Confessions of a Non-Fiction Writer
I do graphic design for a living these days.However, my degree is in English. Specifically, I received an English degree with a specialty in writing. "English Writing Arts" was the full title.
Even more specifically, within the "Writing Arts" division, I had concentrations in journalism & non-fiction. I considered myself a non-fiction then, as I do now. I don't read much fiction and I don't write it.
It was a weird trip, man. Being, technically, an English major who didn't read novels or the great works of literature. Shakespeare always intimidated me. Hell, my friends and I actually had a "movie club" in high school that rented videos of the great works the night before the test. It was like visual Cliffs Notes. I remember being worried, though, that I'd get to the test and mix up the names and characters, since there were no pictures on the test to identify them by. So, we would make up these descriptive alliteration-terms to help us remember:
"McDuff, Mustache; Banquo, Beard"
This way, when I got to the test, I'd say, "His family was killed? Yeah, I know who that is...it was the guy in the movie with the mustache. McDuff."
So, as an English major, people naturally assumed I was a literature-head. Really, a lot of that stuff intimidated me. I have a greater appreciation for it now, but I really was uncomfortable with this idea that I was required to find literary devices hidden in the works of fiction. To me, they were mostly stories. I didn't like looking for things like "irony," probably because I wasn't interested enough in said stories to pay attention closely enough to recognize these little things that were supposedly put there intentionally. So I used to miss a lot of that stuff back in high school and junior high.
Fast forward to my junior year of college. I was taking a fiction writing course as part of my major requirements, and, man, was I nervous!. The course involved writing a 20 or so page short story, distributing it to everyone in the class for them to read, and—on "your" week—having the class come in and criticize it in front of everyone.
**nausea**
Wow. I was sweating. The class was nothing but wanna-be award-winning future novelists, and they had this sort of pretentiousness about the way they discussed their literature. I felt like a huge fish out of water. And I was afraid they'd expose every scale and fin on my body.
Well, I had a task ahead of me, and I had to give it the ol' college try, no pun intended. I had no reservations, mind you, about writing a little story. But I didn't know anything about these "literary devices." They made me uncomfortable. But I went ahead and I came up with this tale that I just packed with all this heady English major stuff.
I had foreshadowing.
I had irony.
I had symbolism.
I had all that kind of stuff packed into twenty pages. And I wrote in the first person, but through experiences that I had witnessed as a third person in real life.
And you know what?
The teacher and one sharp long-haired dude with a beard caught onto everything. The rest of the damn sophisticates and literary snobs missed EVERYTHING! That bears repeating. EVERYONE ELSE missed EVERYTHING! They weren't even looking for it.
"Where in the heck were you going with that thing?" one asked, and when the teacher explained it, they all laughed in astonishment about how they "missed it." And all the other stories in the class were simply just that: stories. Tales, usually based loosely on lame-ass college-aged stuff: "We all got drunk at the bar. But we learned a lesson about date rape that night at the keg party."
Wow. My story probably sucked, too, but you want to talk irony? The only guy in that class that would have ducked in the corner hoping not to be called upon in a literary criticism course was the only guy who incorporated all that stuff that these people were into.
But I did all that stuff to overcompensate for the insecurities I had as an inexperienced fiction writer. If I had only known....
....known that these other people were just as inexperienced.
...known that it was acceptable just to write a pleasant little story.
....known that I wasted a lot of time worrying about what these other people would think.
....known that I wasn't as "dumb" as I thought I was (or that these lit-heads weren't as smart as I thought they were).
Well... I'd have saved myself a lot of aggravation. Do you know they also all assumed I was writing an autobiography? (Which sucked, because my protagonist was a total loser.) I thought these important fiction authors were used to stepping into other people's shoes to write from other angles. Don't they do that sometimes?
That course singlehandedly cost me an extra semester at school, because I lost time by getting out of the fiction concentrate and into one more appropriate for my style of writing and my practice of reading. An extra semester was a small price to pay to avoid the nerves I got before going to that class.
I have one more killer fish-out-of-water story related to my college major coursework, but I'll save that one for a future blog.
Thanks for reading.
posted by Steve @ 2:52 PM
3 Comments:
You know, I was never into Shakespeare or the heavy lit until arund my sophmore year of college. That was the year I discovered one particular professor who absolutely loved Shakespeare. When he taught, he would act out the scenes, and in fact: ruined a good shirt when he ripped it open as he was acting out a passionate scene; broke a table when he was laying on it as a dead guy; was known to climb up the stair of the class on his hands and knees; etc. I could go on. It was because of him that I picked up an English minor to go with my Communications major/Creative Writing minor, just so I could take the rest of the classes he offered. It is too bad you never had the opportunity to experience literature under someone like him -- it made a huge difference.
And he never focused on irony or any of that crap. He just focused on the story and how it was told. I still have all the notes I took in his classes, since he encouraged us to write them in the margins of our books.
Ah, what great memories.
Steve, this one really resonated with me. Been there, done that. I took several creative writing classes, and though I enjoyed it (and still do), I was ready to pee myself every single time people were going to read what I wrote. I'm still like that, in fact, even after ten years' worth of selling my writing. I doubt I'll ever get past that feeling, really.
I guess that's why I never really got into the reading thing.... or writing thing for that matter. It's hard enough for me to find irony, foreshadowing, etc in a 1 1/2 hour movie, much less in a book that takes me DAYS to read! Most of the time it all goes right over my head (even in movies) and I'm left with "Yeah, it was OK, but I really didn't see why everyone thinks it was so great." I think a perfect example of this would be the second and third Matrix movies. Some people really loved them, how deep they were, how philosophical they were, the symbolism they contained, while the other 9/10's of the American population heard a distinct "whishing" sound as all that crap flew right over their heads. I was of the latter group.
Post a Comment
<< Home