Friday, December 29, 2006

Writing

Writing is hard. This is my problem lately: I start writing some introspective piece, then I get pretty far into it and I realize that it's like pulling a piece of yarn from a sweater. You pull one string and the whole thing starts coming apart. Writing is thinking, and the more I start thinking about things, the more complex they get. And it seems like as soon as I start putting things on paper (or computer), I get frustrated because I think, this is not true. I mean, it's not a lie, it's not like I'm making up who I am as I go along, but it's not the 100 percent real truth. Especially here where many things can't be discussed or I don't want to discuss them.

I think we all have this tendency to make everything a narrative, with a pat ending, all nice and neat and tied up with a bow, but the reality is jagged and curved and cut into pieces. You can take the bird's eye view or you can really be honest and get down into the curves and sharp edges. But I look at those and sometimes I don't like what I see. I write about myself and try to do so with some honesty, then I take a cold hard look at it and realize these things I don't want people to know about me may be things that I need to change.

I've always had this thing about fiction, that it's somehow inferior because it's not true, but lately I've begun to see things a little differently. Maybe in some ways fiction is more honest than nonfiction, because in fiction everything is made-up and there's nothing to cover up. Because it's actually less complex than reality, it's easier to get to general truths without wading through the compounding details. It's easier to get into that close-up view with fiction because it's in the realm of character rather than the realm of reality. You're criticizing the character, you're not criticizing me as a person. And I've never been very into creative writing but sometimes I am tempted to switch to writing short stories or semi-autobiographical novels rather than writing about myself and what's really happened to me and attempting to make some kind of narrative out of it. Do you know what I mean? Or am I just rambling?
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2 comments:

Georgina Baeza said...

Most of the stuff I write is memoir. It's a really interesting genre because it allows you to tell your story as you remember it. Plus, this is your writing and you can tell as much as you want. Some of the memoirs writters out there (like Alll The Pretty Animals) don't tell the reader certain "big" things and do a great job going around it. I mean, it really comes down to the fact that you are writing it and you can choose to tell as much as you want. People are always going to criticize and want to know more. But you have the right not to share.

In my Personal Memoir class, we were assigned Judith Barrington's memoir text and it helped with a lot of these issues.

5:17 AM
Annette said...

Thanks for your comment, La Brown Girl. I guess I am just having some issues at the moment, with writing and in general. Writing has always been a sort of therapy for me and it's a new thing for me to know that a few people might actually be reading what I'm writing. And it has made me a little more guarded than I have been in the past. But maybe the best thing to do is just write what I feel comfortable writing and not overthink it.

1:35 PM

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