I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
If you spend any time at all reading about writing fiction (or even nonfiction these days), you will hear the advice show, don’t tell over and over again. One reason I like writing nonfiction, especially essays, is that I can tell, alongside showing.
As I work on my Things Men Gave Me essays, I’m seeking the perfect balance of showing and telling. In personal essays, and memoir, you need both. The best part of personal essays, to me, is the ability to present a higher level analysis of what happened, to tie it all together with interesting theories, to not just say what happened but also share why it did.
Phillip Lopate, writing teacher and author of The Art of the Personal Essay advises memoirists to bring two perspectives to their work, both a vicarious reliving of the experience and analytical reflection, from the perspective of who the memoirist is now:
In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, which will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self. This second perspective, the author’s retrospective employment of a more mature intelligence to interpret the past, is not merely an obligation but a privilege, an opportunity. In any autobiographical narrative, whether memoir or personal essay, the heart of the matter often shines through those passages where the writer analyzes the meaning of his or her experience. The quality of thinking, the depth of insight, and the willingness to wrest as much understanding as the writer is humanly capable of arriving at—these are guarantees to the reader that a particular author’s sensibility is trustworthy and simpatico. With me, it goes further: I have always been deeply attracted to just those passages where the writing takes an analytical, interpretative turn, and which seem to me the dessert, the reward of prose.
Lopate finds the spread of show, don’t tell advice aimed at nonfiction writers concerning:
The nonfiction student’s reluctance to provide summary and analysis shows the markings of that nefarious taboo of writing programs everywhere: “Show, Don’t Tell.” Leaving aside how much this simplistic precept has validity even in fiction (consider the strong essayistic tendency in novelits from Fielding, George Eliot, Balzac, Tolstoy down to Proust, Mann, Musil, and Kundera), I would argue that literary nonfiction is surely the one arena in which it is permissible to “tell.” In personal essays and memoirs, we must rely on the subjetive voice of the first-person narrator to guide us, and if that voice can never explain, summarize, interpret, or provide a larger soiological or historical context for the material, we are in big trouble.
I am working on an essay right now about a relationship in which I felt used and treated as an object. In turn, I used and treated my partner as an object. We were in an I-It relationship rather than I-Thou.
It would be a shame to rely only on showing to express this. While perceptive readers might say to themselves, “Look, they are each using each other!” as I wrote how I loved living in his golf course home and how he perceived every one of my paintings as an observation on him and his life. Highly educated readers might go further and think to themselves, “I believe, to use the terms of philosopher Martin Buber, that they were in an I-It relationship.” But how much more fun if I can tell them this directly, providing the insight I attained through reflecting on what happened and writing about it and pondering it as I wrote my Tuesday Book Club post yesterday.
To me, the reward of writing is in the telling, in the part where I take all the memories that I’ve portrayed and refined and digested and share what I think it means.
Wednesday Website note
I have two categories for my Wednesday blog post: Wednesday Writing and Wednesday Website. Today, as a Wednesday Website activity, I may create an initial landing page for Things Men Gave Me, so I can link to it when I mention it. That way people can read more information about it, sign up to receive updates about it by email, and maybe even see an image of one of the completed paintings and a snippet of an essay.
Update: Done! Things Men Gave Me