The Least You Need to Know

Much of our conversation yesterday sprang from a brief article by Sue William Silverman in which she discusses the importance of voice in creative nonfiction. Borrowing from William Blake, she defines the two major voices that writers use in memoirs and personal essays as The Song (or Voice) of Innocence, and The Song (or Voice) of Experience. The first, as Sue says, “relates the facts of the experience, the surface subject.” This is the voice of narration, telling us what happened in what order. This voice, in its purest form, can know only what the innocent “you” knew at the time of the events. The Voice of Experience, on the other hand, knows much, much more from its wiser position of distance from the events. This voice is the more reflective voice, the voice that interprets the subject matter and guides the reader through the experience that’s being dramatized.

We had the pleasure yesterday of a visit from Stewart O’Nan, best known for novels such as Emily, Alone, Wish You Were Here, Speed Queen, Songs for the Missing, and the recently released, The Odds, but also the author of an interesting book of nonfiction, The Circus Fire, about the horrible blaze on July 5, 1944, in Hartford, Connecticut. We’d read an excerpt from the book as well as last week’s articles from Gerard and Schwartz, so we were prepared with questions for Stewart about the research and writing of his book.

I’m pleased to have my student, Marty Ross-Dolen, as a guest blogger this week. After Marty’s entry concerning research in creative nonfiction, I’ll add a writing exercise, but now, here’s Marty:

I would like to thank Lee for this opportunity to act as a guest contributor to his blog.  I offered to write this week because I am both fascinated by this topic of research as it applies to the genre of creative nonfiction and because I love taking part in Lee’s class in the real world so much that I figured the virtual classroom would extend the discussion longer, which I easily welcome.

The poet and essayist, Sydney Lea, offered some thoughts on what he called “the lyrical essay” in an article that appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle in February, 1999. This was early on in the explosion of the lyric essay that has continued with the work of such writers as Ander Monson, John D’Agata, Jenny Boully, Eula Biss, and many others, but Lea’s thoughts on how an essayist works by the art of indirection, dealing with seemingly disparate particulars, as he or she writes toward a point of connection, are still extremely relevant to this form as it’s practiced today.

Last week, we talked about turning oneself into a character in creative nonfiction. This week, our focus is on creating compelling characters of other people. My students read a roundtable consideration on this craft issue that was published in a long-ago issue of Fourth Genre. One of the participants, Donald Morrill, talks about how characters in nonfiction “don’t exist just for our purposes–because they live.” In other words, unlike in fiction, where characters are invented by whatever means necessary, the characters who populate our nonfiction are real people who live or have lived. Morrill goes on to say that what fascinates us about these nonfiction characters is the part of them that lies out of sight. “Most of life is a secret kept by banality,” Morrill says. I love this line because it’s so true, and it’s so much at the center of how we go about creating characters of real people on the page. Just like when we write fiction, our nonfiction characters should be capable of surprising us. We shouldn’t be fitting them to a specific mold of the type of person we determine them to be; we should allow them the free will to be someone outside of type. We should be alert for those words and actions that provide an additional layer to their characters (a layer surprising and yet accurate), and thereby surprise us with what we’ve come to know. We should make our nonfiction characters as round and multidimensional as any unforgettable character in a work of fiction.

Friends, with the kind help of Silas Hansen, we’re going to provide the links to the readings and writing activities for the creative nonfiction workshop. Here’s a start, with more to come as the weeks roll along. As always, thanks for reading.

Reading: “Chop Suey” by Ira Sukrungruang | Writing Exercise, Week 1

Reading: “The Sloth” by Jill Christman | Writing Exercise, Week 2

Reading: “Swerve” by Brenda Miller, Scenes from a Weekend Poetry Conference” by Rebecca McClanahan | Writing Exercise, Week 3

Writing Exercise, Week 4

Writing Exercise, Week 5

Writing Exercise, Week 6

Our conversation in workshop today centered on Phillip Lopate’s craft article, “Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character,” which appears in Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard. Lopate points out the importance of the essayist becoming a round character in his or her essay, dramatizing the writer’s complexities and tapping into what Lopate calls “teeming inner lives.” Lopate suggests cutting away the inessentials of our characters and highlighting those features  that lead to contradictions or ambivalence. Characters become interesting to us when they act against type, giving us something we didn’t expect. If we provide a baseline of the character by establishing a pattern of habits and actions, then any variation that hits upon another aspect of the personality will immediately resonate with the readers. As Lopate points out, the personal essayist needs to take an inventory of his or her idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies, and quirks. He also stresses the importance of being able to view oneself from some distance and with a degree of self-amusement while also being willing to analyzing the flaws in one’s thinking. All of this is necessary to seeing oneself in the round, thereby becoming a vibrant and interesting character in your own essay.

In light of my uncle’s death and a trip to Illinois to see to family matters there, I asked for a volunteer from my MFA CNF workshop to do a guest blog post this week. Michael Larson has kindly obliged, and in just a moment, I’ll paste in his entry. Before I do, though, let me see if I can put together just a few thoughts about form in creative nonfiction as suggested by Brenda Miller’s article, “A Case Against Courage in Creative Nonfiction,” which appeared in the October/November, 2011 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. Brenda argues, and convincingly so, that it often takes cowardice rather than courage to write good cnf: “We need to shift our allegiance from exerience itself, to the artifact we’re making of that experience on gthe page.” By placing our attention on “all the stuff that comprises form(metaphor, image, syntax, structure), we invite what Brenda calls “inadvertent revelations.” In other words, the “deep and scary emotions” surface through an attention to form rather than to the naked expression of those emotions.  “Honesty, authenticity, bravery: all these qualities emerge under cover of form, voice, metaphor, syntax.”

Welcome to  what will be a series of ten posts from my MFA workshop in Creative Nonfiction at The Ohio State University. I did this same thing last quarter for my fiction workshop; now it’s time to step out from behind the scrim of fiction to the full exposure of nonfiction, where facts count but so does artistic styling.

Our ten weeks together in the MFA fiction workshop have come to an end, and the time has seemed to pass so quickly. When I was a kid, I thought time sometimes crept by so slowly. Now, of course, not so much. As a kid, I was good at making my inner thoughts known to anyone nearby, especially my parents when we were doing something grownup like visiting their friends, or shopping, or an endless number of grownup activities for which I had little patience. I was very verbal about how bored I was, how eager to go home, how thirsty, how hungry, how miserable, etc. I had no filter between what I thought and what I said. I was a kid. I hadn’t learned to keep things to myself.