What's next is we take everything we learned and practiced in poetry and begin applying it to prose. I know some of you are delighted to move on from poetry to get to storytelling and some of you would be happy to spend the rest of the term on poetry. Well, we'll just have to meet in the middle and surrender to the introductory nature of this course which is meant to expose you to the major principles and tenets of creative writing, including that of poetry and prose--prose including both fiction and nonfiction. (Heads up: we're covering all three of the areas in which you can choose to continue study after this class: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. FYI I'm the one who teaches the continuing classes in creative nonfiction, so I'm super excited we're delving into that territory now.)
The way that we're bridging the two is through the flash nonfiction essay!
What is the flash nonfiction essay? It's short and intense, like a flash. More specifically, for our purposes, it's 750 words long or shorter. Nonfiction means you're not making it up, you're culling directly from experience and memory. There's a connection between the narrator (or as we might say in poetry, the speaker) of the essay and the person writing it. As for its intensity, well, every word counts, and to get more bang for your buck, so to speak, metaphors, similes, strong images and concrete details (sound familiar, from poetry?) are the building blocks of the flash essay--with the addition of tightly crafted scene and character. This is where we're wandering into the territory of storytelling, of prose, and marrying it with what we know from poetry. But we write in paragraphs and full sentences by and large and eschew line breaks. Rhythm and meter, the way the sentences flow and sound, can definitely still be in, though we don't generally use a rhyme scheme, though some internal rhyme could certainly be beneficial.
OK, enough explaining for now. How about you take a look at a few examples to illustrate what I'm talking about?
Here's Candy, by Di Seuss, who used to teach here at K. Notice how it's built on a specific memory to tell a larger story about place, class, gender. Look at how she uses carefully crafted image, including color, to shape both scene, with some dialogue, and to establish and create character. Notice also how she allows herself to shift out of the past scene into observations from her present self--this is a classic move in creative nonfiction.
In Toledo, Ohio 1977 by Sean Thomas Dougherty, memory is central, as is place, class, historical time, though this piece is through a masculine lens that also focuses to some extent on race. Notice the vivid images through detail, again, that create character--several, really, in such a short piece of writing. Look at his admirable use especially of metaphor ("We were Band-Aids ripped off fast.").
Ann Panning's Candy Cigarettes also relies on memory, but it shifts point of view with use of the "you" as if the narrator is speaking to her past self. She also shifts in time, chronologically from past to closer to present, using cigarettes as a focal point.
All of these flash essays come from Brevity magazine, which exclusively publishes the form. Here's a Q&A with its founder and editor Dinty Moore about the form. Please read it to help you better understand the form so you can try it out for yourself!
Which brings me to this week's assignments:
1. Continue your observation journal. Culling images from life is still crucial for writing prose, both fiction and nonfiction.
2. In your journal, consider returning to one of the life events you wrote down at the beginning of term in your journal as subjects you might want to write about. Spend more time free writing about one or more of them, or choose something else, and really focus on concrete images and details as well as dialogue and scene. With fiction it's OK to make things up; with nonfiction it's important to not deliberately deceive the reader.
3. DUE TUESDAY AT NOON: write your own 750-word or shorter flash nonfiction essay, perhaps based on the free writing you did for #2. Focus on using strong images, metaphor and simile, dialogue. Your language should be very efficient, which means you show a lot in very few words (in Dinty Moore's essay he references the ideas of showing and telling, and what I'm asking you to do here is SHOW more than TELL. We'll use this language in workshop and for the rest of term.) You decide the subject matter, you decide which point of view to use (first person="I", second person="you", third person="they" without "I"), you decide how many paragraphs to use, and you're welcome to use any of the above example flash essays as models, or you can spend some time poking around Brevity's current and back issues if you're really into the form and want to see more examples.
For the rest of the term we'll return to Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird as well as read some short stories from the Scribner Anthology. I'm giving you the choice of writing fiction or nonfiction after this week, so there's a significant element of choice. And we'll continue to talk about the similarities and differences between them, the chief difference being that in fiction you get to make everything up (though it undoubtedly will be based on what you have perceived in your life) and in nonfiction you may not deliberately deceive your reader. There are also some different techniques we'll explore, though they both rely on scene, dialogue, character development, and structure (plot for fiction, not necessarily the same kind of plot for nonfiction)--in addition to all the careful tropes and ways we pay attention to shaping language from poetry.
It'll be fun. I promise.
Also, I'm looking forward to reading your midterm portfolios ASAP and getting back to you with feedback!
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