This early stage of composing a personal essay should be messy. There ought to be many false starts: lists, half-sentences, abandoned paragraphs. There shouldn't be too much crossing out or erasing. That can come later.
Before giving directions for generating more writing, I want to review a couple of principles that frame this whole approach:
Do Not Interpret Personal Experience
One of the dangers in writing personal essays -- especially for Mormons -- is the temptation to leap to interpretation. This instinct isn't a bad one, especially for those committed to a moral or a Christian life of personal reflection in the hopes of improving oneself. I'm not opposed to that instinct. But I ask my students to defer this impulse to moralize or interpret their experience. Thematic shaping will come along later, but the first step is simply registering one's experience, respecting the raw data of personally lived events before processing that data in any way.
A Different View of Writing
There is a philosophical principle driving this literary approach, a different concept of writing. Life writing cannot simply be seen as an act of recording or transmission. Sure, you do want to "get it down" (as though "it" were a clear thing, just waiting there for you to package it up with words); and sure, you may wish to publish or preserve this writing for others. Knock yourself out! But what if we think of writing as more than just a clerical or technical art (recording), or even as a rhetorical art (trying to convey a message or influence an audience in a specific way)? What if we view writing as an investigative tool, like a microscope? Words and characters and descriptions and scenes aren't ways of expressing emotion or impressing audiences--though they can in fact do both. These literary tools are the implements of introspection, the equipment that can provide actionable evidence within the laboratory of reflection. These tools are strategies for seeing, for measuring, for mediating, for meditating, for revealing, and not just for communicating a known idea or bringing about an intended effect.
This approach to writing requires faith: you write without knowing the end (both "end" as in stopping place and "end" as in goal) but with confidence that this process -- part intellectual, part emotional or spiritual, part private, and part social -- can truly lead to good destinations: understanding, coping, a deepening of personal relationships, peace. A simple way to understand this philosophy and method for writing can be summed up in three words: Sight before insight. So, that's why you tend to the sights (and smells and other concrete details of lived experience) before tending to the patterns and themes that abstractly name meanings. This is why I am insisting upon this method of inductively gathering the "raw data" of experience. This exercise will help them heap up their pile of experiential mulch.
The assignment:
1) Use headings in your post for each of the five methods listed below and generate additional "raw" (undeveloped) writing. This writing can pick up from the writing done in class. Such writing may include lists, sentences, or short paragraphs -- and need not be continuous or connected writing. Try to do about 100-200 words, at least, under each heading, with an overall length of 500-1000 words.
For your post title, don't put "Brainstorming" or "Personal essay assignment" (though you should put "personal essay brainstorming" as a label for your post). Instead, for your title, tease us with a concrete detail, even if that detail isn't representative of all your brainstorming. For example, "Breaking the banjo string" or "Four reasons to return to South Dakota" or "Captain Awkward and the soggy fries" -- anything that's brief, concrete, and a little thought-provoking.
2) Read two other students' posts (at least) and point out whatever you find remarkable or indicate what details made you curious to hear more. Another approach is to indicate to the post author which of his/her ideas they seemed most engaged in talking about. What had the most the juice, the most energy, the most personal investment?
This will be due Saturday, October 18, by 10pm, with comments due by Monday, October 20th, at noon.
Generating the raw data of personal experience
Generating the raw data from personal experience is simultaneously super easy and quite hard. Why? Because the data part is pretty easy to put your finger on, but it is also hard to keep your hands off of. In other words, it's hard not to interpret that data. But we must try! Here are five categories that are of use in generating this authentic stuff out of which, later on, a great personal essay may emerge:
- Physical experience
- Scenes
- Speech
- Emotion in the moment
- People of consequence
Each of our senses register experience in different ways. At any moment, one may matter more than others. That's normal. But we are often too good at leaping away from all the direct, physical, sensorial experience that was part of the scene we are investigating. So it is good to consider all the senses, as well as the range of embodied experience we can have.
Something interesting starts to happen when one tries to account for this primary, physical, sensorial experience: you start to remember things. That smell of wet concrete is associated in your mind with your father hosing down the driveway. A single element -- one smell -- can thus evoke a scene or a character -- each of which can be further delineated. In this example, I might think of the "scene" of yard work in my family life, and now I'm suddenly thinking of learning to fertilize my father's rose bushes, or the time we erected a fence together, or the rabbit hutches we carved into a hill, or the stink of running over dog poo with the lawn mower...etc.
You have to let yourself go a bit, as I just did with that single memory about wet concrete. Could this be an essay about my father? my life as a child? yardwork? Sure! But I'm going to stop myself right there -- from leaping to an interpretation of the data. That doesn't mean that I must stop myself from my digressions. Not at all. At this stage in the writing process, freely associating can be the very thing that breaks things open. Maybe I do start describing more scenes and sensory experiences associated with my yard -- the time that I tipped the swing set over by swinging too high, the time my father shouted at us for not picking the fruit delicately enough, the time I found a way to hang tennis ball cans filled with water from the willow trees. Where is this going? I don't know! But I'm on a jag, and I can trust that I might just end up somewhere awesome if I go with the flow, grounding myself as I go within the concrete details, the atoms and molecules of real life.
2. Scenes
It's easy to see how the concrete details of lived experience tend to clump around scenes--that's good to recognize. Often, it is the physical scene that later yields symbolic or thematic value. So think about scenes, too. Once you have found a meaningful scene (one rich in details you can recall and name), you can flesh this scene out with more images and in the other ways suggested below--again, not insisting on any interpretations yet, though you may find your feelings gravitating to a specific tone which will be central, probably, when at last you do do more conscious thematic shaping. So, find details, paint scenes, and follow where the scenes take you. But this isn't a movie and there is no script, so don't you dare direct any of those scenes. Who knows if they will even remain after a single revision?
3. Speech
The spoken word lives powerfully for us--and I'm not referring here to wise words or important concepts carried through speech. I'm talking about the viva voce, the living voice, as something that marks a character or imprints a moment. Speech is subject to the moment and to the person or people involved. It can be great raw material. Looking over the various images or memories you may have listed so far, can you think of words that were spoken, dialogue that took place, or even (ignoring completely the ideas communicated) the tone, the dialect, the emotional valence of words? I remember my mother's voice -- uncharacteristically harsh -- both before and after her major surgery to take out that cyst. I remember her holding her hand up, gripping an imagined cantaloupe, telling us "This was the size of the tumor," and how I never looked at cantaloupe the same way again. Let speech speak: bring it back to the present by remembering its force in the present moment of some past event.
4. Emotion in the moment
It's easy to see that images are laden with emotion -- both reflecting and generating emotion. And in describing scenes or people there is often an emotional aspect ("He looked like I'd just deeply disappointed him."). But in this case, I'm describing your personal emotion. You've got to try to re-create your feelings and psychological state as they were happening back in that moment (not later, not now). When I was helping my father with his biography, I kept finding him talking about himself as a young man from the point of view of himself as an older man. "You can't use hindsight," I would tell him. "The Rulon of age 23 is not the Rulon of age 78. Be true to Rulon at 23." He then began to write about his first marriage in an authentic way, even though it ended poorly years later. He had to honor the reality of his feelings for this woman, no matter that she turned out to be, quite clearly, something far different than he first believed. He had to record how he first believed, how he really felt then. Try to approximate in your mind, now, how you experienced things in your mind, then. This is something I tried to do in my "In an Open Field" essay. Note how present to the moment I was there -- not just nature and the physical surroundings, but the emotional surroundings I was then experiencing.
Mormons sometimes aren't very good at acknowledging any kinds of emotions or feelings that aren't consistent with our overall positive version of life. That can get in the way of authenticity. It may be that you need to try doing this writing privately and only mentioning that you wrote about this in a general way publicly. But often you can tap into some pretty strong reality if you dare to write about wrong decisions, about moments of fear, temptation, violence, etc.
There is an equal temptation to believe that only dark or troubling aspects of life, or even happy but very dramatic moments in life, are the ones worth recording. Not always so. In fact, you can end up becoming sensationalistic, like those people who have to tell you how many foreign countries they have visited. Review the essay by Tessa Santiago. She never addresses thing sensationally, but she is still able to be honest about a sensitive area (women and body image).
It's not always easy to know how to approach an emotionally laden experience. You might need to talk it through with someone. Some experience is too private, too sacred, or simply too recent to be dealt with in a literary essay. I'm a big fan of what writing can do, but I also don't want to oversell it. Sometimes, you need to stay quiet, or stay away for awhile.
It's worthwhile to test the waters, to try to talk about the thing that you might be scared to talk about. That might be a very good sign. But as you go, you will need to use care. Being "raw" and "real" can be code for being insensitive.
5. People of Consequence
It should be obvious by now that good personal essay writing is all about people -- not just you, as someone experiencing things, but others who you connect with or who play a role in what matters to you. Close personal relationships are often a good starting point for personal essays, though you shouldn't feel as though you need to stick to that small group of people. Try composing a character sketch of someone: their physical traits, their manner of speech, their habits, frame of mind, and way of dealing with other people.
But also, think back to the images you've recorded or the scenes you've described. Then ask yourself who were the main agents in those scenes, the ones who made a difference (to the moment, not necessarily to your whole life). I met a man in an airport once whose leg was in a cast: it had been chewed to pieces by a boat's propellor. His story mesmerized me. I don't know his name and never saw him again. But his story became part of that trip that I took. People of consequence don't have to be parents or spouses or religious leaders. They can be strangers or acquaintances. Just bring in the "other important humans" as you brainstorm about powerful personal experience.
-----
Whatever you do, don't draw any conclusions or point out any themes or try very hard to guide where you are going with all of this. Let those who respond to your raw material tell you what seems to be of interest. You will use that feedback, later, as you decide what to focus on for the next revision.
No comments:
Post a Comment