On Telling People You're Writing a Novel

It's an odd, conflicted thing, this telling of people that you're writing a novel.

On one hand, it's something you must do (if you're me, at least): I need public accountability. I occasionally need people to think with me through a rough patch. I need a cheering section. Thus using this blog to think "out loud": I need a way to process through all the thoughts I have about writing a massive project anyway, so why not use the blog to do that for all of the above reasons?

But on the other hand, telling people you're writing a novel (at least in person) brings forth a wide variety of responses.

Some people say, "Let me know when it's on the shelf--I'll buy a copy." (Which provokes an internal wince, since you've worked in publishing, even though you have an inkling that this is a fairly marketable idea this time.)

Others say, "Oh yes, you've done something like that before, haven't you?" (Another internal wince, since it seems to imply that the last one didn't go anywhere, but then you remember that most good authors have several novels in a drawer and you brace yourself from the potentially implied criticism.)

And then there's the most useful responses: "Oh, that's so fun. I hope you'll let me read it!"--which inspires a mental note to further explore how much they mean it.

Ultimately, the usefulness of the response has less to do with the words spoken, though, than with the non-verbals that come with it. Smiling, cheeriness, expressions of open faces pledging confidence in your abilities vie with those who have pursed lips and narrowed eyes expressing doubt.

The latter wouldn't affect me so much if I didn't have my own internalized critics of the seemingly grandiose idea of writing a novel to agree with them. After all, I worked in publishing and have been in the game. I know many many people want to be an author of novels and with the state of publishing, many excellently-written stories never make it to print. I know others have inflated senses of their own writing ability and will never make it to print, having written, to echo Lady Bracknell in Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," "a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality" or something else that isn't that bad at all but simply isn't quite there yet.

Sometimes my having been "on the other side of the page" can be a hindrance, that way.

And then there's the connotations of the word novel itself. "Writing a dissertation," for instance, was something that sounded a bit grandiose and unachievable to some, but then there was the proof that you were enrolled in a program that helped you along (and some of them knew that previously you'd completed your novel in a drawer, so they were sure you'd finish it). But "writing a novel," yup, that evokes images, for readers, of our favorite novelists, whether literary or popular, and encourages comparisons between whether you'll be able to make it to that level. It helps a bit, for legitimacy, to say you've enrolled in a fiction-writing seminar, but even then, they're not sure.

Ah, the neuroses of the writer! One must constantly fight these narratives with the broader truth: that one's earlier novel manuscript was a good warm-up act that was a lot of fun to write, and it's okay to leave it in a drawer. That one's been researching this particular new DNiP* for a long time and finally needs to take advantage of the time to write it, as life changes quickly and one never knows when one will have another opportunity for a long time. That yes, this particular idea has a good chunk of marketability to it, and one's academic strengths in research methods and in writing persistence and stamina in other genres, as well as research into how communication and storytelling work, will help one, along with one's lifelong love of reading and the enrollment in a fiction-writing class.

Besides, it's a lot of fun to write a novel, most of the time. One gets to create. And practice empathy for one's characters, which in turn helps one practice empathy for other people. So while one feels one has a chance of actually completing it this spring/summer and thence getting it onto the market (cue New Year's resolution), even if that didn't happen, one would still use this precious time to work on this project and drive toward those goals, because one is able to and finds it a worthwhile thing to do.

One just tells people (and updates this blog) to give oneself accountability to others to increase the likelihood of meeting the deadline.

So please keep cheering away on the sidelines, faithful friends who don't mind hearing about my efforts! Thanks for your support!

*DNiP=Dear Novel in Progress

On Successful Style-Switching

By some miracle I wrote 300 pages in a spring semester two years ago--but it was a dissertation, not a novel. And I fear my subconscious will have trouble making the switch from the diss to this NaNoWriSpr novel-manuscripting project and not recognize that this one, too, is a novel, rather than a dissertation. It simply must recognize that.

One of my biggest concerns for this new novel project of mine, for which the actual writing starts in less than a month, is that my recent requirements to write highly academic prose occasionally broken by creative non-fiction essays are unfortunately likely infect my novel's tone. That despite my best efforts to the contrary, 5 syllable words will worm their way into passages that are meant to be highly emotional or suspenseful. That my subconscious will add topic sentences to paragraphs. Etc. 

I've been a bit concerned about this process ever since I heard Camilla Gibb give an excellent talk a few years back at the University of Saskatchewan about her own long process of transitioning from writing a dissertation in anthropology to writing fiction, and writing it well. I really want to avoid a long transitional process if it is remotely humanly possible.

I have a few tips and tricks up my sleeve to try to hasten the transition. On a recent Way with Words podcast (love this linguistics podcast--it's been helping me re-focus on the joy of words this fall), Martha suggested a technique for switching among styles which simply involves copying the works of a master in whatever genre you're shifting into. I'm planning to try this over my holiday break--and probably still in the spring whenever I'm switching from teaching tasks and/or academic writing into the DNiP* project.

I've also bought a couple of useful reference books for writers to help me de-academicize my prose as well. Perhaps the most useful is called The Emotion Thesaurus, which arrived in the mail a few days ago. It will help me make my language about my characters' emotional states more concrete by giving me external and internal descriptions of things regularly associated with each of 75 emotions. With that and other writing reference books at the ready along with some time spent literally copying classic novels in my genre, I should be able to keep my prose both better honed and more novel-esque.

Here's hoping it works!

*Dear Novel in Progress

On the Beginning of NaNoWriSpr

I've wanted to do NaNoWriMo (that's National Novel-Writing Month, in which people try to write a 50,000 word novel during the course of November) for a long time, but at the same time I always thought it was a little crazy. A novel in one month? How could one imagine enough depth of character, enough plot twists, enough atmosphere and symbolism for a whole book in such a short period of time? After all, my dear Novel In A Drawer took 18 months of painstaking midnight labor sessions to be birthed, and that only after 6 visits to the location and lots and lots of research. A month always seemed a little ridiculous.

Here's the exciting news: I'm writing a new novel manuscript this spring--likely not in one month, but hopefully in 3-4. I meant to announce this earlier, but I got sidelined by my gratitude as I summed up the gradual rebirth of my writing life and associated writing stamina. I feel profoundly privileged to have the opportunity to do this, and I'm ridiculously excited about it at any point that I'm not overwhelmed by it. It's a manuscript I've been researching towards for almost as long as I did for my earlier project, and I feel this one might have actual market potential, which is an exciting thought.

Since it's not the right time for the social support that comes with the official NaNoWriMo, I'm thankful to be able to take part in an upper-level fiction-writing seminar class at my university this spring that will serve the same purposes. Keeping me on track. Holding me to the deadlines I would be creating for myself anyway. And in addition, helping me with craft and giving me feedback on whether at least parts of the thing are, well, any good.

I probably won't tell you much about the specifics of the genre or plot of Dear Novel in Progress--which I think from now on may occasionally be acronymed DNiP (or on days I don't like it as much, as SNiP=Stupid Novel in Progress)--but I hope to share process and progress notes in this blog along the way as another form of public accountability. I'd love it if any who read this blog would also provide cheers from the sidelines, as it were. Thanks in advance for your support.

It's a big project, this NaNoWriSpr of mine. But one I'm thrilled to have the time, energy, and resources to undertake. So incredibly thankful.

Writing Lessons: Research Results Gymnastics

So this year I presented 4 papers and a poster at 4 academic conferences. This fall alone I presented two. The first one I presented at the Semiotics Society of America conference in Cincinnati in October, the second at the National Communication Association conference in Chicago in November.

Both of these papers started as course papers. The first started as a 30-page conference paper, and thence needed to be turned, Alice-in-Wonderland style, into a short abstract for submission. Then later, after acceptance, it needed to be cut down into 8-9 pages of coherent presentation. After the presentation, it needed to be cleaned up and the style converted to be submitted for the best student paper award.

However gymnastic these efforts sound, the other paper was even more convoluted in its parallel-bars-style revolutions. It started out as a 12-page course paper. Then it was converted into an abstract plus a description of how it contributed to the panel it was a part of (which was all people from our class). After that, it had to be extended to a 24-page paper to send to our eminent reviewer before it was cut to a 4-5 page paper short enough to be fit into the 10 minutes I had to present at the conference.

These gymnastic writing gyrations have at times made my writing muscles a little sore this fall--after all, it's not easy to sum up a 30-page paper in a few hundred words, and even harder to take a complicated French philosopher and express your ideas about his work in a 10-minute presentation.

But these exercises, like those for the physical body, have ultimately strengthened my writing skills. I even think they've helped my fiction-writing skills. For instance, previously writing from a plot outline, which previously felt unnatural, doesn't sound all that untenable after all these practices of research results gymnastics.

So I'm planning to work soon on some plot outlines for the short stories I've been wanting to write, since yes--forgot to mention it previously--I'm taking a short story-writing class in the spring. Since my course work is done, the course is for fun, and I'm definitely looking forward to it. I naturally think more in chapters of a bigger whole than in short stories, but after these gymnastics I've been doing this fall, it feels like my writing muscles might be just strong enough to pack a lot of oomph in those short pages. We'll see how it goes.

Pushing the Manuscriptlet Back Out of the Nest

So this morning I woke up, checked my email, and found an email from Amazon that was actually useful for a change. For once, they weren't trying to hock me titles like Microbiology Made Easy from the one time I ordered a few textbooks for my med student boyfriend. On the contrary, they told me about the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, which is a very legitimate contest (sort of like an American Idol for manuscripts) involving a grand prize of a lovely large advance and publication from Penguin Books.

The judges? Very respectable authors Sue Monk Kidd and Sue Grafton. The genres? The novel manuscript could be from any genre. Better still, there was no entry fee.

The only drawback? It seemed it was the last day of 6 that one could submit (deadline was midnight tonight or until 10,000 entries had been submitted), and one needed to submit not only the first 3000-5000 words of the manuscript, but also the full manuscript, and a 300-word pitch statement. Optionally, in case one got to the part where people voted on one's manuscript, you could also submit an author photo, synopsis, bio, and story about the experience of writing the book.

And Sunday is ALWAYS my day off.

But it was exciting--I figured, why not? I'd been a bad mama bird, not having pushed my 81,000-word manuscriptlet out of the nest for the last 6 months, but I had most of the elements sitting ready to be dusted off and relatively quickly readied for online submission. No time to re-revise the manuscript or the excerpt for the sixteenth time, of course, but when I re-read the opening excerpt, I was much happier about it than I'd expected from my recent negativity regarding it. So I spent my day quite delightedly revising the pitch and polishing up the other optional elements, just in the extremely off chance that my little pages stayed aloft long enough for the voting round.

And it's now submitted. I feel good about having sent it off again. I'll be extremely happy if the little thing makes it past the first round, in which all but 2,000 entries are pruned away on the basis of the pitches, to the second round, in which they actually read the opening excerpts to get it down to 500 quarter-finalists. No matter what happens, though, it's just nice to have it out there in the world again. It's so good to be creatively active.

Oh, and you'll definitely be hearing if it gets to the point where people need to vote for it.

Life Imitates Art?: The Debate Formats

So last night I was watching the debate responses late on MSNBC when this political analyst came on. I don't remember his name (as I was still half-dead from my week of grad school insanity), but he attributed the more loosened up format of the debates in West Wing affected Jim Lehrer's insistence on McCain and Obama talking to each other. If this is true, a fictional representation may actually have had an effect on this election.

The thing is, as a West Wing fan, I knew the thing looked familiar as I was watching the debate. I knew I'd seen something similar on the show. As someone who's studying stories, particularly fictional ones, from a rhetorical, what-is-its-place-in-society way for my PhD, I found this just delightful. But beyond academics, if it's true, it could be actually quite significant within this already-unusual election.

So much to say. First, the analyst's case for this connection between the fictional and the real debate was compelling: he said that Jim Lehrer had been asked to take part in the fictionalized West Wing debate version a few years back, but turned it down because there was a rule that PBS employees couldn't appear in fiction (and Jim Lehrer himself had written the rule). That he'd talked to Jim Lehrer after the fictional version had aired, and Lehrer had liked the fiction version. We can't know for sure, but yeah, from my viewings of both (I watched that episode again a few months ago), there's a pretty significant echo here between the fictional and the real versions, particularly considering the popularity of the show and the fact that the debate moderator tonight actually had such a close connection with the fictional version.

Anyway, if this connection is true, this is huge. See, West Wing, according to teaser quote on the back of Season 4, is, at least in the eyes of The Buffalo News and those who wanted to put the quote on the season's cover, an "hour-long fantasy about what the White House might be like if honor and intellectual brilliance ever trumped cupidity and mediocrity." So this influential, well-written and award-winning show about what politics might be like may, a few years after its airing, be changing potentiality into actuality, which is pretty mindblowing to think about (though totally familiar ground for narrative theorists such as Walter Fisher).

Case in point:
LAST NIGHT There was much made in the post-debate coverage that Obama relaxed and look at McCain as Lehrer was urging them to, whereas McCain looked uncomfortable with the whole format and never once looked at Obama. And yes, Lehrer's role as the moderator highlighted this difference, as he was the one encouraging direct interaction.

IN WEST WING It was a situation with a youthful but smart Latino Democratic candidate (played by Jimmy Smits) goes up against a much older Republican mavericky candidate (sound familiar?). In the TV show version, both sides loosen up (not encouraged by the moderator but on their own--I think it was actually the Republican candidate who started the thing and insisted on a new debating style, and the Democratic candidate responded well), putting them on much more equal footing and making the audience breathe a sigh of relief as both characters became more likeable.

IN WEST WING, then, both opened up. LAST NIGHT, in the real version, only one of the candidates loosened up.

It makes me wonder, a lot. In a few directions:

1. Will art make a measurable difference in this election? West Wing was a very popular show, and that episode was only aired a few years ago. I can't have been the only one in the audience with narrative expectations based on the fictional version. Might these comparisons to the show's outcome actually affect in a significant way how the voting public interpreted the outcome of last night's debate? (One wishes someone had started a longitudinal study back at the original airing, so as to ask those people tonight was their reactions were. :) If so, the comparison can only be positive for Obama, it seems, and negative for McCain, which is incredibly relevant at this point in the election cycle.
   
   It's definitely exciting, in that the world of possibility offered within West Wing offers an antidote to what narrative theorists Bennett and Edelman say happens so often in the narratives crafted by politicians: that "stock political plots ([as opposed to] other, more useful narrative possibilities) construct meanings to counter...ambiguity," resolving "possible points of new understanding into [cut-and-dried] replays of the political dramas of the past." This means that literary representations of truth may have wedged new possibilities for the narrative genres put forth by the political culture of this country, which as Bennet and Edelman argue has difficulty achieving the sort of creativity and possibility offered by great fiction.*
   
   In other words, solutions that people have dreamed up and put into fiction are able to break into our polarized, highly conventionalized ways of thinking about politics in this country, demanding that candidates act in new ways, in a very literal sense.
   
   On the other hand, some might be disturbed that a scene in a TV show, in prescribing new ways for politicians to act, might have been able to act as a lobbyist, potentially swaying the course of the election. If you think the show's potentialities are the way candidates should relate to each other in the debate, you're likely to think it's great--if not, probably not so much.
   
   (By the way, I think Obama won the debate, and I'm perfectly aware that my judgment in that could be influenced by, among other things, the fact that I like the styles of relating offered by West Wing's version of political debating--they rang true to me when I first saw them, which gave me further grounds for the contrast between the two versions to seem particularly striking to me. In fact, if West Wing really had a conceivable influence on this election, I wonder whether it's possible that Obama's style is somewhat more accepted in general during this election because of some of the aspects of the "fantasy political world" West Wing laid before the American public.)
   
   
2. For artists, including myself: Does this raise the stakes on what we do? On the ethics of what we as artists choose to write? How we write it? This case seems to illustrate that our cultural productions have some pretty powerful rhetorical oomph--perhaps even influencing who becomes president of the US. That's some pretty amazing power--something to be taken seriously. I don't think it means that we should be making our fictions heavily ideological, allowing the "shoulds" of the world trump the "what ifs" within our stories, but it certainly makes me think we should at least be asking the right "what ifs"--important "what ifs"--and seriously considering our choices of characters, as well as other ways we might think in the ethical dimension about the persuasive power of the story to influence the world.
   
   
3. For narrative theorists and creative folks of all stripes: Not so much a wondering here as more of a WOW! Look! A pretty significant example that art, and its study, is incredibly important, and that stories are incredibly significant in how they shape our views of the world, and provide a testing ground for proving out how ideas may work in the world. Woohoo!
   
   On the other hand, though, it concerns me a bit. It makes a strong case for rhetorical and sociological interpretations of art, which is good, but with Santiago Ramos, I'm worried about our reduction of art to ONLY these aspects, so it makes me worry a bit about whether this kind of case could overly encourage that sort of emphasis at the expense of the other equally valid aspects of fiction, especially their aesthetic qualities as well as the ways they help us view people and the human condition in more complex and (often) sympathetic ways.
   

One final prediction, from a girl studying the rhetoric of conspiracies this semester: Someone in the McCain camp could so easily turn this whole West Wing and the debates thing into a conspiracy theory of some kind. I sincerely doubt that such a thing would be the result of a conspiracy--just shows that Kenneth Burke's idea in "Literature as Equipment for Living" is right--that we use situations in fictional stories to help us understand situations in the real world, as strategies for thinking differently than we are used to thinking.

* Bennett, W.L. and Edelman. L. (1985). Toward a new political narrative. Journal of Communication, 35(4), 158, 162. For more on rhetoric and possibility, see Kirkwood, W. (1992). Narrative and the rhetoric of possibility. Communication monographs, 59(1), 30-47.

Some links to stuff about the West Wing debate episode:

1. A description of it,
2. a blog post highlighting the political side of the episode,
3. a Washington Post article on the effect of the episode
4. an MSNBC post-episode report
5. AP article asking why real debates don't work like the episode
   

1:39 PM:

Really have to stop researching this soon and get back to more immediate stuff, but here's some articles making recent connections between the West Wing election and this campaign from
a Minnesota Public Radio debate article from yesterday and a BBC article from 12 days ago which says Smits' character on the show (and not to be a spoiler for DVD watchers, but Smits's character won the election, by the way) may have influenced Obama's run, and another blog post mapping the similarities and connections.

The Power of Choice

Over at the Good Letters blog, Santiago Ramos has posted about this How Fiction Works book (by James Wood) that I've been reading, blogging about, and enjoying. One comment he made is one that a lot of my classes have also been focusing on lately--the power of the author to both choose and exclude certain items from the story.

Both Ramos and Wood speak of this option in terms of the novel and speak of it as a potentially beautiful, artistic act, and I love that. The reason I love this is that the world of critical theorist academics so often speaks of all choice as negative, and arising from malign motives.

Often they are right, and have valid points--and social justice is a truly beautiful thing, highlighting the downtrodden and the oppressed. And I think that it's very important for us, when looking at something like a historical archive in the library, to be aware that how the items were chosen and what might have been excluded were important choices to analyzing the collection and towards building our view of history.

But I don't think that such exclusions are always made out of malign motives. I think that those who were building the literary canon, for instance, were simply trying to come up with a good list of literary works. And I think they did a good job of that. Sure, other things are worthy of study, and we ought not become snobby about sticking with the canon all the time, or assume those who made the choices or those included within it are unimpeachable. But I think we need not knock down these authors simply because they've been considered great. In fact, I think we should take some time to revel in the excellent choices these great authors made within their works when it came to language.

And we ought not think that choice is always a negative thing. Sure, as deconstructionist literary theorists such as Derrida famously pointed out, choice always involves both the chosen and the unchosen, but we couldn't live without making choices in our written and spoken words: in the things we choose to do each day, in the writing projects we choose, and in the details we choose to include within each line of poetry and sentence of prose.

I appreciate the attention the critical theorists have brought to the ethical significance of these choices and their potential exclusionary power, and I try to think more about these choices on a daily basis as a result, but as Ramos and Wood remind us, it's worth also remembering that these choices, on the aesthetic level, can create great beauty, and on a deeper level, can provide great meaning and dignity, helping us to appreciate how much we share in the human condition through beautifully chosen words.

The Ethics of Fictional Material

When I went to Alaska to collect research my first novel, I made many efforts to avoid what Uwem Akpan (Nigerian Jesuit priest whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker) refers to as colonizing another's world by fictionalizing it. I walked where my fictional character would walk. I took photographs of the undergrowth in case I needed to describe it. I measured how long it would take my character to drive into town.

I eavesdropped, and I paid close attention to those around me without always broadcasting what I was doing, but I made sure my fictional characters were conglomerates of a lot of different elements. Plus, I sought to imagine my way into the motives of the characters/viewpoints I disagreed with well enough so as to represent their opinions and motives somewhat graciously.

Many people told me I was being overly particular, but I wanted to do it right so that both natives and Outsiders would get an interpretation of Alaska that was bigger than just my interpretation of it, while containing my interpretation.

And then I met academic ethnographers, and took a communication class on field research and participant-observation. I now know I have been but a babe when it comes to the ethics of observing and representing human behavior (at least when it comes to academic non-fiction under the purview of the human subjects review board).

My question is this: should any of these extra layers of ethics be properly applied in the world of fiction research, in a modified form? For instance, when it's possible, should I be letting people know about my writing project when I'm observing them? Might there be any reason to review what I do with people's stories with everyone I chat with about a topic related to my book while I'm working on it? Might taking conversational fodder, observations, etc. and using it as raw material for one's novel at any point be properly called theft? If so, what would that point be?

Any thoughts from you writers and readers?

(Oh, and to make sure I give appropriate attribution, thanks to Robin and those in COM 682F for being part of the germination of this post.)

Two Kinds of Springs, part 2: Fiction

I realized, as I thought about these different kinds of springs for my writing, that most of the novel-length fiction ideas I've had going have generated primarily out of thoughts and reflections rather than the need to express an emotional experience. There's nothing wrong with that--I think they're excellent projects and I'm excited to be working on them, and they always help me process emotions as I'm going along. But there are a few consequences of this insight for my recent situation:

1. Fictional projects starting from thoughts need more simmering time while I work my way into understanding the emotional territory they occupy.
   
   Sometimes the emotional territory is, as is the case with one of the thought-motivated novels I'm working on, emotional territory that's painful for me to enter, and so it's good that my reflections have led me there, but sometimes the simmering time is all the more necessary so that I can enter that territory gradually, over years if necessary.
   
   At other times, the emotional territory and the culture these projects occupy is simply one that is foreign to me, and maybe involves a lot of getting inside the heads of people who simply are part of cultures or lifestyles I haven't been exposed to enough to write them immediately. This is good, as it requires me to empathize with those unlike myself, which is a good spiritual discipline. But it requires a lot of both research and simmering so that I don't feel like I've colonized these people whose motivations I don't understand. This leads to the second insight:
   
   
2. Thought/reflection fiction projects don't always mesh well with a lot of academic work. Not only do these kind of fiction projects require a lot of time for research when my academic projects also require a lot of time for research, the fact that they start from reflections can make them feel a bit too similar to everything else I'm doing. I love doing the research for them, and their subject matter would form great academic papers as well, usually, but the fact that they're projects whose emotional territory takes a lot of time to imagine my way into means that if I move past the research stage into the writing stage, they can suck up a lot of the time I should honestly be putting into other things.
   
   
3. As a result, I should be spending time, during the school year, writing fiction during the school year of the other type: that which flows out of emotions and situations I'm dealing with. I have a huge fear of writing fiction that's thinly veiled autobiography, but that's not what this means. Mostly what it means is allowing space for fiction projects to emerge that have been simmering within me without my head knowing about it.
   
   Case in point: a day or so after I told the whiny voice of my current fiction projects to sit in a corner, I sat down and sketched out the beginning of this story with academic characters, in a department different than the ones I'm in, but with whose emotional territory I'm immersed in on a day in, day out basis. This project is the perfect kind of project to work on during the school year--it won't take long to slide in and out of because well, the characters' emotions are familiar to me. In fact, I'm probably experiencing them on a daily basis, and turning them into art will help me to deal with them.
   
   Not only that, but it will give me motivation to make it through the parts of my academic life I don't like. When something I'm going through becomes dull, worrisome, painful, or whatever, I can see that as material my characters might also experience. And that will transform the very emotions that usually trap me and sap my essay-writing energy into treasured possessions, bits of hard-won "research" that will enrich the fictional story I'm working on. All of which will make my life significantly more enjoyable.
   

Well, I'm glad I figured that out. Art really is an odd and wonderful thing, isn't it?

An Insight: Two Kinds of Springs

(NOTE: I've been advised that my posts are getting too long again--they tend to do that--so please, if it happens again, leave a nice polite reminder comment. For that matter, if you have topics you'd like me to address, also leave comments for that. Thanks so much.)

One of the insights that came shortly after I'd grounded my creative writing censor is that there are two basic ways my writing projects emerge: (1) as Wordsworth's "overflow of emotion," or (2) as the overflow of thoughts and reflections. These kinds, which of course blur into each other at times, cut across generic boundaries such as non-fiction and fiction, academia and "creative" writing.

All the same, some genres do often align with one type more than another. Poetry, for instance, while it can contain thoughts and reflections, is often for me of the outflow of emotion type. And academic essays, while they often flow out of topics I'm passionate, and therefore emotional, about, usually start from my thoughts and reflections.

What really interested me about this insight is the two other genres that seem to come from either one or the other: creative non-fiction and fiction. Creative non-fiction can flow out of an emotional experience I need to express, then quickly merging with thoughts and emotions, or it can start with thoughts and reflections and then merge with my experiences and emotions. This is helpful for me to realize because the best creative non-fiction incorporates both seamlessly--expressing thoughts and ideas, but in a way that also expresses emotions and experiences.

The second genre, fiction, is the humdinger of the insight for me, though. But that's an insight for tomorrow.

A Different Way of Thinking Things Out

I was hanging out over at Image's "Good Letters" blog, and I was struck by the similarity of this post to some of the narrative theory I've been reading so much of lately--that is, talking about the link between fiction and its impact on lived reality. I was also glad to hear the affirmation of fiction, though I'd like to add a few thoughts and extensions to the thoughts expressed in the blog and the comments it got in response.

First, it is true narrative prose, particularly fiction, can do things academic prose can't (and that's why I write both and particularly revel in the fiction-writing task), but I'd like to also call out something both of them have in common: they both present a nuanced view of reality. One of the reasons that I both went back to school and started writing novels, after spending several years working on squishing large ideas into small words on web navigation bars, was to address questions in ways that allowed me to see the nuances of them again.

I enjoyed writing my MA in English thesis tremendously for this reason, and I hope it didn't try to explain away the creative works I was looking at, but instead helped people to have a deeper context of and experience of them. I know I was able to get a profoundly deeper experience of them while I was writing those hundred pages. I would in fact say that it's just as difficult to reduce my thesis to a journal article--both my supervisor and I tried before he suggested I send it as-is to a monograph series to see whether they'd like to take a look at it--than it would be to reduce Four Quartets' and Walden's deeply expressive ways of describing life to my thesis.

That is to say, I think that some things are simply irreducible to a few pages, and I'm thankful to live in a world where that is so.

But, to move on to my second point, I also think fiction--and poetry and creative non-fiction too, for that matter--have profoundly important roles in showing us the concrete expressions of what may happen, as well as appealing to us on levels other than the intellect. I think both these roles are profoundly important, and may act rhetorically to help us to see new possibilities.

Then again, this post is not supposed to be my dissertation, so I'll not ramble on too far in that direction, just pause and bring this back to its relevance to me as a writer and academic. The point is this: as an academic, I tend to live in my head too much--by the end of a semester's worth of classes I can feel that my feet are floating somewhere above the earth in a cloud of abstraction. Writing fiction, specifically, brings my feet back to earth (all the better that it's an imaginary earth, I say), giving me a way to think through the connection between theory and lived reality before applying anything to actual lived reality.

My fiction is of course not all, as Santiago Ramos says in the post, the equivalent of an "essay or philosophical discourse"--I'm also just playing and enjoying being artistically expressive and getting to know my characters. Still, when I write fiction, often I take a series of questions I have about the world and clothe them with an imagined reality to see what would happen. When I'm doing this, I love the fact that it helps me to test my thoughts by seeing their emotional and spiritual impacts on imaginary characters before applying them to the real world.

Yup, considering this ethical dimension of fiction, one wishes chemists and bioengineers were required to test out their theories in fictional form, trying them out sincerely on imaginary characters to see what the impacts might be, before trying them out in the real world.