A circumspect reflection on a unit should focus primarily on what I learned. So I shall revisit my portfolio and give a more complete account…
In fiction, the goal that I tried hardest to achieve was to make characters walk off the page – saunter, in some cases, or crawl or sprint. I did this through careful observation of people going about their daily routines as I went about mine. Small movements, the way people acted or talked, were under the scrutiny of my covetous eye. Writing stranger studies instigated a constant sketching of them in my head. Running commentary and fiction narrative scrolled through my thoughts as I met people, observed them, looked at them from afar. This whole process, which was brought out during the unit and intensified as it progressed, helped make me pay attention to how characters might walk off the page – with a jaunty off-step, or with a slight limp due to a previous injury that the reader does not find out about until the end of the story, or with a wink and a line: “Be good. I’ll come check on you tomorrow.”
But it’s quite difficult, creating a full portrait of a character in such a way that he comes to life for the reader. I feel that many of the characters in my short stories and exercises fall flat. (My extraordinary –> ordinary piece is an example of underdeveloped characters.) I realized the challenge of keeping out of the cliché. At times I felt that the expressions I used were very colloquial and somewhat static. It was difficult to write in a different way, with descriptions that were solely unique to the person, and with a new, fresh perspective. In order to develop my characters, I created their back-stories in my head, so that whether I chose to take anything from them or not, the knowledge of their past and their person would still influence the way I wrote about the character in the story.
One risk I took was the experimentation of inhabiting different characters’ voices. I struggled to break out of my own lyrical, quiet, fairytale-like narrative voice to take on different personas and sound convincing. I tried to do this in both my myth re-appropriation The Boy Who Cried, in which I took on the voice of the “villain” character who is usually not given much thought, and in my first person narrative “Pete’s First Date,” in which I adopted the voice of a character I normally would not write about or from the perspective of. First person was by far the hardest voice to write from, mainly because I wanted to interject as the writer, or simply found it hard to break out of my already established style of writing which I had become rather attached to. Speaking of attachment, I wonder if it dangerous to become too attached to your characters. What degree of distance should the writer maintain? Is the goal to have as little distance as possible? Or will the writer become too involved rather than let the character tell his/her own story?
I think the aspect of writing fiction that I explored most extensively was dialogue. Technique-wise, this is the area that I learned the most in and improved the most in. Before our studies and exercises in dialogue, I was not consciously aware of the different ways of writing dialogue and how each functioned and propelled a story. After learning about the effects of summarized dialogue vs. actual dialogue, I was able to make mindful decisions about how people talk to each other in my stories. I practiced summarized dialogue quite a lot and experimented with how it fit into the narrative voice of the piece and kept the story moving forward rather than slowing it down with actual dialogue. And I learned that actual dialogue, then, in the midst of summarized dialogue, could be extremely effective. It felt, in some ways, earned.
Another important element that I was introduced to in this unit was structure. I learned from the pieces we read, the effectiveness of marrying form and content. For some pieces, certain structures spoke to a particular story more than others. The way that a story is told is just as important as what is being told. Examining writers closely (as I did with my presentation author Thom Jones and my response author Milos Macourek) lent insight into how to employ the best structure possible for a piece. In imitating them, I was able to apply their techniques and learn from putting my observations into practice. The piece that most exhibits my experimentation with form and structure is my imitation piece: Johnny’s Goldfish.
The lessons I learned in writing during this unit are many and I cannot recall them all in this reflection. There may be simple stylistic moments that I picked up unconsciously that I have transferred into my writing – the best way to learn how to write is, after all, reading those who know what they’re doing. And put their instruments into practice, get into the habit of keeping a journal and writing everyday. In all, the most important thing I will take away from fiction, I think, is a heightened awareness of my narrator. With this comes narrative voice, narrative distance, etc., but what is most important is to know who is speaking and whose story it is, be it one person’s, many people’s, an ant’s, or even, perhaps, the color blue’s. I tried my best to bring this awareness of the narrator together with all the other lessons I’ve learned into my final piece: Story of the Stone.
