Curls and Caffeine

How Writing For Yourself Pleases No One 

In anticipation of seeing David Sedaris speak in Princeton next month (birthday gift from Andrew!), I’ve been reading his older books. Barrel Fever, a collection of stories and essays, is disappointing compared to When You Are Engulfed in Flames and his more recent New Yorker articles.

I enjoy parts of it very much; Sedaris is a talented fiction writer and his love of words is apparent. But that is it, in fiction, sometimes we write in a vain way, to show off how gritty we can make the details or how distinctly we can build our sentences. But sometimes it turns out we’re just surfing the skin of our characters, we’re not making them vulnerable or memorable. We end up sacrificing depth of meaning for a sentence that sounds cool. The result is a piece that is enjoyable but not likely to be remembered.

I started a new job earlier this summer at an upscale corporate office. The building is massive–it has its own laundry service, car detailing, convenience store and full restaurant. It also has an atrium with a 15 foot waterfall. “There are trees growing inside the building.” I said to Andrew after my interview, “Trees!”

For the first few weeks I sat in the atrium for lunch, surrounded by palm trees and granite-everything, reading When You Are Engulfed in Flames. His work felt so honest and simple. It seemed natural. It made me want to write. 

Atriums are beautiful architectural accomplishments, they give the illusion that the space held by the building is actually outside. But, they are also a fire hazard, as they allow flames to spread to the upper floors more quickly than in a normal structure. I find this a fitting metaphor for surfing the skin of your characters: when you favor flair over honesty, you compromise your piece. Those fancy words and shocking plot points all fade away once the story is over.

I know I’ve done this in my writing, a good example is the short fiction piece Leon Strathmore. I see now that I was showing off more than I was writing. I tried to create a quarky character but left the story with little substance. The result is a piece that quickly catches fire and falls away from the reader’s memory.

Writer’s Block and Living Honestly

I’ve revised my short fiction piece, All In. I would not feel comfortable calling this a final draft, but I think it is worth posting.

I wrote the piece as a part of my fiction workshop class at John Jay. The original draft received some praise. Mostly, people said they didn’t think anything happened in the story. I wasn’t insulted or troubled by this. I wanted the turn in my story to be subtle and drawn out; I didn’t want to have a “Eureka” moment where everything fell into place.

The story was meant to be a simple one about honesty in art: How can we write honestly if we don’t live honestly? The narrator, Rea, is a twenty-year old college student, who is very guarded in all her interactions (she lies, is sarcastic, rude, cold, etc.). The story follows her as she tries to deal with writer’s block. I was trying to deal with issues involving authenticity, that is, the idea that when one is so unwilling to interact genuinely in their day to day life they cannot interact with the blank page successfully.

Here’s a link to the original post I wrote about this, that explores some of these topics more.

I’ve been reading Laraine Herring’s Writing Begins With the Breath (Shambhala Publications*). It has a really interesting approach to creating an authentic writing voice. Herring uses yoga postures and an awareness of the breath to help the writer access the part of the self that is usually guarded by our inner critic. Her first chapter is on risk in writing. She explains that most writers guard themselves in their works, “The writer tries to play it safe, tries to couch what he’s doing in layers of deep, and often beautifully phrased crap. The reader spots this right away…” But that through surrendering ourselves to our experiences, we can become more honest and compelling writers.

I very rarely take any risk in my writing. My memoirs normally adopt a sarcastic tone in order to downplay the importance of events. In fiction, I have created numerous middle aged male narrators, whose voices are usually comedic but distant. In an effort to tap into a more authentic voice, I created a female narrator in her twenties who was struggling to write a story (very much like myself). The result is the short fiction piece All In.

Any writer that shares their work understands that most people will confuse the narrator with the author. This can be frustrating, especially when we’ve worked so hard to create an interesting and complex character. But we can’t deny the little bits of ourselves that we invest into our characters (and that is where risk comes in–the more you are willing to invest, the more alive your story becomes, but also the more susceptible you are to be judged). Most readers will understand that if the story was purely autobiographical, the writer would have labeled it a memoir (as a side note, what is wrong with people who keep releasing fabricated memoirs? Why don’t they just call it fiction and avoid all of this?).

This is not to say that we can only write narrators that share our same demographic information. We all know that there is something that resonates beyond age/sex/location in a story. But to get to that point, we have to admit that if the story we write is our story then we’ll be closer to the characters and the result will be more powerful.

My hope is that the parts of myself I invested into my narrator, Rea, will make her believable. I also hope that readers will understand that she has certain exaggerated traits that make her distinct from me. It is a relatively simple story about self-realization and the confusion of college. Sharing this story is the most important part of the process (although believe me, writing it was difficult enough) so I’d love to have some feedback.

Thanks!
Gina

*For anyone who isn’t familiar with Shambhala Publications, they’re the ones that published Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, another essential tool for supporting your creativity.