Tuesday
Imagine you're making your daily protein shake. Your wife, angry with
you, storms into the kitchen and knocks the blender off the counter. It
shatters into a million little pieces.
If that scene were a novel excerpt, a class of Converse-wearing MFAers
might argue that the blender was phallic, that the shake symbolized male
potency, and that by breaking it, your wife castrated you.
In a nonfiction world, though, you're just pissed because you've got chocolate shake on your sneakers.
The line between fiction and creative nonfiction gets fuzzier as
everyone from Paris Hilton to the cat-lady librarian in Iowa pens
memoirs. CNF reads like fiction, but it isn't. Truth can be boring, but
with an adept hand, that fact-based chocolate on your Nikes can be
parlayed into something deeper without lying. CNF can share craft
elements with its eminently cooler older sibling, like deeper meaning
and symbolism.
It starts with the hard, barebones structure of your narrative, which
you'll later flesh out with the blood and guts of your piece. Think like
a journalist to build it, answering who, what, when, where, why. Here's
the barebones of something I wrote about killing a bird when I was
little:
My friends ditched me one summer day. I was sad. I went swimming. I couldn't swim good. I got out. Then I found a baby bird in nest. I took the bird to play with it, filled a tire with water, dropped him in and accidentally killed him. Fin.
Now that your bones are in place, you've got to fill them with all the
stuff they're meant to protect. Start at a cellular level: language.
Manipulate it so that it relates to your truths. For a story about a
bird, you could "chirp" instead of "cry"; your fingers could "flit and
fly" instead of "reach." Injecting language relevant in the core of your
truth-telling fleshes out your barebones with the connective tissue
designed to elicit deeper meaning. (Hint: isolate the core of your
truth-telling—the thing you're writing about—and jot down all the words
that come to mind.)
Now try what I call "parallel-worlding." Discover the worlds in your piece—betcha there're a few. Consider Mary Karr's Lit—sober world and drunk world. Eat, Pray, Love:
Elizabeth Gilbert's world here and abroad. My story: my world and the
bird's.
Parallel-worlding works by digging through worlds and connecting them in
a way that delivers deeper meaning or symbolism. For example, I
discovered my bird and I were both deserted, I by friends and he by his
mama. Add to that I was too young to swim solo, ditto him with flying.
And we were both pulled out of warm, status-quo nests: he, literally,
and I by killing him. In considering those worlds, I realized that,
symbolically, we were kinda birds of a feather.
Parallel-worlding is tricky. It can seem like fibbing because
you're introducing pretty concepts, not the hard facts that were present
in the real-time event you're writing about. But really, it's
reflecting and connecting. The truth on steroids.
All that's left is the grand finale: What deeper meaning/symbolism do you want your readers to discover?
Consider everything you've written to that point. Look for the bridges
you've yet to cross. That's where you need to be. This is the time for
you to reflect, to take yourself out of the real time of your
truth-telling, and come back to you in the here and now. What have you
learned? Clearly the moment resonated with you, or else you wouldn't be
writing about it. The X factor is the why of it all. Visual cues
help me in this search for why. I imagine a big question-mark shaped
piñata that I've got to hack away at. I "hack" by finishing this
sentence—"I wrote about this particular moment because X"—over
and over again. By doing this ad nauseam, you'll travel into a
free-writing realm, and the stubborn last connection will eventually
knock itself loose and come spilling out. And when it comes, pounce,
pounce, pounce, my friend, because it don't happen often.
About the Author
Amy Kates has somehow managed to make a living from writing. You can find her work in Delaware Today, Delaware Bride, Philadelphia Style, Super Lawyers Magazine, Texas Monthly, Main Line Today, Boston Magazine and in the archives at paranormalpopculture.com. For a year she worked her dream job, covering baseball for Merge Magazine, a weekly insert in the Allentown Morning Call. When not writing her way through Rosemont's MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) program, she spends disturbing amounts of time obsessing over baseball and pop culture.
