating would not have existed. I felt such a temptation to go there, go somewhere that I had never gone before and see where it went.
I guess I’ve just felt that creative non-fiction has been limiting. I’ve seen places in my work where I just really wanted to tweak something a little bit, to give it that flair or that closure that the piece needed. I think my frustration shows in my first 250-word narrative (the audio is at the bottom of the post). Clearly there is a lack of continuity of tone, a struggle to find the right words, to put meaning into my piece. I needed to put more time into it to make it work as a piece for starters, but its roughness is a perfect example of my struggle to find a way to make everything I wanted fit. Although there isn’t anything fiction that I wanted to include, that it was coming so much from me and had to be so was difficult.
I enjoyed the stranger study quite a bit, because in some ways it was less non-fiction than the exercises and free-writing I had been doing. I was writing about somebody I knew absolutely nothing about; discovering them as a person by things that I could see was almost like making them up. I was choosing which person to monitor, in some ways choosing a character. It made me think hard about which details mattered, which details really say something about somebody. Even if in the future I choose to live more in fiction, the tools that I learned here in creative non-fiction (such as this, how to make someone real, what matters) are certainly necessary. I will add, though, that even in liking the exercise I still did have a temptation in the 250-word narrative to mold her a bit…
I also really enjoyed the process of learning to read as a writer (Reading Response). I’ve always enjoyed reading and trying to figure out what the author was saying, but this was new. In some ways, it felt like going forward in order to be able to go backwards: figure out what they’re really saying, the deeper meaning, and then figure out how they’re saying it and how they make you recognize this deeper meaning. It was incredibly challenging and frustrating at first, but I feel like as the unit went on I started to pick up on it and tune into it a bit more. I got really excited when reading Annie Dillard’s piece because I felt like I was really understanding what she was writing about and, to some degree, how she was pulling it off. I felt connected to her as both a character and an author.
The long piece (that’s the first draft, here is the second draft) really challenged me. I had a ton of difficulty creating a mental sieve. I could feel what I wanted to write about. What comes to mind right now is the BFG, specifically the scene where he’s showing the girl the jars of different dreams in his cave. It is like I had the specific dream bottle chosen, and I could feel the texture of it, but I had to figure out how to bring it to life. Not only was this hard in terms of figuring out just what kind of emotion/growth/movement it was, but also how to express that once identified. The huge questions of what to include/exclude and how to include it felt soooo enormous. The previous work we had done in creative non-fiction had been on a smaller scale, was a bit more self-contained and easier to tackle. This was big and unwieldy. I find myself now wondering what the differences would be between this assignment and a replica of it in fiction. Would I find it easier? Part of myself says yes: I wouldn’t feel the pressure of portraying exactly my identity and my perspective on the situation. I get frustrated sometimes that what I write is sometimes shy of that BFG dream bottle inside me. The pressure to recreate it exactly would disappear. However, there’s no doubt that there would be a similar pressure in fiction: the need to flesh out the dream bottle to the same extent so that it is real. I am very self-critical — maybe this other kind of pressure would be liberation in some way. The fiction piece would have to be just as real, for certain, but it could be something created and from imagination and thus more malleable.
As much as I may have been frustrated by the demands of creative non-fiction, I did enjoy just messing around with images and memories in my notebook. You can find some excerpts here. I liked being able to stay small and practice different types of stories/images and different tones/methods of telling them. I do wish, though, that I had branched out more with some of my 100-word responses. Sometimes I wrote them just because I knew I had to write more and didn’t put deep thought into how I might try something new. This was still helpful because it “built the writing habit” as Barbara loves to talk about, but I could have gone outside myself a bit more. I don’t know if I really had the time, in retrospect — it’s been a pretty packed semester… — but it’s a regret nonetheless.
All in all, I think I’m going to remember this unit as one of learning. I’ve grown as a writer in becoming aware of much more of the process. With creative non-fiction, I was always learning new ways to bring a story/person/experience/etc to life. I also learned many pitfalls. I think that the challenges of frustration and perceived limitation that I ran into were signals of places that I need to be conscious of at all times, regardless of what form of writing I’m engaging in. I know I’m being a bit vague, but it would take me a long time to list all of the things that I’m referring to. The fact that I have this many things going on in my head and my difficulty focusing right now is a testament to the new consciousness of writing and the process that I did not have four weeks ago.
