These are the Facts

Fact: I make my bed every single day.

Making my bed doesn’t feel like a chore. It feels like a sense of control. My brain craves the order and consistency that making my bed every day provides. Writing creative nonfiction provides a similar sense of satisfaction. When I put a memory onto the page, in any form, it’s like a sense of release in my head. Getting the words and images that are swimming around out into the world brings about a sense of euphoria (no, not like the show). If I had to sum up the experience, it could be described as a stress relief. Writing creative nonfiction is reinforcing what I already knew as truth simply by putting it into words on a page.

Fact: I drink a lot of coffee.

Drinking coffee doesn’t always wake me up, but it does help me get into the mood for writing. I guess drinking coffee could be seen as aesthetically pleasing, which is completely true in my case. Sometimes the words just can’t flow without a cup of coffee sitting on a coaster next to my workstation. The smell of coffee in the morning brings forth the image of the baby-faced sun in Teletubbies. The coffee I drink provides a sense of assurance that everything, no matter how bad my writing may be, will be all right.

Fact: I am mildly insecure.

Most of the time my insecurities don’t get in the way. Lately, however, more and more people that I knew in high school are publishing works like poetry collections or short stories in magazines. If the people that I knew in high school who are younger than me are already farther ahead in my career category, what does that say about my abilities as a writer? Am I secretly thinking that I chose the wrong major as a senior? Yes. Am I going to change my major this far into my college career? No. Remembering not to compare yourself to others on a completely different life path is easier said than done.

Fact: I have high-functioning anxiety.

It is important to me that everything is in the correct place on my desk. My laptop goes on the left. Then my journal with the book for class resting on top. Then the pen is placed on the far right of the desk, aligned with the edge of the desk. I try not to let my anxiety shine through too often, but it gets hard to mask it during our Writer’s Circles. I try to focus on listening to constructive criticism, but the desperation for the whole endeavor to be finished overrides my system. Next time, hopefully, I will have created a strategy to keep my attention on the task at hand.

While what I have said thus far is factual, I have one opinion that carries more weight than all the facts combined. Despite the difficulties of writing creative nonfiction that have overwhelmed me this semester, I love this form of writing most of all.

Slow Progress is Still Progress

    Writing creative nonfiction has been especially hard for me this semester. I have struggled to pick the topics for my stories more than anything. As the semester progresses, it feels as if I am running out of things to say or talk about, but I know somewhere deep in my memory there is something that should be put to paper. Picking topics for my creative nonfiction pieces is my biggest downfall currently, but using the prompts from Tell it Slant has helped me tremendously in getting this far, so I will probably keep using those until I feel more confident in picking my own topics.

    While writing for this class, I have been forced to reflect on my work instead of just writing it for myself. In doing so, I have found that I tend to mostly write with emotion, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I like being able to evoke emotion in readers as long as the story itself doesn’t fall flat because of my own goal to make my readers feel what I felt in those moments. I have also found that I describe the five senses quite well, which I actively try to do to encapsulate all feelings, not just emotions. I plan to keep working on creating a balance between keeping the details while also writing a more light-hearted work for my readers.  

    Reading The Library Book by Susan Orlean was an amazing experience for me as a creative nonfiction writer. I understood that the whole story didn’t have to be about my experiences as a human, but it could be about my experiences learning about other people. I found the strategies of writing that Orlean implemented consistently engaging, and it is something I would like to try in my future writings. I haven’t yet tried my hand at the strategy I learned through Orlean mostly because I’m not confident that it will make sense or that it will ruin the strategy for me in the future. Why ruin something I actually enjoy?

    I think some of my best writing this semester happened in my second creative nonfiction assignment. I wrote about my childhood dream of being a cowgirl to the age of me swearing I would be a marine biologist to me declaring to be an English major. I ended my introduction to that assignment by saying, “I bought a book that changed my little eight-year-old life: Dolphin Tale: A Tale of True Friendship. This entered the age of my obsession with becoming a marine biologist.” If you know me at all, I will find any excuse to use the word “thus” in any of my work. I felt particularly proud that I could incorporate it here while also crafting a sentence that felt elevated because of the diction I chose to use.

    Even though I feel like the progress I am making is slow, I am still proud of the accomplishments I have made in this course. In the past, I always liked writing about my own experiences, but I formed them into fiction. This course has helped me hone my craft in making my experiences my own, filling in the details I can’t quite remember while hanging on to the truth in the narrative.