Peter Becnel

Our Most Personal Art

“Unlearn the popular image of a writer as an isolated genius producing masterpieces overnight.” Certainly these people existed—prolific great writers who were capable of crafting masterworks in fiction and poetry in brief amounts of time, all of these writers share one thing in common—they practice writing. One of the greatest tools to motivate the practice of writing fiction is a group that can provide you suggestions to improve your craft, motivate you to aspire to a higher quality of work, and criticize you constructively when your work is riddled with failing (particularly the types of failings that cause your work to express something contradictory to your intended message). The creative writing workshop I participated in this semester provided me with these three faculties. The quality of my work greatly improved as a result of the workshop's suggestions, and the interactions with other writers of fiction, far more rapidly than it would have if I were to work on writing without any constructive interactions with other writers.

In my opinion “the popular image of a writer as an isolated genius” probably formed as a result of the nature of writing as humanity's most personal art form. In painting a painter may make his brush strokes with a style that is so distinctly his that it can not be mistaken for anyone else by an expert on the matter. However the style of your brush strokes reveals little about a person's intellect, character, ideologies, fears, desires. Writing reveals the workings of a person's mind. This is part of the reason that writing is perceived as such a personal art form, it is the art form most revelatory of the workings of the artists mind.

This contributes to a typical writers desire to hide his work away, never allowing the outside world to see it (this of course is not typical to all writers, some of the more extroverted writers have gone out of their way to distribute the workings of their minds as far as they can). It is relatively easy to identify a writer by the way he thinks, the way that he phrases sentences, his unique way of describing things. Writing is very much about control, deliberate control of a flow of words through the fingertips. This control is a leading factor contributing to what I understand is an ongoing battle between writers and editors everywhere, even to this day.

In writing poetry, my goal was to compress my idea as much as possible. I wanted to employ slant rhyme, specifically the type of rhymes scheme which is typically heard in rap music (omitting the constant exoneration and the frequent profanity). I also wanted to work with a combination of related and conflicting images, also a style that is reflective of rap music. Having never written poetry before, I found the process exhausting. I worked and reworked my poem, went to sleep, woke up and read my poem, hated my poem, reworked my poem, hated my poem and on. After finishing my poem I remember feeling a tremendous relief, as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders, I felt that I had finally said what I wanted to say. Then I submitted my poem to revisers who told me that it was largely incomprehensible. I revised again and submitted my poem for a grade and found that I had made spelling errors.

One of the most valuable lessons that I learned from my experience with poetry is how difficult it is to revise your own work without bias. I spent so much time reading over my poem that the mistakes in the text became invisible; I wonder now if I was even reading toward the end. Perhaps I was simply reciting a different poem as my eyes glanced across the forgotten relic I abandoned. The fiction workshop did present me with one possible solution to this problem—walk away. Revising work that an author is not looking at through fresh eyes is entirely different from revising a work after you have parted from it for several hours. After a nice long separation from his work, it is possible for a writer to reexamine his piece more objectively. After a night of sleep, mistakes he doesn't see the night before seem to jump off the page.

“A manuscript is always a work in progress,” in a previous course Minority Literature, we read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and I thought the novel was brilliant. I was impressed not only with Morrison's writing abilities, the elegance of her prose and the effectiveness of her devices, but I was also impressed by the way that she nearly flawlessly demonstrated ambivalence, which was part of her thematic work. I was so enthralled by the novel as a whole, I read the commentary in the back of the book written by Morrison herself. She discusses how in many respects she wishes she could rewrite whole portions of the novel. In some ways she sees the work as a failure. At the time I did not relate to this desire, and I don't entertain the idea of writing a masterpiece like The Blues Eye, but I can certainly relate to Morrison's plight.

It is impossible for me to determine that even ten pages of fiction are finished. Every day that I look at my own work with a fresh set of eyes I see a fresh set of problems, and every time that I improve upon those problems the work becomes much better. This ties into the notion that the longer an author spends away from his manuscript the easier it is for him to edit his work, not only because he continues to grow as a writer and reader but because at a certain point he becomes unfamiliar with his own work. He is then able to edit the piece without bias. One of the great challenges in editing a piece of fiction, is that many of the devices are difficult to identify; especially if the tone of the story or passage is not dictate by the text on the page, and is rather a production of the author's intentions.

An example of an issue that can be hard to identify in your own work is pacing. Every author is deeply absorbed in editing his own work, therefore he does not need to consider pacing to engage himself in the action of the story. The reader, on the other hand needs the story to move with sufficient momentum in order to feel engaged. The text offers practical help for authors wishing to identify and remedy pacing problems, “a series of short fragmentary exchanges of dialogue can do wonders to enliven a scene thatt has become bogged down in description or low-key aciton.” By applying this knowledge, an author may be able to identify key pacing issues based on structure, rather than feeling. This gives the author a big advantage when editing his own work, by enabling him to analyze pacing problems outside of his developed bias of the story. The issue of these abstract complexities such as pacing, is that they create the phenomenon cited above; every manuscript can be improved upon, every work is a work in progress.

I took Creative Writing because I am extremely busy and I thought it would be an excellent manner of taking a course that provided me time to work on fictional creations. Creative Writing class did provide me with this opportunity, what I did not expect, was Creative Writing class hijacking my entire semester. No course I took this semester required me to think more than creative writing, and I think that I can honestly say that Creative Writing is the course I took the most value from. Learning to write creatively requires an author to create another world, I have never felt so much respect for the authors that I read in my literature classes. Writing is exhausting, it requires attention and focus for hours on details, and writing requires the author to make himself very vulnerable. It is impossible to write a work of fiction without writing much of yourself into the piece.

There have been many instances where learning experiences regarding fictional writing have already presented themselves in my life and curriculum, but the best example of a way in which this semester's creative writing class transferred effectively into another course, was a Basic Texts III assignment which I wrote about Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God. I began Arrow of God shortly after completing textbook reading over dialog, and I found that symmetry existed between the two pieces. In the textbook Arrow of God is written almost entirely in transliterated English. The term transliterate was coined to describe the manner in which Nigerian authors are able to express Nigerian sayings in English without jeopardizing the cultural authenticity of the particular Nigerian expression. I was dealing with Achebe's reasoning for writing in such a fashion and I cited the textbook, “using foreign language directly is usually done only if the phrases are brief.” Because Arrow of God is written in transliterated Nigerian, I continued to follow the logic of the textbook to shed light on the working of the language device in the novel.

Overall I would say that creative writing opened my mind to the joys of writing fiction. Although the process takes an incredible amount of time and concentration, the feeling that an author gets when he writes something well is difficult to describe. Writing is an art form that is truly individually you, it requires you to be vulnerable, but it remains rewarding to present yourself on paper.