Friday, January 29, 2010

How To Dance the Tarantella

Sorry I haven't written in a while, but I'm going to post some of my writing from the classes I took for my English minor. This first one is from a class called Personal Essay...great class! Thank you, Prof. Walters! The genre is creative nonfiction and this particular essay was meant to say something about the process of writing creative nonfiction, hopefully for the benefit of other writers. Here it is:

How To Dance the Tarantella

It is ten-o-clockish and I am still doing a dance to and from my computer and pen. It is the same dance I do every time I have something to write—a dance to bring a downpour of creative writing energy. I tap, wiggle and fidget to and fro until I decide to just sit myself down, even if it is in front of a blank page, listening to the clock tick-tick-tick. I am trying to get past page two of my second creative nonfiction essay, which is due in rough draft form tomorrow at 9:00 am. I am miffed about missing out on seeing “Where the Wild Things Are” with my friends. One day your work will be on a best-seller list. I have to keep telling myself something to feel better about missing the movie, to get myself going. Still, I am sitting slumped over in front of my computer with a self-pitying grimace on my face. I try another more self-encouraging pep talk. You will be a better writer for having stayed home. It works this time—well, at least I am sitting up a little straighter now.

While reading back over the two pages I have, I find areas that need a bit of editing. But what I’m really looking for is a piece of something, anything to get me across the three inches of white space between page two and page three—a spark that will light up the rest of the story. There are no sparks, though, not even a piece of driftwood to float across on. So, I decide that it must be time to make the box of brownies that has been sitting next to the toaster for about a week. I take the time while the brownies are baking up warm and chocolaty to google random things of interest on the Internet. I don’t think I have checked my email in a while, or at least since this morning. There is an email about a Halloween bash…hmm…Turkish delight. It’s 12:41 am. I make some notes: 4th grade reading groups
· We read about porcupines making pacts
· The advanced group read the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and got to make Turkish delight and eat it
I’ve worn myself out doing approximately nothing at all and so I retire to bed. In the morning, at 5:00 to be exact, I can move forward after sleep. I take whatever verb tense comes to me and just let it flow from my head to my fingertips, listening to the loveliest clickety-tap sound of the story being typed out. This is a rough draft. Just do it. The story stretches to page four by 5:50 am.

Upon meeting with my professor I am forced to think about why I’m telling these stories, why I remember those specific frames of my childhood. I can write things down, tell a story, but ask me to find the meaning and to sew it into my own work and my creative mind freezes as if from shock. Finding the significance in a story I want to tell is a little like plowing through a brick wall with all the human force I can muster into a toothpick. In my struggle to find this significance, I try to string my stories together, but I can’t even push the thread through that tiny needle hole. I just end up writing, pen to paper, pouring out any thoughts I have, at anytime, that either seem to connect or don’t seem to connect. I find myself doing some soul-searching, because there is something I need to say about what all my memories mean to me. Sometimes I feel crazy, jotting down these rambling thoughts. I know, though, that it is an active search for meaning—maddening, like when I’m searching for the right word that stubbornly remains on the tip of my tongue. Eventually, I realize that I have two more stories to tell. In the physical process of living and jotting down, listening to people, including myself and learning and scribbling, the stories collide at the point of my pen with a very-real-life significance. I can’t think about what I want readers to take away from my story to get to this point. That doesn’t take me anywhere but straight into a creative brain freeze every time. Maybe it’s self-centered, but I have to know what I take away from it. It is important to me that an audience gets something out of reading what I’ve written. What I’m hoping is that, somehow, if it is truly meaningful to me, then it will mean something to everyone else.

Now, I’m going back and forth again, trying to figure out what to say about creative nonfiction. How do I write about writing? I can do it indirectly by way of the above narrative, or I can face it head on, like so. It’s a fight, an inconstant process to get the words down on the page—a little of what I imagine it would be like to dance the tarantella. At some point the story finally just seems to resolve itself and then I realize that I haven’t paid a bit of attention to how I got there. I can’t keep track of all the conscious and unconscious decisions that make the essay what it is in the end—the how of telling the story, which is actually my favorite part.

One conscious decision I remember making on that second essay was to use Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp to inspire its form. Music of the Swamp is a narrative of a boy’s coming of age in the form of a cohesive collection of fictional short stories. Some of the stories border on creative nonfiction where Nordan himself said that some of the people and the stories were actually real and that he almost got in trouble for using their real names. I like the rhythm of Music of the Swamp and I wanted my essay to sing like Nordan’s work does. So, I separated my memorable stories into vignettes and gave them titles, but I gave all the people aliases, so no one would try to hunt me down and sue or anything of that sort. I kept a similar tone and attitude toward my memories to tie the vignettes together. I noticed that I did change the voice somewhat in the last two stories. It just felt right and it seemed like it was working, though I didn’t set out to do it. I had to step into my character from where I am now, speaking from my adult voice. That voice change is where I started fleshing out the significance of the stories and presenting the reader with what they mean to me now. At some point it pulls away from the narrative told from the perspective of my grade school age self and, I hope flows into a sort of adult author’s reflection. The last vignette is sort of a combination of the very short-story-like narratives that I start the essay out with and the vignette before it in which I start to talk about significance in that adult voice. The last story is from a memory of a second grade art project, but I narrate it from my adult perspective. I didn’t think about this being a good form or method to help tie the two perspectives together. The only thing I thought about was the fact that I was doing something different and when it seemed to fit I continued on in that way.

It is a strange thing, the difference between actual people and my creative nonfiction representation of them as characters. I control the characters in so much as how I present them as I see them now, how I saw them in the past, or how I want them to be seen, though the people are who they are. I don’t actually create them; I interpret them and draw a version of them to fit nicely into the creative narrative. It is surprising, though, how much there is left to manipulate in this character representation. Maybe it’s just as tricky, if not more so, than creating a new character. It was important that the characters I wrote of people in my second essay represented my memories of them and how I felt about them. I didn’t care if that representation was true to life or reasonable in light of my adult hindsight. In the beginning, I actually set out to let the stories have a sort of slant to them. I wanted the people and events to seem somewhat exaggerated, because that is how I remember them and that is how I still can’t help seeing them even as an adult. I used the most exaggerated descriptions at the beginning of the essay to present the creative nonfiction character Wendy Michaels. I felt that I had to introduce her in the following way so that the reader could sit at my desk and see what I saw:
Mrs. Zane has placed Wendy Michaels in the desk that is in the exact center of her first grade classroom. There are nineteen other students whose desks surround her like a halo. For the most part all the desks face the front of the room where Mrs. Zane is standing at the chalkboard, writing things first grade teachers write on chalkboards. She asks the class for answers and her voice twangs and scratches like a smoking fiddle. In a sea of small hands, one stands out unmistakably—the hand of Wendy Michaels. Wendy is sparingly freckled, as if someone has sprinkled cinnamon on her face only in the cutest places: nose and cheeks, with honey hair swinging at a sweet length just above her shoulders and wide blue eyes level at just the right height for a six-year-old girl. Yes. Just right. Wendy Michaels is the brilliance shinning right in the middle of Mrs. Zane’s classroom.
I have done the same thing simultaneously with the description of Mrs. Zane. I present the reader with over-amplified versions of my interpretation of these people. These versions are also meant to give readers a clearer portrait of the six-year-old character me. If the reader sees Mrs. Zane the way I did maybe they will begin to understand why I put gum in Wendy Michael’s hair one day.

I had my doubts. I mean, about creative nonfiction. Maybe, it wouldn’t be as much fun to write as fiction. For me, as it turned out, it is a lot more fun to already know the story I’m writing. No surprises there, at least to some extent. The difficulty I have with spinning a good story almost from scratch takes some of the enjoyment out of fiction writing for me. With creative nonfiction, I am free to enjoy the art of putting it down in words. It isn’t that my life is so much more interesting than anything I could imagine up…well actually, it very well might be. This is not because I have such a terribly eventful life, but because my skill in spinning a great story from scratch definitely leaves something to be desired. I know that my fictional stories are not completely fictional so that I’m never truly starting from nothing. My creative nonfiction is never truly non-fictional either, since my memory is quite unreliable and I do like to remember things in a certain way that isn’t necessarily the right way. However, creative nonfiction, allows me to focus, in a way that fiction does not, on how the story is told and also on what it can all mean to me and then to the reader.

I’m not going to dance back and forth any longer for this essay. If there is one thing I always seem to know in writing my essays, it is where the end should go. Sometimes during the creative nonfiction writing process I know what I want to do and am conscious of the steps I take, of counting them like in a waltz. Most of the time, it is a fight between that process and myself. I can’t seem to make headway except under the pressure of a close deadline. Then I am writing in a waking dream and I don’t remember how I got from page three to page four or from narrative to exposition. It is always an erratic dance of exhausting frenzied spurts of thoughts intermingled with the occasional flow of elegant prose, as my mind and feet take me in and out of telling my story.

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