Exploratory Writing for Creative Nonfiction Story

I guess I wrote a lot for this assignment, even though you didn't have too, but I actually found it really helpful: I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write about for the creative memoir and was honestly really scared and nervous, but this has really helped me find some sort of thread // topic that is interesting to me.

Part A

Ahhh I’m so stuck.... I’m not sure what to write about because I don’t have any tragic, life-or-death, winning the lottery kind of experiences... and I feel like that makes me discount all of my other feelings and experiences..... because they don’t seem “meaningful” enough, whatever that means.

Hmmm. I guess that might be a struggle in itself... maybe I can write about that.

One of the biggest and most eye opening experiences I’ve had this year has been through the protests against police brutality. It’s really made me open my eyes and realize that the world is so much bigger then my little bubble. My own world is really all I know, so it’s hard for me to really believe the reality of all these awful, absurd things that are happening around me.

I also recently read “I Am Malala,” the autobiography of Malala Yousafzai, the girl who was shot by the Taliban and has been an advocate for women’s rights and education since. Her story is so powerful and intense and scary and riveting and heartbreaking and unbelievably sad. Once again, it’s hard for me to not see this as simply fiction but to acknowledge it as being completely real.

I guess on of the biggest struggles for me as I am growing up is the realization that this world is so big and so crazy and so illogical and in many ways so messed up.

It makes me feel guilty for my happiness.

This morning I got all upset because I didn’t know what outfit to wear. Yet I own a million clothes. How pathetic is that? So many people in the world don’t even own clothes, and yet here I am, a privledged little white girl living in 
Park Slope who can’t chose what outfit to wear?! Pathetic!

But, that’s also not fair. It’s not fair to denounce and diminish my own feelings and experiences by comparing their level of tragedy to other people’s stories.

AH. I don’t know what to do.

Another thing that’s been concerning me lately: truth. Lies. Rumors. Myths.

Doctors are always telling us to not put computers in our laps for too long, not to hold our cell phones to our ears, not to keep them in our pockets. Why? Because there’s radiation. And what does radiation do? It causes cancer.

Or so our doctors tell us.

And my physics teacher told our class the other day that this is a complete myth. Evident from one simple scientific fact, it’s obvious that cell phones and most everyday electronics don’t cause cancer at all.

How insane is that?! That these doctors–these doctors in whom we put our lives, these doctors that we go to to heal, to get better, to survive, these doctors whom we trust to heal us, they haven’t been telling us the truth! But the most convoluted part is that many of them probably know it’s all a lie. Yet if they admit that, they run the risk of jeapordizing the whole medical community, whom could all get sued for promoting something that’s false so 
widely.

This makes me so mad. And an example of this in my own life: welcome to high school! Where rumors spread like 
wildfire. Where you hear things, hear things about your friends that seem absurd, where you then ask your friends if these things are true and they deny it, and of course you want to believe them because they’re your friends but you 
really don’t know whose telling the truth.

The people who you think are your friends really aren’t your friends. You tell a secret, the next day everybody knows about it. You even find yourself doing things like this, which makes you mad and guilty and awful and just confused and angry on how fucked up all of this is because YOU DON’T KNOW WHO TO BELIEVE ANYMORE.

(Other bits?)

My biggest struggle this year was honestly going on the double black diamond when I was skiing with my friends.

Protest

Black lives matter !

Being on the subway, encountering people.

What Diaz Does–

-flat

-descriptive

-deadpan

-about external events

-trying to describe stuff without an excess of emotional charge

when I sat in class today, Theodore gray made his speech in three words

three words.

-following a person

-

-diaz’s style is a way of observation.

-in the metropolitan museum of art

-looking at paintings

-the observer creates the event

-overhearing my uncle john talk to my parents about wanting to leave his wife

-hearing the sadness in his voice over the phone when he arrived home

-guilty about my happiness

Junot Diaz:

-uses the narrator to critique, comment, and describe other characters in the text to actually reveal things about himself.

Part B

Dear Junot Díaz,

            Hello!

We have been reading // closely exploring your book, Drown, in my literature class at school, and I’ve greatly enjoyed doing so. I’m very drawn to your style, which is a wonderful mixture and beautiful blur of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and more. You write in such a lyrical, poetic, flowing, surprising, intriguing way that I honestly think it will be very difficult to imitate your style in our own creative memoirs, which is what our assignment is for the class. I think your style actually seems pretty simple when you take a quick glance. But when you look closer, it’s filled to the brim of so many sharp, tight moves, loaded metaphors and similes, fascinating parallels, eery echos. I think it will be hard to mimick this without having the same content that you do, but it’ll be interesting and fun to try.

I would have to say that the most intriguing part of your style is the way you, almost secretively, layer in all these situations, per se, that repeat in almost every story, yet with something slightly tweaked or changed, enough so that we almost ride right past them unless we dig and explore deeper. Something we’ve noticed talked about in class is how you constantly use the setting of people sitting on a couch in nearly every story. This would be a really interesting thing to explore, I think, because it seems easy to say that it could be simply a coincidence, or just an unimportant occurance, but I think there’s something deeper to it. Also, many of your themes, especially ones revolving around familial relationships, repeat from story to story. It’s interesting to see how they morph and change over time, since this is a memoir and roughly follows certain characters.

Another fascinating–yet puzzling–thing that you do is the way you arrange the sequential order of your short stories. They jump all over the place... we think we know something about a character but suddenly we read the next story that actually takes place years before the previous story and we realize something totally different. Although this isn’t something we can really mimick in our own stories as we are only writing one, it’s something worth exploring.

To be quite honest, I can’t really relate to many of the exterior themes that you explore in your book. I have no experience with parental tension, nor poverty, nor immigration and uprooting//completely changing (my) life. But there are more internal themes, like relationships with your parents, siblings, friends; feeling like an outsider, someone who doesn’t belong with the crowd; wanting things that you know you simply can’t have. I resonate with many of these ideas, and the more I closely analyze your text, the more I see connections between myself the characters/situations within the story.

I really have enjoyed reading your writing. I’m a little nervous and even daunted to take on the task of attempting to mimick your writing–especially as I feel that I haven’t experienced anything as dramatic, life changing, heart wrenching, or tragic as the characters in your story have had. That will be something I struggle with as I write: finding a way to write about my own experiences as they are and not feeling like I have nothing to write about because I lack those experiences. But, it will be a good challenge.

I can’t wait to read more of your books!

-Lola

Part C

Things I find interesting while looking back at my notes:

-       The idea of Style vs. Content; how style can completely transform content. I think this is really interesting especially for me because I’m already having some difficulties around what the content of my story will be. It’ll be even more interesting to see, for myself, how I use inspiration from Diaz’s style to transform // create my content.

-       Just as important as what Diaz includes in his writing is what he leaves out. He says VERY little, especially about what the narrator is feeling. We have to piece together the few clues that we get along the way to reveal something massively important about the narrator. I think this aspect of Diaz’s style will be immensely challenging to mimick, as we are often taught that the best writing has the most details, description, analysis of the situation, yet this is not always the case. Often, saying little actually says a lot more.

-       Diaz’s use of seemingly casual, simple, everyday things/items that may represent bigger themes and ideas: i.e. Yunior’s vomit (in “Ysrael), Papi’s green Volkswagen, the names “Lucero” and “Aurora,” the pool table, the ginkgos.

-       (kind of connects to the last one) How Diaz uses certain things to represent things that are much much deeper, like “How to Date...” which may very well not be at all about dating.

-       Yunior’s fantasy

-       The objective correlative; how in fact this whole book, or at least each story, may be an objective correlative in itself.

Part D:

Common Thread(s) [does anything coalesce – I really like that word ;)))]:

-Themes of style vs. content : how do I use style to perhaps enhance the content; how can I focus more on style than on content.

-Time hops; idea hops; no order // random order such that it actually creates its own kind of order.

-Growing up and seeing how much bigger the world really is than I know // than what I experience daily.

-How to give credit and acknowledgement and respect to my own experiences even though they may be less high stakes than others.

-Feeling guilty/mad at myself when constantly comparing my life to others out there.