Places to Start
• places where you don’t know very much
(the things you already think you know will probably come out stilted, formulaic, and in a way that will be less hospitable to the reader; you may have to start with the things you think you know, but the trick is to continue to write through this until you come to an opening, the place where you come to the end of what you’ve already “figured out.”)
• memory, observation
• unanswered / unanswerable questions
• nagging memories that make no sense
• situations that are incomplete, interrupted
• a desire to redeem / honor / make meaning out of anything
A Method for Drafting
• A first draft is chaotic, messy, unformed, a dumping ground, a place to challenge yourself. After this is down, give yourself time away for “wordless amusements,” walking, showering, gardening, cooking, etc.
• The second draft is when you’ve finally figured out what you want to say. Now you can be a craftperson, be more cagey, come up with strategy and stucture. This is when you should think about the reader for the first time.
• The third draft is when you finally begin to think about language, word choice, and where you might look to get a response from a few readers. Before this point, it’s nobody’s business but your own.
Thoughts on the Personal Essay
• In the personal essay, there is no universal truth, only personal truth.
• The personae with which you write is a little bit bold, a little presumptuous.
• Yet it’s the form most available for people who are clueless.
• You start with “this is what I think” and you move somewhere.
• The strongest thing in this form is the antithesis—the point in the essay where you try to speak from the opposite of what you think and belive. Often its in that dialectic that the insight comes. If it’s really an essay, you need to wrestle with ideas.
A Method for Structure
Carol Bly has the following method for creating structure in the personal essay—to include:
1. an image (something concrete, dialogue, a visual, an object)
2. an idea (vision, insight, something that can be said in a sentence, a question)
3. an anecdote (a story, a memory)
Often by including these three elements as you write, one of them will rise up to sort-of run the essay. You can reinforce that piece and allow it to weave the essay together. But you keep them all in there, working their synergy together.
Memoir
• Any decent memoir has to have an essay component
• If your territory is dark, readers will stay with you if they know that you’re going somewhere. Humor is a huge help.
• Specificity of detail—things that are very unique to your own experience and personal sense of place—ground a memoir.
• Also good to pick a structure, a timeframe, a point of view, a storyline
• And, it’s good to remember that nothing is inherently interesting; we sometimes think that our own personal history is fascinating in all its intricate detail. But it’s good to be selective with details. The interest in reading a memoir comes in the meaning making. Sometimes describing a highly dramatic event can be almost harder to handle because while writing you become so caught up in how it all happened. Writing memoir is about moving through this, and discovering the meaning you didn’t know was there when you started to write. Memoir is about meaning making.
Credits: Patricia Weaver Fransisco, Hamline College. Compiled by Kate Lucas.
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