Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Started a Story
I started writing a story that is fairly autobiographical, and I don't understand my problem. This all stems from a conversation that Dvorak, Quiller, Dumanis, and myself had outside during the break of last week's class. The short version is that I have a ridiculous family and ridiculous friends, and because of their ridiculousness, I have a wealth of funny stories that I can write. For some reason, when I start to write anything personal, I just hate the way it turns out. It's probably at least partially my own reservations about spilling everything on the page, but it doesn't feel as natural as it does when I'm creating something out of the depths of my brain. The part that confuses me is that I have no problem telling the stories. When I tell them, they're short, succinct, and they seem to get conveyed exactly as I intend them to. When I put them on the page, I ramble, struggle to find words, lose focus, etc. I'm ready to start abusing my own experiences for stories, because I think that in the long run, I will write better stories when I'm at least building off of my own life (if not transcribing it on the page outright), but I need to figure out my problem before I can begin to develop ways to combat it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
I think the key is writing from personal experience, not about personal experience. That's probably one of those things that sounds nice, but doesn't really make much sense.
It does seem to me that if I use an experience from my own life, I do feel a bit like I'm cheating. I think perhaps the problem is I cannot put enough distance between myself and what I'm writing. If I'm going to write about a character based upon someone I know, I feel extremely limited. I also feel an obligation to prohibit them from doing anything incredibly horrible that makes the reader positively despise them. Unless of course, I already despise the person. Either way, it's too limiting. I also almost find it boring. Why write about something that already happened? Make something new happen.
I think the best advice I can give you when writing about a personal experience is, try to forget it actually happened. Start it and see where it takes you. Perhaps the story will indeed play out exactly how it really happened. Or maybe you'll discover a different path.
Hope that at least makes sense. After that, I hope it helped. Good luck. :)
I understand what you're feeling. I also have a wealth of not funny stories, but horrible sad ones. I also seem to hate everything that I write about them, but maybe because it is too familiar? I've been trying to use reality as a jumping off point for the story, and adding my own fantastic events, but I also have a hard time developing characters beyond the people that I know. Sometimes I feel like I add too much of me in a person, and so of course I end up hating them too.
I haven't done any creative writing in the past four years, so I'm lacking a lot of confidence and practice at this fiction stuff.
If it makes you feel any better, I've been doing creative writing for two straight years and I still lack confidence. I think that you and I share the same problem though, because I can start writing from an experience, but when I try and alter it, my brain struggles with the fact that it is different than my memory, and the whole thing falls apart. Maybe I should try writing when I'm drunk...
When writing from personal experience I like to mix things up. In the short story I'm writing now there is a female character with aspects that remind me of me, my mother, and a few other important women in my life. There's also some exaggerated personality traits that I've never encountered. The boy opposite the "heroine" is a creation of what I view as my worst parts. I guess what I'm trying to say is when I incorporate my own reality, it still remains far from truth. I think the biggest mistake any writer can make is trying to put word-for-word truths from their own life on pages. Because, like you said, if it's meant to be told in less than two minutes and get a great laugh then it's unlikely to be transfigured on paper. I use pieces of my own life, combined with pieces of life as I wish it had been or hope it will never be, when trying to create diverse fiction.
So, in my TV-induced insomnia over Christmas Break (my parents got digital cable which just makes for way too many channels to surf through at 4AM in the morning), I found myself watching some class room-oriented show on A&E Biography (they have an entire channel devoted just to A&E biography...is it just me or does that seem a little...over-bearing?) But back to my actual point. I was watching this thing on Hemingway and in my half gone daze, I picked up on the fact that the smart people (I assume?) they were interviewing on Hemingway were saying that Hemingway (like Shakespeare) never told original stories. He stole other people's life experiences (and not always very kindly) and made them his own through his style.
So in my own devious way, I've stopped telling wholly-original stories-- I take pieces from either my own life or from stories that other people tell me and then I build from there. So far, it seems to be working fairly well. And no, that does not mean I've pawned an engagement ring.
And that probably makes no sense, but I'm trying. Your blog has also had me laughing uncontrollably a couple of times, so I appreciate that.
-Katie (blogspot doesn't want to let me into my account, so I have to post anonymously.)
Post a Comment