Back in undergrad, I was a creative writing major. At the time, what this meant - mostly - was that I could spend an inordinate amount of time drinking myself into oblivion, getting myself into questionable situations, skipping classes that were hard or boring, watching the early incarnations of reality television, going on random and horribly ill-prepared road trips, behaving like a complete and total idiot... and all in the name of becoming one of America's next great writers! According to my theory, one could not realistically write about a subject unless one had experience. It didn't necessarily have to be an exact mirror experience, but to write about life, you had to live it. You had to understand the motivations behind why your characters did what they did. You had to know, man... you had to KNOW. And when you're in undergrad (again, according to my theory), "living life" and "knowing" meant drinking myself into oblivion, getting myself.... you get the point. It is entirely possible that some of those experiences will be shared in future blog posts. It is also possible that this is a shameless lie intended to get you to keep reading.
In any event, one of the other things that being a creative writing major meant was reading a lot of really outstanding writing. Incidentally, it also involved reading a lot of really atrocious writing (usually in the form of writing workshops, with said atrocious writing coming from classmates but NEVER from me) - a primer on "what not to do," so to speak. But we mostly read the good stuff. One of my favourite authors was, and still is, Margaret Atwood. I can't say precisely when I discovered her or in what class, but I can tell you precisely which piece of work stands out in my head the most: her short essay called "Happy Endings." You can read it here: http://users.ipfw.edu/ruflethe/endings.htm
Surely at this point you are asking how it is that my favourite Atwood piece is an essay, and not one of her short stories or novels. Well, it is. So there. It brilliantly highlights that it isn't the ending of any particular story that is important. After all, the ending is always the same, no matter who the characters are. Rather, the hardest part to write (and the most interesting part to read) is, as she put it, "the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with." This is not only true in writing, but in life as well.
Think about it. No matter what path your life takes, the end is the same - you die. Yes, I agree that this is a morbid thought, and I recognize that there are many people out there who can't bear to even think about it. But it's TRUE. And BORING. It is one of two universal truths all human beings share: we are all born, and we all die. [Yawn.] It is what comes in between - how we craft our lives, how we handle situations, why things happen - that makes us who we are, makes us individuals, tells us what we are made of. It's the stuff in between that makes a story, and a person, interesting.
So who am I? What makes me an individual? What am I made of? Am I interesting? The writer in me has crafted multiple iterations of my character, but the realist in me has no idea which one is the correct one. Maybe starting therapy will help me narrow down the field. But ultimately, only time will tell which of my characters is the most authentic; in all likelihood, she will be some combination of reality and those artistic iterations, as construed by whoever is left to describe me. Here's hoping that person liked me!
One of my writing professors was fond of giving unusual writing assignments to try to get us to think about the written word and how to best capture what we intended to capture in the right voice and tone. One of the assignments was to write our own epitaph. Mine was:
"Not just a what and a what and a what."
Let's try for the how and why now, shall we?
