Joanna Siwiec Response: WT, Ch 4: Shape

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#426

One of my biggest concerns when I began dabbling in creative nonfiction, was the freedom of structure and language. Through my entire academic career I felt comfort in structure, and security in reaching the written out formula. As I progressed in my studies in English, the shape of writings began to blend and merge, and I found myself tiptoeing into the free form of creative nonfiction. The free form for me, however, was still embedded in a structure–a structure of my own creation. Soon enough, I noticed that this structure I created began bleeding into my academic writing. The shape of my writing went through many revisions, until I reached one that I felt could express my words the way I thought of them. Fragments. Being taught to combine fragments to make sentences since I learned how to write, I found a sense of rebellion in my new found way of fragmented writing. Soon enough, my pieces were free but enclosed in a fragmented structure. Just like all other writing however, I struggled (and still do) in revising fragments. To minimize them. To take away, yet to give.

The chapter mentions the author in The Plague and his consistent need to rewrite his first sentence. Joseph Grand’s inability to find the right words for his first sentence is comparable to my hesitations about redrafting. I find that the more I redraft my pieces the more stuck I get on technicalities, words, and that I often begin to dislike what I have written. While rereading and redrafting has always worked fine with my academic writing, I have found it to have the opposite role on my creative nonfiction. While I do revise, I often find that my rawest thoughts and words come out at the beginning, and then become constrained as I pick at them. In this chapter it points out that “rarely is your first line the best beginning. Read down the draft to see where there might be a stronger opening”(45). I found that to be the truth for my writing after a period of not liking my beginnings. In my academic writing I found trouble with my endings, and in my personal writing trouble with my beginnings. Rereading my pieces and regaining a new feeling towards them often left me in a pensive mood, which new beginnings were born of.

Lastly, I enjoy this chapter’s different types of shapes and forms of the segmented essay. I often experiment with different forms and have with many of the ones written about, and find myself always surprised how well some forms scaffold my writing. Capturing the mind at work is one of my favorite experimental techniques, and attempting to organize reality through it pushes my work to a certain concreteness and fragmented reality that I enjoy.

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