Tag: Craft

The Hidden Patterns of Writing

anaThe first poem I ever wrote still hangs on my grandmother’s wall. I found it there a few weekends ago, while staying in her guestroom. “Tiger Eye Sun” is the title, printed in a special font on computer paper. I wrote it in a public library workshop when I was six. I remember the adults clapping when I finished reading it out loud. I loved twisting the images of rocks, and playing with personification, to describe something to simple and routine as the sun. I was able to take something I thought was familiar, and show it in a different way. This made me want to be a writer.

The poem is, of course, full of the things expected of six year old writers. It doesn’t have images, so much as mentions, and the intent, if I ever had one, is quite clouded. But that doesn’t matter. If writing this piece made me want to stick with the craft, then it means something, in all its kindergarten glory.

Writing stayed my favorite subject in school, including many short stories, poems, and a few “novels” comprised of about thirty pages each. Still, I had no way of knowing if what I tried was any good–as good as an elementary school writer can be–until the seventh grade. That Christmas, I entered and won a Christmas story competition for the local newspaper. My piece was printed that holiday for the city to read. I was elated, and decided to keep on writing.

Now, I write every day, I’m in classes, learning the mechanics of line breaks and character development. Looking back on my old writing makes me cringe. But, like something really horrific on television, I can’t help but look. What’s interesting isn’t so much the ways I’ve failed at communicating a story, it’s the ways I’ve succeeded without realizing it.

Until high school, I didn’t think to make a distinction between summary and scene. They were all parts of a story to me. And still, that Christmas story, has managed to establish a backstory, then lift the character into a scene, then jump back again to transition or give context. I wondered, at first, if there was something intuitive to writing. But now, I don’t think so. If writing could be based purely on intuition, then there would be no need for teaching it. Instead, I was reminded of what my teachers, and the professional writers I’ve seen, have all said: read, read, read. My whole life has been partially consumed by books. My mother and father read to me at night. I checked out audio cassettes of the Harry Potter series and Beverly Clearly. I buzzed through the books at school. I learned how to write the basics of a story because I read.

So, if I could learn so much by reading, why is it that studying creative writing is still so important? Studying creative writing is not a “learning how to write”. A person can write without instruction. My teachers, instead, have showed me why choices are made, and what choices. Just reading only shows you the final product. A poetry class calls to attention everything that was put in, and everything that isn’t said. My teachers could take the words, which I might have appreciated on my own, and turn them into a whole working structure. Since high school, I’ve started to learn how to make choices, what counts. I can look at writing not just through my emotional response, but by the subtle pointers driving that emotion.

My early writings had no choices. I didn’t think when I wrote, I just saw something in my mind and recorded it. Like a kid who sees the prettiness of a flower. Now, I come across an idea, and I see it for the Fibonacci-driven fractal that it is: infinite, up to me to realize what should be shown, and what should influence the reader from the inside.

–Ana Shaw, Junior Editor in Chief

The Craft of Nye

naomi-shibab-nye

When I first came to Douglas Anderson I swore I would never write poetry. How could I?  Poetry was constructed of line breaks, and choices. Like fiction these choices were made with intention, but with poetry the intention was a hard technique to learn, a hard technique to master. When I look back and think of what scared me most, was how raw poetry allowed one to be. Every word gave away a personal detail. It feared me to know that in a few stanzas people could know aspects of myself I never shared with anyone other than myself.

My junior year I wrote my first real poem, what deemed it real is I had to share it with others, yet I didn’t hide my emotion, the emotion I was always scared of sharing. Of course it was the cliché poem about the death of my grandmother. Later that year I had to recite a poem of my choice, and I chose Naomi Shihab Nye. A poet crafted in detail, and symbolism. Metaphors that brought me to the sands of the Middle East, every word counted.  What brought me to Nye was how she respectfully wrote about her heritage half American, half middle eastern. I always had a hard time writing about my half Albanian heritage. I felt as if I didn’t have a right to those topics, because it was only half of my identity.  The poem I recited my junior year was titled Blood, a commentary on war, and a narrative about how it affected her father, symbolism for how it affects us all.

“Years before, a girl knocked, 

wanted to see the Arab. 

I said we didn’t have one. 

After that, my father told me who he was, 

“Shihab”—“shooting star”— 

a good name, borrowed from the sky. 

Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” 

He said that’s what a true Arab would say.”

Yet Nye  wrote about this in the perspective of herself  an American, who is so torn by what is happening, torn because even though she is an American they are still her people.

Nye is the reason I can write about my own father, about my own heritage, and also why I can write about being an American. Because what does the word American really mean? Who gets to fit that description? Nye has made me consider how every detail counts, how a title can convey much more than it seems, and that displaying a picture in someone’s head is a gift that not many can master. Nye is the reason I have never felt that when it came to my heritage I had to choose.  

-Mary Feimi, Co-Editor in Chief

Literary Warmth

PICTURE JacobWriters have a reputation for being cold. The writer spends his days at a desk working the same words into different orders, avoiding other people so he can concentrate, obsessing over titles, obsessing over the few experiences he has with the outside world, obsessing obsessing obsessing. The nights are the same, but darker, mixed with images of the tortured soul. Addiction, insomnia, and night terrors are common. The writer is alone, is misanthropic, is sarcastic and mean, is cold. The stereotype is half the story; the warmer side of the literary life is rarely thought of.

The misconceptions of writing are clear to anyone who lives a creative life. No writer gets by spending all his time alone with words. The world itself is necessary for details in poems, characters in stories, and the plot itself in creative nonfiction. Not every writer is tortured. Conflicted over his emotions? Of course. Obsessive? At times. Insomnaic? Well, if you’re working on a piece and sleep gets in the way…. But, overall, the writer must not be an emotional/psychological wreck. Not every decision needs obsession, not every poem means sleepless nights, and not every writer is an alcoholic. Even those who were made it a rule not to write while drunk—the process itself was plain and untortured.

Which leaves the warmth of writing. The moments when the writer realizes the music of a phrase or sentence, the times when characters come alive, the times when a plot twist seems to suggest itself. And the warmth isn’t just related to craft—it comes from those moments when he reads another writer that confirms a belief he’s always had but never known how to express, when he rereads a book from his childhood, when he sits down after a long day to do something he loves—to follow a passion as fully as possible. The relationships formed from thinking so carefully about emotions, the dedication to work gained from reading and passion, the optimism from affirming that life is worth living, is complete, can be beautiful—these are some of the warmest experiences a person can have, and they all stem from writing.

Let the stereotype of the tortured writer rest. Focus instead on those comfortable images—that warmth hiding behind the emotional façade. Affirm that life is good and happy. And write about it.

-Jacob Dvorak, Senior Fiction Editor