Ryan Smith

December 10, 2009

Essay 2: Sharpness

            Ever since my major switched my biology to literature, I have been looking for the chance to take a creative writing course. I have been writing poems for years, though most have been scrapped, and have only recently moved to making short fiction pieces, so my experience beforehand was limited. I simply knew that I enjoyed reading and writing, and that such a class would help me foster the creative side. I assumed, somewhat rightly though not entirely, that I wouldn’t need much technical experience to succeed in such a class as I read nonstop and let the author’s guide and inspire me. Learning and being influenced by authors is, except in rare cases, required for good writing – what I lacked was technical knowledge and workshopping. As I have said in class, the dispelling of the myth (objective 3) of the isolated writer has been one of the most important things I have gained from this course.

             A surprising amount of knowledge came from the assigned textbook readings. Being mostly technical, or professional, in nature, these assignments helped to give context and validity to what was being in class. Among the particular examples of passages that informed or corrected my ideas about writing is a detail that was included in the chapter 15 handout, which explained carious methods and techniques used in the included story “Sausage and Beer.” In this section, the author explains how he came up with the story itself, which was a fictionalized account of actual happenings. After explaining the emotions that inspired the writing of the story he goes on to say: “Another purely factual element that drew me was the language of the insane. I don’t think I could have invented that if I hadn’t not only listened to my uncle on numerous occasions but also to the other inmates” (176). What is interesting here is what the author sys about that particular element in the story – it is something entirely factual, perhaps edited to fit the story’s needs, and not something simply created for purely fictional purposes. This is useful for identifying, in your own work, the purely fictional and the entirely. Something else noteworthy is that the author notes listening to the other inmates. Reading this, and hearing students discuss similar issues in class, confirmed my idea that the writer is a sort of special kind of reporter, gathering odd details, memorable conversations or phrases, etc. and preserving them in a unique form for future generations.
            A tip I found especially useful for my writing, as well as for reading the work of others, is located in chapter 13, and is concerned with the value, or lack of value, in written details: “Fragments of personal experience left in a story for no good literary reason are essentially junk details…At best, such details are mere clutter; at worst, they can mislead the reader by appearing to give importance to something that contributes nothing to the story” (165). Even now, these lines have my thinking back over my fiction piece and wondering if each detail is or is not necessary, or useful. Loose details my same trivial, but can, at times, make a considerable difference for the reader. It is rewarding to note a detail that ends up being reused or significant later in a story; it is frustrating to either note things which are never given any value or, due to detail clutter, not know what details are or aren’t important.

Something that I’ve learned specifically from class discussions that has benefited me is, like the isolated writer myth, the destruction of an idea that a story or poem has a long shelf-life as a draft (objective 4). Naturally I - and I’m sure many other students - once I finish a piece of work, tend to want to leave that work as it is, with minor editing. But I’ve learned after several edits of my fiction piece, and from testimony from the other students in class discussion that good work takes often takes multiple drafts; certainly, my own work has improved after having my instructor and peers critique it, and after having gone through and reworked things to my own liking. My resistance to changing my work is perhaps a mix of the foolish idea that exactly what I want to be said has come out of me, correctly, on the first attempt, and that I have a preference for works with a certain intensity, and I worry that that may be lost over multiple drafts. While revising “Fruition” I realized that both of these ideas are interconnect and false. A writer may well know what they mean to say, to convey, but it takes work and practice to have the words match then vision. Unless they end up second-guessing themselves, or listening to over-powering, misguided advice, a writer’s fiction will only improve with multiple drafts. The same applies for intensity; it can only be honed and sharpened by edits which eliminate weak words and structures.