As an English major, I’ve written many academic papers, but the requirements, style, and flow of academic writing is very different from the genre of creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction is geared towards the art of truthfully relaying a story in a creative manner. Truth be told, I don’t have much experience with writing stories. Obviously, I’ve told some stories but there is a difference between orally telling a story and writing one. Needless to say, the creative nonfiction class was a brand new experience for me.
Whenever I write any paper, academic or now story telling I ponder my focus for at least a day or two. I enjoy going into my writing knowing exactly what my focus will be. I’ve never been much of a pre-writer, but I’ve discovered that the journals were very helpful in enabling me to take on a task that I was rather unfamiliar with (creative nonfiction). Majority of the time, when I do begin to write, I don’t generally stop until I’m done or I encounter writer’s block. If that happens, I’ll go into hibernation and continue to think until I’m ready to write again. Once my paper is completed, I generally allow it to sit for two days before I begin the proofreading process.
As a writer, I’ve always struggled with digression. Beginning with one topic and adding supplemental information that eventually blends into another topic is something that’s heavily embedded in my writing. At the beginning of the course, I made a goal to minimize my common use of digression. With the longer pieces, it was more difficult. For example, in my essay, Fall From Grace, Dr. Chandler advised, which I later realized and agreed with an entire section could have been obliterated because it really didn’t add to the overall meaning of the story. When writing the short essay, I was fully aware that I had absolutely NO wiggle room for digression. Every word had to have a direct affect the remainder of the story. After pondering what I could write about, which took me about five days I wrote a short piece that totaled about 965 words. After revising my piece, I narrowed my short story down to about 725 words.
Shame on me as an English major, but I also tend to write in the passive tense. This class did allow some flexibility in that aspect, but I also made a goal to write in the present tense when it was required. I met this task with somewhat of a challenge when writing my piece titled Unresolved Mysteries because some segments of this piece required me to write in the present. For example, my follow up on my relationship with Kameran is in the present and I wanted to reflect that in my writing as to not confuse my reader. Matter of fact, the entire piece was between my pre-adolescent and teenage years to my life as an adult now. I paid careful attention to write in the present when needed because as stated before, I didn’t want to confuse my reader whether I was referring to the ten year old Jameelah or twenty-five year old Jameelah.
Learning to write stories wasn’t very difficult, but making sure to stay within the confines of the genre of creative nonfiction posed a little more challenge. I spent an enormous amount of time ensuring that the story I was sharing was as authentic as possible to the best of my knowledge. I also aimed to illustrate my stories rather than directly tell my reader, which is a requirement of the genre. I believe that I fulfilled this quality in all of my stories, but in my opinion, I did it best in the story titled Unresolved Mysteries. It was fairly obvious or so I believe that the character, Kameran had a mental disorder, but I focused on her walk, erratic behavior, etc.
Creative nonfiction has been very cathartic to say the least. The journaling prompts in class jarred some repressed memories and most of my stories derived from snippets of my in class journal. All of my focuses were generally about family, family structure, and how a child’s environment or upbringing shapes and molds the adult they will become.
Since my writing career has mainly been academic, I would describe my writing style as simplistic. My aim is to leave a little to the reader’s imagination and interpretation, and I tend to write directly with a hint of suspicion. I like to begin my story with the climax and allow the story to unfold as it progresses. In Fall From Grace, the reader was informed that I was pregnant within the first paragraph. With my shorter piece, I withheld the climax until the second segment. After making revisions to my drafts, I discovered that my writing could benefit from more imagery, figurative language, and literary techniques.
My imagined or targeted audience would be those empathetic individuals of society that are conscious and acknowledge what’s not so pretty in life such as poverty, rape, racism, etc. and have a yearning to evoke change beginning with themselves. I believe my audience might be the readers of the Sun Magazine. However, anyone is invited to read my writing.
Being that my Masters will be in Liberal Studies, I don’t know if I’ll have the experience of creating stories in the near future. However, creative nonfiction has enforced what I already believe. Writers must always convey the truth in their writing. In my opinion, public writing (just as any piece of art) should only be written if something is to be truly gained from the experience either for the author or audience. I have only submitted one piece, which was to Chicken Soup for the Soul, and I’m anxiously awaiting a response. After taking this class, if time permits, it’s highly possible that I will venture down the road of writing and maybe submit some pieces.
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