Writing Without a Net
My MFA program requires work outside my major genre, a minimum of one craft class and one workshop. Some people take theirs in separate semesters, but I thought I would get more out of the experience by taking both at the same time.
Then again, I’m the sort of guy who decided to learn to turn cartwheels at the age of thirty.
Anyway, my experiment has taken me beyond the safety of my imagination into the unforgiving world around me – nonfiction. Instead of simply telling stories, I can choose from a broad spectrum of options – essay, article, memoir, narrative nonfiction and yet more. So what do I do? Tell stories.
I can’t help that part of it. Telling stories is what drew me to writing in the first place, and to playing Dungeons and Dragons, both of which I began as a child. The gaming stuck, but the writing came and went. That’s another story though.
Because to me, everything is a story. Any given moment of time, any fragment of memory, any philosophical thought, is part of a story. It just needs its context made clear, its perspective brought across to the reader.
It’s a nice, neat philosophy that works very well for someone who writes fiction. When I started writing nonfiction, though, it became another matter thanks to one little limitation: I can’t make anything up.
That’s daunting to me. I once made up an impromptu history of the fork – yes, the utensil – to entertain a dinner date. I’d been clear that I was making it all up, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was telling an entertaining story.
To write nonfiction, though, while I can use pacing, tension and other structural tricks learned writing fiction, I have to work with what’s there. I can’t make up a scene that should be there, dramatically speaking, if it never actually happened.
For example, I could tell the story of having strangers as roommates during my first year in college. However, as I portray myself in the transition process, I can’t add a scene of a phone conversation with my brother in which mine are compared to the roommates he’d had as a freshman. No matter how many marvelous uses I can think of for such a scene, he and I never talked about roommates. I still have no idea what his college dorm mates were like.
It requires a different sort of strategy, and I think my fiction will be stronger for it. By taking some of my tools away, I’m forced to find other ways to work with the tools I can use. I’m enjoying the experience so far, and keeping up with the required essay or revision every week, although thinking about my life more has brought memories are springing out of the darkness when least expected.
For example, I hadn’t thought about my college roommates in ages, but I just remembered one of them menacing the other with a held chair for not doing his share of the Computer Science homework. Maybe for this week’s essay. . . .
