This is a link to my 3500+ word creative nonfiction piece. Blah.
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wow, chris. i’m so impressed and proud and humbled and sad and frustrated that i can’t think of any words beyond a third-grader’s vocabulary to describe how i feel after reading your piece. as your title for this post implies, i can really tell that this did, in fact, take everything out of you. and to tell you the truth, it took a lot out of me, too. and it wasn’t just the content of your piece that did it–it was the way you incorporated the dialogue into your thoughts and yet still stayed true to the situation and the other people involved (at least, as far a i know). as far as constructive advice goes, you might go back to the beginning of the piece, before you slip into continuous narrative and look at why you decided to hop around from bit to bit like you did. for instance, why not go chronologically? you mentioned the military before the tax collecting…why not put all of the military pieces together? i think that if you choose to hop around in the beginning, there needs to be more of a transition to the smoother, less jumpy second part of your piece. i’m totally just skimming the surface here because i just got back from newspaper awhile ago and i really need to sleep sometime soon, but really, man, i’m so, so impressed that you were able to get all of this down, and not just in a spazzy journal entry like i would be inclined to do if it were me. p.s. i think your bonneville is tight as all get out.
wow, ditto Tamara. Just reading this took a whole lot out of me–no doubt writing it took more. I really like the stories you tell in your story, and the way you thread your argument on the hill with your mother’s angry words about your father catches the reader by surprise and makes a significant comment on its own.I wonder if there’s a way you could use a similar technique even more in other parts. you have a very clear tone–the piece is especially powwerful because while it feels like a flood of feeling and memory you’ve tuned it just enough to make each word stick and contribute to the piece. the one thing you might consider playing with (and i’m just throwing this out there, it could go either way) is dotting the narrative with a few adjectival comments, describing a feeling or situation, that might enhance the readers’ perception of the physical context or of your emotional states of being as you hear the stories. i guess it’s a question of how much you want to be present in the story. i’m eager to see how this gets worked.
Hey Chris — I’ll chime in with the Tamara/Eleanor chorus; reading this was emotionally exhausting, and I can’t imagine what writing it must have been like.
Something you might want to come back to is negotiating the territory between the very specific details of re-told stories and the larger generalizations, both of which are present in sort of chunks throughout the essay. For me as a reader, I appreciate the specificity of stories more, but realize the value of explicit explanation. What if, instead of paragraphs like this one — “In my life, I have alienated friends; I have destroyed the greatest relationships with people I could ever hope to cultivate; I have broken promises and derided values; I have been pithy and small.” — you interwove this sort of explanation with something a little more tangible? I think the material’s there already. The balance between “showing and telling” is something that always gets talked about a lot in writing classes, but I think this is a piece where it deserves to get mentioned again. You show us a lot — some of the telling could be excised.
There are some small places we might want to talk about transitions, too. There’s so much I want to say here, and an essay of this length and emotional density deserves a lot of time and feedback — but I could go on for hours. I’m looking forward to talking about this in workshop tonight.
[...] to get over what I’ve done for so long. I found it important to tell you in the first draft of my long piece too many details of my father’s early past. I talked about him standing up to a [...]
March 19, 2008 at 1:41 am
wow, chris. i’m so impressed and proud and humbled and sad and frustrated that i can’t think of any words beyond a third-grader’s vocabulary to describe how i feel after reading your piece. as your title for this post implies, i can really tell that this did, in fact, take everything out of you. and to tell you the truth, it took a lot out of me, too. and it wasn’t just the content of your piece that did it–it was the way you incorporated the dialogue into your thoughts and yet still stayed true to the situation and the other people involved (at least, as far a i know). as far as constructive advice goes, you might go back to the beginning of the piece, before you slip into continuous narrative and look at why you decided to hop around from bit to bit like you did. for instance, why not go chronologically? you mentioned the military before the tax collecting…why not put all of the military pieces together? i think that if you choose to hop around in the beginning, there needs to be more of a transition to the smoother, less jumpy second part of your piece. i’m totally just skimming the surface here because i just got back from newspaper awhile ago and i really need to sleep sometime soon, but really, man, i’m so, so impressed that you were able to get all of this down, and not just in a spazzy journal entry like i would be inclined to do if it were me. p.s. i think your bonneville is tight as all get out.
March 19, 2008 at 4:01 pm
wow, ditto Tamara. Just reading this took a whole lot out of me–no doubt writing it took more. I really like the stories you tell in your story, and the way you thread your argument on the hill with your mother’s angry words about your father catches the reader by surprise and makes a significant comment on its own.I wonder if there’s a way you could use a similar technique even more in other parts. you have a very clear tone–the piece is especially powwerful because while it feels like a flood of feeling and memory you’ve tuned it just enough to make each word stick and contribute to the piece. the one thing you might consider playing with (and i’m just throwing this out there, it could go either way) is dotting the narrative with a few adjectival comments, describing a feeling or situation, that might enhance the readers’ perception of the physical context or of your emotional states of being as you hear the stories. i guess it’s a question of how much you want to be present in the story. i’m eager to see how this gets worked.
March 19, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Hey Chris — I’ll chime in with the Tamara/Eleanor chorus; reading this was emotionally exhausting, and I can’t imagine what writing it must have been like.
Something you might want to come back to is negotiating the territory between the very specific details of re-told stories and the larger generalizations, both of which are present in sort of chunks throughout the essay. For me as a reader, I appreciate the specificity of stories more, but realize the value of explicit explanation. What if, instead of paragraphs like this one — “In my life, I have alienated friends; I have destroyed the greatest relationships with people I could ever hope to cultivate; I have broken promises and derided values; I have been pithy and small.” — you interwove this sort of explanation with something a little more tangible? I think the material’s there already. The balance between “showing and telling” is something that always gets talked about a lot in writing classes, but I think this is a piece where it deserves to get mentioned again. You show us a lot — some of the telling could be excised.
There are some small places we might want to talk about transitions, too. There’s so much I want to say here, and an essay of this length and emotional density deserves a lot of time and feedback — but I could go on for hours. I’m looking forward to talking about this in workshop tonight.
Katie
March 19, 2008 at 6:29 pm
you shmuck, I was going to write paper before I started reading this. It is great, and it added so much more to the previous dabble into the subject.
March 21, 2008 at 11:10 am
[...] to get over what I’ve done for so long. I found it important to tell you in the first draft of my long piece too many details of my father’s early past. I talked about him standing up to a [...]