Develop a short essay broken into four sections that shows how your point of view/approach to creative writing evolved this semester (200-300 words p

Artistic Statement1

MAJOR WRITING PROJECT 4: THE ARTISTIC STATEMENT (50 POINTS)

CREATIVE WRITING

DIRECTIONS

Develop a short essay broken into four sections that shows how your point of view/approach to creative writing evolved this semester (200-300 words per section; at least 800 words total):

Each section (4x) should provide a snapshot/glimpse into your point of view at that juncture in the semester (note: a specific snapshot/anecdote, not a summary of everything).

– First Section: Evolution from Start of Class to End of Poetry Project

– Second Section: Evolution from Poetry to Nonfiction

– Third Section: Evolution from Nonfiction to Fiction

– Fourth Section: Lasting Impression/Lingering Image from the Semester

Each section should stand on its own as one “vignette” (a brief, descriptive “episode,” kind of like a series of prose poems) but also work together with the other sections to show the subtle shifts in your experiences and approach to writing from project to project (as if you were flipping through a photo album of the semester).

We do not need an intro, conclusion, or even transitions from section to section; your sections should read as a series of photographs for your audience to compare and draw conclusions for themselves.

The first three (3) sections should include specific examples from one of the pieces you wrote for the corresponding project (just one piece, not both):

In the fourth section, you should choose one piece of your writing that you are proudest of or that illustrates how much you have grown throughout the semester.

The point of these sections (and essay overall) is not to show how perfect you were in each project.

It is to show how you have learned and applied the concepts throughout the semester and how you have grown as a writer.

Each section (4x) should include an epigraph from something that we have read/discussed this semester:

Each section should start with a short quote that somehow represents your approach to writing the in the corresponding genre as you look back on it.

You should have at least one epigraph taken from the poetry unit, one from the creative nonfiction unit, and one from the fiction/drama unit.

For the fourth section, you can choose any quote from throughout the semester that was the most important to you or best captures your growth throughout the semester.

Note that you can use any of the quotes that you wrote about for your reflection questions on each project.

Artistic Statement2

Your epigraph can be a particular line from our class readings that represents a theme/idea that you identified with or that made you rethink the way you view poetry, nonfiction, fiction, or creative writing in general:

I want people to read my work and notice my attention to language, or the way I’ve balanced elements of scene with my reflection on page four, or the actually difficult questions I’m grappling with on the page—the hard questions, the ones I want to back away from but force myself to answer.

– Silas Hansen “On Asking the Hard Questions”

You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: 'No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.' And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too."

– George Saunders ("What Writers Really Do")

"Strip it to the barest bones. Cut everything."

– Tom Chiarella (“Compressing Dialogue”)

And/or it can be a specific line from one of the pieces that we read for class that you used as a model and/or inspiration for your own writing:

Be suspicious of any word you learned / and were proud of learning. / It will go bad. / It will fall off the page.

– Miller Williams “Let Me Tell You”

“After my childhood, after all that long terrible struggle to simply survive, to escape my stepfather, uncles, speeding Pontiacs, broken glass, and rotten floorboards, or that inevitable death by misadventure that claimed so many of my cousins… I had imagined the hunger for life in me insatiable, endless, and unshakable.”

– Dorothy Allison “Deciding to Live”

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably.

– Lorrie Moore “How to Become a Writer”

The epigraphs and sections you include do not have to be “life-changing”:

Just choose four different quotes/lines that stuck out to you and/or stuck with you as wrote your projects (i.e. things that you highlighted, wrote down in your notes, or just remembered for some reason, even if that reason was that you struggled to understand it at the time).

Artistic Statement3

Don’t overthink this:

Go back through your homework and reflection questions from each unit (if you highlighted it, annotated it, copied it down, then it meant something to you at the time–there was something about it that seemed important, even if you didn’t fully understand until now, even if you don’t fully understand it now)

If you are still stuck, just write about four different ideas/themes/strategies/activities that made you think about writing in some slightly new/different way (i.e. light-bulb moments or aha moments or moments of confusion/frustration/struggle).

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164 HoNING YouR CRAFT

like writing about the explosion of Mount St. Helens or the World Trade

Organization riocs in Seattle, I have them pull out a piece of their own prose

and count the number of words in each sentence for three paragraphs. I also

have them jot down commems on the kinds of sentences they use: simple

declarative (basic subject-verb), complex, fragmented, and so forth. They do

the assignment, because it would be even more boring to sit and do nothing,

I suppose. Suddenly a little exclamation breaks out from a corner of the

room. "Ohmigod!" says one young woman. "All of my sentences are eleven

words long!" This young woman has been concerned about what feels to her like a

flatness or lifelessness to her prose. Here, in one rather mechanical but not

painful she's put her finger on the reason, or one of the reasons. On

further analysis she discovers that she has a penchant for writing one simple

declarative sentence after another: "I drive to the forest in April. My car is

almost for a new dutch. The forests are quiet at that time of year." The

metronomic beat of same sentence structure, same sentence length, has

robbed her otherwise sparkling essays of their life.

For the sake of comparison, listen to the difference created in those three

sample sentences by a little more rhetorical invemiveness: "In April, a quiet

time of year, I drive to the forest. My car almost ready for a new clutch." -SuZANNE

Scene Versus Exposition

Generally speaking, scene is the building block of creative nonfiction. There

are exceptions to this statement-more academic or technically oriented writ­

ing, the essay of ideas perhaps-but overall, the widespread notion that non­

fiction is the writer's thoughts presented in an expository or summarizing way

has done little but produce quantities of unreadable nonfiction. Scene is based

on action unreeling before us, as it would in a film, and it will draw on

same techniques as fiction-dialogue, description, point of view, specificity,

concrete detail. Scene also encompasses the lyricism and imagery of great

poetry. We have, as the Dillard quote at the head of this chapter indicates,

access to the full orchestra. We need to learn to play every instrument with

brio.

The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form 165

Let's begin by defining our terms. Expository writing, as the term implies,

exposes the author's thoughts or experiences for the reader; it summarizes,

generally with little or no sensory detaiL Expository writing compresses time:

For jive years I lived in Alaska. It presents a compact summation of an experi­

ence with no effort to re-create the experience for the person reading.

On the other hand, scene, as in fiction, uses detail and sensory information

to re-create experience, generally with location, action, a sense of movement

through time, and possible dialogue. is cinematic. Here is a possible

reworking of the above sentence, using scene: For the jive years I lived in Alaska I awoke each morning to the freezing seat of the outhouse, the sting of hot strong coffie drunk without precious sugar or milk, the ringing ccG' day!" of my Australian neighbor.

The version of this sentence dearly presents the reader with a more

experiential version of that time in Alaska, with details that provide a snap­

shot of the place: the slowness of time passing is stressed by the harsh routine

of the coffee and outhouse; we get a sense of scarcity of supply; the neighbor

even has a bit of swift characterization. Of course, for an essay in which Alaska

is totally unimportant the expository summation might be the better move.

But if you find yourself writing nonfiction with very little scene, you are likely

to produce flat writing readers have to struggle to enter.

Remember "The Knife," by author/surgeon Richard Selzer? This essay

moves fluidly between scene and exposition; Selzer forces us to live the awe­

some power and responsibility of the surgeon before allowing himself the

lmury of meditating about it.

There is a hush in the room. Speech stops. The hands of the others, assis­

tants and nurses, are still. Only the voice of the patient's respiration remains.

It is the rhythm of a quiet sea, the sound of waiting. Then you speak, slowly,

the terse entries of a Himalayan climber reporting back. "The stomach is

okay. Greater curvature dean. No sign of ulcer. Pylorus, duodenum fine.

Now comes the gall-bladder. No stones. Right kidney, left, all right. Liver

. , . uh-oh."

Selzer goes on to tell us he finds three large tumors in the liver. "Three big

hard ones in the left lobe, one on the right. Metastatic deposits. Bad, bad."

Like fine fiction, this passage contains a clear hospital room,

166 HoNING YouR CRAFT

characterized appropriately enough by sound rather than appearance: the silence oflife and death. There is action mimicking real time, containing the element of surprise. We learn along with the surgeon about the patient's metastasized cancer. There's dialogue, as the surgeon narrates to himself, to

his surgical assistants, seemingly to the fates, his discovery of the patient's

mortality. And, like fine poetry, this piece of writing also organizes itself through imagery: the "quiet sea" of the passive patient's breathing versus the labored voice-like a "Himalayan climber's"-of the surgeon emphasizes the former's loss of control.

Selzer's passage would be easy to change to an expository sentence: Often

in surgery l found unexpected cancer. But the author's final purpose-an extended meditation on the relationship of human and tool, soul and body­

would fall flat. The reader, lacking any feel for the grandeur and potential tragedy of exploring the body, would dismiss expository statements such as,

"The surgeon struggles not to feel. It is suffocating to press the feeling out," as merely odd or grandiose.

There are several other moves worth noting in this passage. One is that, like

the sample Alaska sentence given above, Selzer's surgical description is repre­

sentative scene. In other words, he doesn't pretend this operation occurs at one specific time and place, but it represents a typical surgical procedure, one

among many. Another technique to note is his use of the second person for a speaker that is presumably himsel£ Second person-the you rather than the l-is a point-of-view choice, discussed in more detail further on in this chapter.

In contrast, here's an example of a specific, not representative, scene, from

JoAnn Beard's essay "The Fourth State of Matter." The scenes comprising the essay all occur at very specific moments in time. Here is Beard at work, with

her physicist colleagues having a professional discussion around the chalkboard:

"If it's plasma, make it in red," I suggest helpfully. We're all smoking ille­ gally, in the journal office with the door closed and the window open. We're having a plasma party.

"We aren't discussing plasma," Bob says condescendingly. He's smoking a horrendously smelly pipe. The longer he stays in here the more it feels like

I'm breathing small daggers in through my nose. He and I don't get along; each of us thinks the other needs to be taken down a peg. Once we had a hissing match in the hallway which ended with him suggesting that I could

The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form 167

be fired, which drove me to tell him he was already fired, and both of us

stomped into our offices and slammed our doors. "I had to fire Bob," I tell Chris later. "I heard," he says noncommittally. Bob is his best friend.

This is a very pinpointed event, not representative but presumably unlike

any other moment in Beard's life. Notice how much suggestive detail Beard packs into a short space. TI1ese characters break rules, argue, and exist in complex relationship to one another. Her relationship with Bob is established

in this scene–a relationship that seems suffused with a genuine but relatively harmless tension, given their ability to issue dire threats to each other without

consequence. The dialogue sounds real and secures the characters, capturing the nuanced pretense of Bob's stressing the "plas" part of the "plasma." Chris,

the man in the middle, seems to have heard all this bickering before.

We all tend to use too little scene in creative nonfiction. We especially forget the possibilities of representative scene. Even when we're reporting a typical rather than a specific event, use of scenic elements, as in Selzer's sur­

gery, conveys a sense of character and situation far more effectively than does summary.

Specificity and Detail

Scene forces us to use specificity and detail, elements that get lost in the quick wash of exposition. Even in discussing the largest ideas, our brains engage

with the small workings of the senses first. And the specificity of a piece of nonfiction is generally where the sensory details lie: the aroma of honeysuckle, the weak film of moonlight. While it is possible to go overboard with detail,

generally in drafting it's best to keep going back and sharpening as much as possible. You leaned not just against a tree but against a weeping silver birch; the voice at the other end of the phone sounded like the Tin Man's in The

"Wizard of Oz. Your readers or writing group can tell you when you've gone too far. When you write scene, your job is to mimic the event, create an expe­ riential representation of it for the reader.

Look at the examples given before, and think about how much the details

add to those scenes: the hushed silence of the hospital room and three hard tumors on the left lobe of the liver in Selzer's essay. In Beard's, we see the

168 HoNING YouR CRAFT

bickering but ultimate acceptance of this dose group of coworkers. We sense the author's ambivalent position in the group-shut out of their "talking physics," as she tells us earlier-but also her authority within the group. We

sense, in the hyperbolic description ofBob's pipe smoke ("like daggers"), a bit of foreshadowing of a coming tragic event.

In The Elements ofStyle, William Strunk, Jr., explains that the one point of accord among good writers is the need for detail that is "specific, definite, and concrete." (We also address this point in Chapter 1.) Concrete detail appeals to the senses; other writers call such details "proofs." If Selzer told us readers

that sometimes in surgery he found cancer, we might abstractly believe him, but it's hard to associate that fact with real life and death. In this passage, we're convinced by the specifics: three hard tumors on the liver, the surgeon's voice mumbling, "Bad, bad."

Abstract language-the opposite of relying on concrete detail-refers to the larger concepts we use that exist on a purely mental level, with no appeal to the senses: liberty, justice, contentment, and so on. These terms may contain the implication of sensory detail (you may flash on "warmth'' when you hear "contentment," but that's a personal reaction that wouldn't make sense to, say,

a penguin), but they are in themselves broad categories only. Of course, within the details you use emerges a wealth of abstract information. Beard could have summarized her relationships with her coworkers; Selzer could have presented a few expository sentences about soul and body, surgeon as God. We want experiences, not lectures; we want to enter into events and uncover their meanings for ourselves.

Paying attention to concrete detail and the input of our own senses also helps save us from the literary pitfall of cliche, an expression or concept that's

been overused. Frequently, cliches are dead metaphors, so overused we don't pay attention anymore to the comparisons they contain. (Do you actually think of a yellow metal when you hear "good as gold"? Do you even realize this phrase comes from a time when the gold our country held validated our money?) If Beard had described Bob's pipe tobacco as smelling like "dirty socks," or "killing" her nose, she would have been indulging in cliche. Instead, she used the information of her senses to create a fresh image.

Chances are, you know more than you need to know to write effective scene, bur your natural expressiveness has been stifled, often by misguided advice from academic writing classes. Next time you work on a piece of ere-

The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form 169

ative nonfiction, hear yourself talking through the story to friends in a crowded coffee shop or club. There's plenty to divert their attention: music, people­ watching, smoke, and noise. Which details do you use to hold their attention? Do you imitate the look of someone's face, the sound of a voice? Do you

screech to demonstrate the sound of car tires on asphalt? Your reading audi­ ence will be equally distractible. Think about how to render these attention­ grabbing devices in your prose. You may want to consult Chapter 1, "The Body of Memory," to remind yourself how to use sensory detail.

Developing Character

Character development, like learning to write effective dialogue, is part of

writing scene. It's another particularly easy-to-miss demand of good creative nonfiction. Afrer all, we know what our patents, children, or lovers look like. Unconsciously, we tend to assume that everyone else does as welL

Suzanne has, by marriage, a very funny grandmother. She wasn't intention­ ally funny, but nonetheless the mere mention of her name tends to bring down the room when the family's together. The family bears in mind, as courteous

people, that we need to break through our uncontrollable giggling and due other listeners in to the source of our amu

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