I took a creative writing class back in college. All of us were assigned poems and all but four of us were assigned short stories. The remainder, which included me, were assigned "creative nonfiction"- that is to say a narrative presentation of something true from our own lives.
What I wrote was a rather loose narrative of sitting at my keyboard, having had an incident of genuine personal revelation that was truly important to me, and all of the reasons I had no intention of writing it for the class. It got a mixed reaction from the other students, but the teacher liked it, so I suppose that's alright.
I've been thinking about it for a number of reasons, though the immediate catalyst was reading other writers' blogs and watching them share things so heartbreakingly personal that I would hesitate to discuss them with the best of my friends. And here they were, flinging them out into the uncontrolled void, to land on who knows what sharp rocks, to be exposed to the unknown elements of other people's minds and hearts. I was jealous, mortified, exhilarated, and I think a little ashamed.
Part of the reason I think it's all knotted up in my mind is that that specific honest emotional component is something I had genuinely loved about those writers' stories, and I think it's something that's often missing from mine. And I don't think there's a good way to fake it, which means I would need to open myself up to the weird distant intimacy that comes when you really put yourself out into your fiction. I'm not really comfortable with that, except in very specific ways. I think the thing I'm least willing to share with people is joy, honestly, and I think it's fair to say that my writing comes out a little darker and more hopeless for it. Joy's a funny thing sometimes- light and delicate as a soap bubble, and while it's probably tougher than I usually give it credit for, I have a terrible tendency to hoard my little joys to myself, for fear that others, not understanding, will mishandle them or mock me about them. I'm generally quite a happy, upbeat person, but if I were a house, I would tend to entertain on my front porch, and most of my back rooms would be tightly locked.
In life and in writing, it's something I probably need to work on.
Lovely post. And pertinent, since it's something I've wondered about as well - does real-life reticence result in emotional distance in what we write? For me I think it does. I *have* written fiction with intensely personal themes, though only with much encouragement and the specific goal of *trying* to punch through that wall. Success was limited. I still had to remove myself to that place where an author sits, conducting and critiquing the action remotely.
ReplyDeleteWhat does it take to become comfortable with sharing intimacies? Courage? Confidence? An insouciant attitude towards the reactions of others? Repeated exposure to the discomfort until you develop the necessary armored epidermis?
Or abandon the idea of armor altogether and surrender to the experience of true vulnerability...
That sounds about right, I think. And scary as hell :-)
Hmm... I was told several months ago that I pull back from real emotion in my stories.
ReplyDeleteI was angry when I was told that, because I thought I was pretty good at faking it. But then, in some moment of weakness, I wrote a story that was 100% true and that generated the most amazing feedback.
If you're not 100% confident with writing something that is straight up true, just keep the bones of it and cover it with something you're comfortable with. Wrap it in something classic Lesliesque, keep the speculative element. The familiarity of the genre might make it easier to share the emotion behind it.
Or I don't know. :)