Tag Archives: revision

April 28, 2013

Entry Point

By bethanyduvall

About a year ago, Susan Henderson came to UCF to read from her novel Up From the Blue. Some of us had the chance to go to dinner with her afterwards. It was a great conversation, and I’ve mentioned her a few times since then in blog posts.

One of the things I asked her was what strategies she uses for revising a long work. That’s been one of my biggest challenges as a writer, and, ultimately, the driving motivation behind spending the last two years digging myself into debt getting an MFA. I had a handful of novels, but couldn’t figure out how to revise.

Susan said that for each pass at it, we should look for different ways to enter the text. Never enter it from the same place twice, she said.

It sounded good, but I had no idea what she meant.

She went on to say you could enter it via characters, setting, or other elements of story. Fine. Good. But still vague. It wasn’t sinking in for me.

Now that Adelle’s novel is in an intermediate draft, with all the major signposts of story in place, I’m ready to put 36 credit hours of grad education to the test. It’s time to revise. And now that I’m actually doing it for the first time since dinner with Susan, I think I’m finally getting what she was saying.

I wrote this novel differently than the previous three. With the last three, I sat down and wrote chapter one, then chapter two, and so on. Every so often, I’d move a couple scenes around, and once, on Sarah’s story, I realized I was missing a chapter and couldn’t move forward without going back and putting it in. Halfway through that one, I also started writing the end. I wrote the last chapter, then the chapter before it, and continued to work backwards on some nights and forward on others. But even with that, I was writing in order. It was from the front forward or from the end backward, but always in order.

I’ve talked a few times here about how Adelle’s memory prevented me from writing her story that way. The chapters that I tried to write in chapter form are the weakest ones. Halfway through the project, I figured out I needed to write each of Adelle’s relationships from start to finish, and then break them into scenes and intersperse them with each other. The chapters came together through a quilting process.

Now, it seems like what makes the most sense for revising is lifting those scenes from the novel and putting them back into their individual threads in separate word documents, fine-tuning or revamping them as needed. Then, I’ll reinsert them into the text, opening up room for new ones or putting them in a better sequence as needed. What Susan said is making sense now. I will be entering each revision through a different character. So far, this has been especially helpful with characters too complex for me to figure out until near the end of the project. Some of them didn’t even have threads in the first writing. They acted as satellites within other characters’ orbits. I can also lift out scenes where I need to establish place or discovery, or any other element of story, and treat them with the same process.

I’m so excited to see how it all comes together.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joncandy/3755718285/sizes/s/

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Adelle's Story, Projects, Uncategorized, Writing Approaches, Writing Process

March 21, 2013

The Waiting Game

By bethanyduvall

I am between things.

I turned in my thesis just over a week ago. I defend it next Tuesday.

As with any novel that doesn’t follow formulae, I discovered the core of the book as I finished it. It makes sense. Once you get to the core, the only place left is the denouement. There’s no sense in writing more story, just in bringing the bits of this one to a close. If you’ve already figured everything out, there’s no reason to write it down in the first place. At least, that’s my experience.

So, after working on it for a year and a half, I learned, four days before it was due, exactly what happened to cause all of my character’s grief, and how she can use that to move forward.

Four days.

Now that I know what the different veins of the novel were arcing toward, I’ve gone back to massage them into the narrative more smoothly. But four days isn’t much time to develop the little clues that I put in intuitively without knowing what they meant eight, ten, sixteen months ago. My director and I always knew it would be an intermediate draft: finished enough to defend, but not polished.

The challenge is that now I can’t polish it until the defense is done. I can work on line-level stuff, which is good because there are little errors all over. But I can’t make any content changes or I may get confused about which draft I’m defending.

I’ve also started thinking about my next project. I’ve gone through the grieving stage before when finishing a novel, and in a couple months, when Adelle’s story is polished, I want to make sure I have some new characters to hang out with so I don’t get too depressed. It’s rough when people you’ve spent about half your life with for the past couple years just don’t need you any more. I’m going to miss Adelle and the rest of the cast. I’m even going to miss De, the character who gave me such a headache back in January because I had to figure out how to care for him, even though I didn’t like him very much.

I care for De quite a bit, now. It’s one of the reasons I know the ending is right, even though it’s not the ending I expected. De makes sense in ways he couldn’t before I understood the whole story. Everyone does.

So I know what I’ll work on next. Adelle’s novel has been an exploration of the question What does it mean to lose a child? The next one will move through the question How much intimacy can a relationship stand? But I can’t start working on it now. Some writers can generate and revise at the same time, but I’m not such a multi-tasker. I need to finish out Adelle’s novel first.

It’s only a few more days, and I have a lot of blogging to catch up on. Since my last post, I’ve had some encounters with fantastic authors. I’ve met Carolyn Forche, who wrote my favorite poem, and Neil Gaiman, whose work I’ve been reading for twenty years. I’ve been able to talk to Matthew Pitt and Kevin McIlvoy, and attended a reading by Dylan Landis.

So I have a lot to write about. But no novels to work on. Not right now.

image credit: Olgierd Pstyrykotworca, ”Bus Stop,”  http://www.flickr.com/photos/olgierd/4907659565/

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Adelle's Story, Projects, Uncategorized, Writing Approaches, Writing Life, Writing Process

January 20, 2013

Trusting the Process

By bethanyduvall

I’ve talked before about the word count conundrum, how some of my writer friends are great at setting a word count goal per day and meeting it, and how I’m not. This has been one of those weeks for me.

I’m coming in to the real meat of Adelle’s story. At the same time as I’m stitching together her memories and experiences for the second section of the book, she’s finally let me in on the event that caused all the confusion to begin with. A little background: this novel refuses to be written in a linear fashion. Through trial and error, what I’ve learned is I need to write a bunch of the “now” scenes and a bunch of the “just before now” scenes. Those I can usually count on if I just show up.

But right before I begin a new section (the book has 3 with about 4 chapters each), all the present and recent past scenes stop. Nothing comes. This is a good time for quilting together the scenes I have. I start moving them around and filling in the space between them so they happen in the order that the novel happens, which is different from the order of the events on the timeline.

And then, something remarkable happens: Adelle’s child-voice starts talking.

It throws me off. This week, for instance, I’m almost done quilting the second section together and preparing to move forward into the third. It’s been a few months since I began the scenes for section two, so I’d forgotten that it always begins with the child-voice. Wednesday night, out of nowhere, I’m working on the quilting and then I hear four-year-old Adelle begin to speak. And it’s immediate, insistent. If I don’t write it now, it will go away, and it’s absolutely urgent. I have no idea what she’s going to say, but I know I need to listen.

Her child-voice scenes have been increasingly painful to write because they contain the reasons she has such trouble with her memory. This one was nearly impossible to get through, the hardest of them all. By the end, my stomach felt like it would cave in. I had to stop for the night. I had a couple trusted readers look at the scene and help me get centered about it, and then I just stared at the computer for the rest of the night until I had to go to sleep.

I haven’t written on the story since, even though I’ve sat down to it every night. I started to get worried last night because I need to move forward.

But this morning, when Adelle’s child-voice picked up where the Wednesday night scene left off, I realized that there’s no writing crisis here. It’s all part of the relationship I have with this piece. It’s Adelle getting me ready for the final segment of the book. The core of it is the memory that caused her to start forgetting in the first place. That’s the memory I wrote Wednesday night. Everything else that happens in the final segment is a satellite to this memory. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to move past the second section when I finish quilting it.

This is why word count is impossible for me. I can’t say, Okay, Adelle, tell me your worst experience, and do it now in at least 1200 words. And then get yourself together so you can help me fill in the blanks in your changing everyday life.

She needs room, and I need room, to work with what has happened, to come to terms with putting it on paper. Words have weight and power. They are spiritual objects, and ordering and numbering them diminishes their value. This is not everyone’s process, and a word-count writer can produce words with power and weight, too. But I have to trust a different process in order to honor the work. I must leave word count to the revision stage.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindaaslund/3033054970/

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Writing Approaches, Projects, Adelle's Story, Writing Life, Writing Process

January 1, 2013

The Blob: Writing in Every Direction

By bethanyduvall

I’m celebrating the new year by working on the next phase of Adelle’s story. It’s fitting that this book is about memory. It grows the same way memory grows.

This has been unlike any other writing process I’ve ever experienced. I get an entry into the story with a scene and I start running with it and think I’m writing the first chapter. But by the end of twenty pages or so, I realize that the things that happen in this chapter, they can’t come first because my character won’t remember all of them at the beginning of the novel. So I come to terms with the fact that it really goes somewhere in the middle. I write around it, backwards, forwards, and in no direction at all. I write whatever relationships my character has, and I write those in order, and then chop them up and intersperse them through the existing scenes in the order she remembers events instead of in the order they occurred.

There’s something about numbers that makes it feel like progress. Writing chapter seven feels like I’m further along than when I’m writing chapter one. But I get none of that satisfaction with this story. It grows organically. It expands like a blob. I’ve just finished writing a new chunk of relationships. This past week I’ve been sitting down to start weaving them together thinking that I’m going to be using them to construct the next four chapters of the book.

But the going has been slow. I’ve printed out all that’s written, the old and the new. I’ve read through it all, outlined what was and what could be. I’ve chopped it up by scene and labeled the scenes with Post-its.

And now, I’m working on chapter one again.

I know some writers work from a perfectionist place where they write the first chapter until it’s exactly as they want it and then move forward. It means the process takes forever to get a complete draft, but there is less time spent in revision of the whole.

This is not what’s happening. I write a chapter, think it’s done, think I’ll keep going through the whole book and then come back and revise the whole thing. Then, when I keep going, I realize that the new information needs to be integrated into the whole existing manuscript. It is not progressive, it is expansive. The story keeps growing. It is getting longer and richer and better. But it is not happening in an order that follows numeric sequence. It’s happening like an ever-expanding blob. It’s happening like a memory: every time new information comes into play, the memory sifts it and connects it to existing information in ways that make it personally meaningful.

I know it’s growing, and I know it’s doing what it needs to do. I just really need to get over wanting to be past chapter one.

Maybe I’ll come up with my own labeling system. Maybe I will end the numbers until the final draft. Maybe I’ll label my chapters by color, jungle animal, or, more appropriately, the psychologist that most nearly aligns with the concepts of memory in a given segment. Why do we quantify fiction? Chapters, really, are as artificial as time. The sun will be in the middle of the sky whether we call it noon or not.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/microscopics/6080657146/sizes/n/

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Adelle's Story, Projects, Uncategorized, Writing Approaches, Writing Process

December 8, 2012

You Can’t Always Get What You Want (But if you try sometimes…)

By bethanyduvall

During the first year of my MFA program, I became doubtful. I had specific goals for myself as a returning student. I am 35, have written a few novels, published some poetry and lots of articles. I wanted to 1.) learn how to revise something as large and unwieldy as a rough draft of a novel, and 2.) build a writing community. A nice side effect would be that I’d walk away with a degree that opened more teaching opportunities. Last August, it became clear that my classes were not focused on novel writing, and the fact that I am older and have a family that I c0-support was going to keep me from many of the social gatherings that solidify the relationships among my writing classmates.

My fiction workshops have centered around short stories. If we do turn in novel chapters, many of the professors expect them to be discrete units that stand alone as complete stories. While the profs like to say that this is standard fair for published novels, it’s really just a matter of convenience: if chapters could also function as short stories, then no one needs to do the extra work of separating appropriate questions about content from those that would be naturally covered in other chapters.

But, seriously, how many novels have you read where every single chapter begins with establishing the basic background information over and over again? If we know from chapter one that Jane Bennet is Lizzy Bennet’s sister, and that Mr. Darcy is Mr. Bingley’s friend, wouldn’t it be irritating to have Austen remind us of this in chapters two, three, four, etc. before she felt she could move forward with the action of the story? Of course, there will be context that works around these truths, and a savvy reader should be able to figure the relationships out to some extent if they pick up the book at a random chapter. But it’s not the author’s responsibility to establish over and over again what chapter one already said. It’s her job to build on it and trust the intelligence of the reader.

As a teacher, I understand the need for developing assignment criteria that are functional for the class, and that approaching a novel in a workshop with 10-15 students can be challenging. But, as a teacher, I also know that if we really want to make assignments functional for our students, we can find ways to do that, or at least some middle ground.

Fortunately, I did my undergrad work at a wonderful little school called New College. At New College, if you couldn’t find a course on the schedule that fit your area of interest, you were expected to find a professor who had similar interests and expertise and develop a syllabus on your own. You could do this individually or as a group, but the New College philosophy begins with the statement: “In the final analysis, each student is responsible for his or her own education.” I am deeply grateful for being given that responsibility. I felt equipped to build what I needed out of what was available, whether or not the school had a structure that could provide it.

In the summer, I began a weekly Long Works Workshop in my home that has evolved into a group of tight-knit writers whom I adore and owe a great deal of my progress. We workshop novel and long memoir pieces mostly, but short stories and essays are welcome, too. The beauty of the group is that we are able to follow each other’s projects over a longer period of time than a semester, and we don’t have to limit ourselves to only two feedback sessions per semester. We had an end-of-summer retreat at Atlantic Center for the Arts, a wonderful facility for creative pursuits, and are preparing to host a Winter Retreat at ACA for anyone in the MFA program who wants to join. The group has become active enough that some of us are using the events on our CVs as we apply for professorships, so we decided we needed a name. We are the Shine Street Writers.

After summer, when our next round of fiction workshops began, the professor called for volunteers for the first feedback session. My friend Leslie and I had both been producing work steadily for SSW, and we both volunteered. We both got some wonderful craft-based feedback from our class, but sat in agony listening to our classmates ask questions about the content that were answered in other chapters, and that we both knew about from our summer work together. Ultimately, since neither one of us was allowed to speak or defend ourselves in workshop (a good rule, by the way, because it forces you to listen instead of mounting an argument), we both ended up explaining the context of the work for each other’s manuscripts. We knew we could get in some trouble for it, so it was a bit of a risk. But sitting there listening to questions and revision suggestions that the greater work already addressed made it a worthwhile risk.

Our professor, Susan Hubbard, listened. She was already a writer and teacher whom I respected deeply, but now she has even more of my admiration. She changed the structure of the workshop as a result of Leslie’s and my feedback session. Now, those students building long works may turn in a chapter for feedback as well as a chapter or excerpts for optional reading to provide context.

My most recent class workshop was the first one to allow this kind of context. Yesterday, I turned in my final portfolio for the class, and the revision on that piece is the best work I’ve produced in a year and a half. I have one semester left, and I feel like I’m getting what I’m paying for: I have a solid writing community that I trust to last well beyond the program and, finally, am learning how to revise long works into something that I can feel confident about submitting. Sometimes we have to make our own worlds, and sometimes we just have to be patient.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronjacobs/66393869/sizes/n/

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Writing Approaches

September 9, 2012

The Forest and The Trees

By bethanyduvall

Painting has come naturally for me in so many ways. It’s not that I haven’t had to work at it. There’s been plenty of skill-building, research, and humbling critique. But in general, paint makes sense to me. It is the way I think and pray.

Composition, though, has been a challenge. I could shade well, show dimension and emotion, mix colors intuitively. But I always put the images in the wrong place on the canvas, and now, after 21 years, I sometimes still do. Over the past two months, I’ve realized that I have the same problem with writing.

When I began working on Adelle’s story, I thought I was writing the first chapter. By the time I finished that portion, I realized that because of the way memory works in the novel, it could not be the first chapter. It contained information that the characters would not yet know. I figured it was maybe the third, fourth, or fifth chapter. I didn’t know which one. I set it aside and began working on a new first chapter.

About five paragraphs from that second attempt have ended up in the current first chapter. The rest has been scattered across the entire structure of the book. Between then and now, I stopped trying to write in order, and just wrote whatever scenes I had a grip on in the moment. I got snippets of childhood, teen years, early marriage years, and current moments. But not in that order. Even my sentences were often out of order, and I would only realize it when I went back days later to reread.

Two tricks helped me with figuring out the space of a painting. When I realized just how jumbled my focal points were, I spent almost a year imagining squares around everything I looked at. I would enlarge the square or shrink it, shift it up or to the left, concentrating on how the people and places looked from different positions within my invisible square. And I learned to work on a whole painting at once. Instead of getting one eye perfect before moving on to the next one, I would spend a little time on the eye, then move to the neck, then up to the hair, then into the background, and back to the eye. I painted a little bit of each part at a time so that the entire worked developed at the same pace. This way, nothing stood out as over or underdeveloped at the end, unless that was the intended effect. To use the old adage, I tried to see the forest and the trees at the same time, where before I’d been distracted by each branch and sapling.

Now that I have enough moments from Adelle’s life on paper, I have begun to realize that I’m doing the same thing: painting the whole story at the same time. When I stopped worrying about what came first and writing it in order, the story began to emerge on its own. I am starting to apply the square to it now. I made post-its for each scene and moved them around in different arrangements until I found one that made sense.

The novel is not finished; far from it. But I’ve learned something about structure and seeing and fear that I didn’t know before. From now on, if a novel needs it, I will remind myself to be comfortable with working a little on all the trees for a bit before trying to figure out the way they fit into the landscape. It feels like a free fall, but now that my parachute is sprung, I’m enjoying the ride.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Adelle's Story, Projects, Uncategorized, Writing Approaches

June 14, 2012

No More Raking the Muck

By bethanyduvall

I’m writing a novel like I’ve never written one before. The ones bulking up my filing cabinet in various stages of rough draft all came to fruition when I started on page One and stopped on page End. Because of the nature of studenthood, I haven’t found a way to do that with my current project. I use the chapters for my workshop classes and then must revise them for a portfolio grade. It’s forced me to rework as I go, and in some ways this had been great because it helps me crystallize the foundation of the story. For the first time in my writing life I feel confident that I will be able to revise the final work effectively.

But after turning in four of the five chapters I’ve written, revising them at least once each, and then condensing these five chapters into three chapters… I’m losing momentum. I’ve been stagnant for a couple weeks, even with the energy that gathers from sharing my work in a non-academic writing group. The critic is noisy and takes up space. I am bogged down. I want to be reckless, spontaneous, alive like I only ever could be in a creative work. In my daily life, I am quiet, well-behaved. Making art, verbal and visual, is where my rebellion lives. The critic is valuable, makes sensible strength out of my crazy ideas. But I’m done with mucking around in the same puddle of words. I’m ready to get into some trouble.

photo credit:  http://flic.kr/p/58nDm9

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Writing Approaches, Projects, Adelle's Story

May 25, 2012

Social Writer Paradox

By bethanyduvall

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpclemens/2610633533/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Recently I’ve heard a few people use the term “social writer,” as in, “I’m a social writer: I work best when collaborating with other writers.”

Now, I love people. I especially love creative people because they challenge me to grow my own work. But I have always thought of myself as an introvert. Over time I have learned how to open my mouth and talk. I have learned how to hang onto myself in a crowd and I think I can even put others at ease when I am at my best. But at the end of the day, I want to be alone or, at the most, with my small family. I like the quiet. I need time to mull over all the noise, emotional and otherwise, that comes with relating to other humans. It helps me make sense of the static of my own reactions.

I never even thought of any such thing as a social writer until I heard enough people say it that I realized it’s a real thing. I knew people collaborated; one of my favorite examples of this is Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet. In fact, Gaimen collaborates all the time, but usually with artists or film makers. I’ve done my share of collaborating as a visual artist: several of my mural projects, most of my art shows, and all the art events I’ve organized have been collaborations. Right now I’m collaborating with HD Counseling to develop artwork that helps people tap into their own stories.

I could say I’ve never done collaborative writing projects. But this would not be true, not if I count the good-night games I sometimes play with my daughter Zoie: she writes a sentence, then I write one, and we pass the paper back and forth until we have a story. Or we roll the story dice and take turns building impromptu narratives. And there is that collaborative poem that my professor had us write at the end of fall semester. “Shelf Life.” That was my poem. I had been thinking of the title for about a week, and then Russ wanted us to write the title and first line of a poem. We passed each one around the room until we got our own back with the authority to pen the last line. The finished piece communicated exactly the sensibilities I had wanted to put down, even though I wrote only two lines of it.

Being in grad school is making me more aware of my own habits. My best writing, so far, still comes from sitting alone and slogging it out, word by word. But that is only half of the practice. If I just sit alone and slog it out, I lose momentum. I learned while writing Sarah’s story that the weekly reactions of some dear friends energized me and propelled the progress of the novel. As a student, I value my workshop classes, but they aren’t enough to push the work forward at the kind of exciting clip that weekly readings can do for me. In a four-month period, we only workshop two or three times. With longer works like mine, this functions more for the course grade than to serve the work as a whole.

Now that summer has hit, a few other writers and I have started a workshop for long pieces: novels, memoirs, and graphic narratives. I am finding that energy all over again. I am so excited about working on Adelle’s story after getting reactions from the group. I’m equally excited about being a part of their processes. It’s different from class; we are writing because we are writers. We are meeting because we need each other. It is not for a grade and it is not because attendance is required. It’s because we feed each other as artists. As much as I need to sit alone to work, I am finding I need community in equal measure. I am learning to redefine myself. I need time alone as a person, but my work suffers from too much of it. I am a subbreed of the social writer class: I work best when in community with other writers.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Adelle's Story, Projects, Sarah's Story, Writing Approaches

April 3, 2012

Flashing through Revisions

By bethanyduvall

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncle_jerry/162852753/

In my Form and Theory of Creative Writing class, my professor, Jamie Poissant, required us to write a flash fiction piece. I write a lot of very short nonfiction, but I have a terrible time with short stories and have never felt successful about one that I’ve written. It takes me too long to get to know the characters and what it is I am actually writing about. Novels work much better for me. Out of the six courses I’ve taken since starting grad school, this assignment has scared me the most.

In order to prepare for it, Jamie had us read Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories, edited by James Thomas and Benjamin Rosenbaum. In the intro, they talk about how a flash fiction piece should, like a poem, cover a topic of much gravity in order to balance the compact nature of the form. As I read through the selections, I found the ones that resonated most with me involved characters that the authors knew so well they were able to select one or two phrases that encapsulated the entirety of the character. I realized that this is why short nonfiction works for me: when I write about a moment in my own life, I can see its significance in connection to the whole arc of my life so far, and so it is not such a stretch to make the moment a snapshot of the full arc.

And now… drum roll… I feel like I’ve had an amazing breakthrough for my revision process for my novels! Instead of starting my flash fiction assignment with thin air and characters I’ve only just met, I decided to work with characters from an earlier novel who just aren’t living up to their full, well-rounded expectations in the long project.  This way, I could know my story arc well enough to try to give the flash piece enough gravity. At the same time, the flash would give me a chance to really explore characters who have been giving me trouble in the revisions. The assignment became like the amazing flash of lightning in the photo above: one instantaneous streak of light, there for only a moment, but powerful enough to illuminate the entire skyscape that had been mostly hidden before. I am so excited to be getting to know my characters in this new way. Now I plan to use this method as an entry point to revising the novel. I’m even toying with the idea of writing flashes for many of the moments in the novel to see if I can create a more successful end product by incorporating some of them.

We workshop the flashes tomorrow night. Right now I’m still a little insecure about the piece because it’s the first flash fiction I’ve written, and because my characters are Orthodox Jews, and I am not. I am not Jewish at all, and one of my biggest challenges has been entering a culture that is not mine to write effectively and respectfully while still using dynamic, well-rounded characters. In the flash, it’s less intimidating to do the research because it’s one moment instead of a whole life.

After workshop, and after I’ve had a chance to do some revisions, I have decided to go ahead and take the risk of posting the flash here on my blog. I worked very hard to represent the situation accurately, but if you have more experience than I do with Orthodox Judaism, please look for my flash in the next couple days–by Friday night at the latest–and give me some feedback. I would really appreciate any insights you can offer. I will treat that blog post as a workshop experience, so don’t be afraid to tell me the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think this may be the most productive approach to revising the novel of any that I’ve found so far, and I need your help. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Creative Nonfiction, Projects, Sarah's Story, Writing Approaches

March 20, 2012

What is it about fiction?

By bethanyduvall

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicholasjones/5032232903/sizes/m/in/photostream/

This semester I am taking two classes and an independent study. One class is Form and Theory in Fiction. The other is a mostly nonfiction workshop that includes an unusually heavy reading load for that sort of course, making it a hybrid of student critique and Form and Theory in Nonfiction.

Each week I’ve read a novel and a memoir as a result. It’s had me thinking lately about the difference between truth in fiction and truth in nonfiction.

I’m not referring to facts. In both of these genres, the facts are incidental: present only to reveal a greater truth. In nonfiction, the facts are more important because they are the bridge that carries the reader to the truth as the writer discovers it for herself. Discovering a betrayal of facts in creative nonfiction can make the reader feel betrayed and corrupt the greater truth at the core of the work. But in my mind the facts remain separate from the truth.

I like memoirs. My favorites are The Color of Water by James McBride and Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. But I don’t write memoir. Here and there I will write a short–very short–personal essay, and that’s the extent of it.

So I’ve been asking myself: as a writer, what is it about fiction that gets me to the truth more effectively than nonfiction? Why do I have this affinity toward novels? When I examine my reading habits, I tend to choose just as many memoirs and biographies as novels. Why not write them?

The answer for me is pretty psychotherapeutic so far. It turns out that my novels have become vehicles for me to discover or work through a circumstance in my present life that I cannot get at in any other way. Here’s what I mean. Memoirs sift through the past, memories and events and histories, to make sense of a life. My novels, although they are about fictional characters, often reveal or parallel a circumstance in my present life that I had not realized existed before writing it.

Sarah, the protagonist narrator of the novel I am revising, is a young artist growing up in an iconoclastic Calvinist church and trying to navigate dating. Her encounters with experimental characters from the art community collide with her spiritual search for truth and get mucked up in her hormones and emotions. In this, we begin with similar circumstances. But otherwise, Sarah is not me. She has a different family and economic background, different friends and romances, a different developing career, different travels… and, the biggest and most important difference between us is that Sarah has different demons than I do. She completely surprised me halfway through the story by developing an addiction to alcohol. This is one of my biggest revision problems, as alcoholism can become a dangerous cliche in fiction. When I wrote her the first time around, I had no understanding of the disease. I finished the first draft in 2007.

Two years later, while working on revisions, I became aware that a member of my immediate family was an alcoholic. This had been true the whole time I was writing, but my only knowledge of the addiction was the lying, vomitting, violent steriotype in movies. Those extremes make it hard to recognize when you’re living with a milder, more functional version. I have since learned that having a family member with alcoholism almost always results in the nonalcoholic sharing a measure of the disease. I am not much of a drinker, but since 2009 I have been working prodigiously to find the balance between helping people and enabling them. I have been learning not to cover others’ mistakes or fulfill their responsibilities. I have been practicing the art of transparency: working against my instinct to hide information that might upset someone, against my instinct to hide my own needs to avoid conflict. I may not be an alcoholic, but I certainly have my own share of sickness. After putting Sarah away for a couple years, revising her now with new eyes is quite an experience.

Adelle’s story, my current project, deals with memories. I have to be careful about this because I try not to talk much about what I have not yet finished, but in general Adelle’s brain builds walls that trap her memories. She has learned to cope by creating systems to help her move through her daily life, keeps her condition hidden from coworkers, and avoids intimate friendships.

I began writing Adelle’s story in August last year. Three weeks ago, my doctor ordered an MRI that revealed lesions on my brain. I am now going through a battery of secondary tests to find some answers. The neurologist has given me some ideas about what it could be, but I have no official diagnosis right now.

In the wake of this information, doctors have asked a lot of questions that have made me aware of just how precarious my own mind and memory have become. Like Adelle, I can usually remember academic information fairly well. I can remember enough of it, at least, to participate meaningfully in class and sidestep the bits that have gotten lost in the fog. But I have also been forced to see all the systems I have in place as a safety net for my memory. I’ve been driving kids to school and picking them up since 2000, and never once forgot one. But in 2011, I began needing to set my alarm on a daily basis so that I would remember. I have post-its everywhere. I never used them before six months ago. I keep a notebook with me so that if I remember an obligation in the middle of writing or some other task, I can write it down and review the list when I’m done. Otherwise I feel compelled to get up right away and accomplish it because of the danger that I will forget about it until it is too late. I prepare my things for class at least an hour before I have to leave so that I don’t forget materials, but it’s common for me to have to go back to the house up to five times to get things I’ve left behind. My binders are color coded and include professors’ names, class meeting times, and room numbers because sometimes, even months into a semester, I get to campus and forget where I am supposed to go.

So this is what it is about fiction. Even if I think I’m creating a world for a character only a little like me, or not like me at all, ultimately they seem to become prophetic. They don’t tell me my future. They tell my my present. They tell me what I refuse to see otherwise. As a person who spent much of her life hiding truths–one of those secondary alcoholic habits I developed–I think it is just easier for me to work my way to where I am through someone else’s life. It’s less threatening somehow.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Adelle's Story, Creative Nonfiction, Projects, Sarah's Story, Writing Approaches

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 32 other followers