Maggie_Response to WT Chapter 10

[Sondra Perl]

#883

“If, for accuracy, we clutter our descriptions with too much detail, our truth will be lost on the page. So we select and dramatize for clarity and suspense” (150).

“If we stick only to hard, verifiable facts, our past is as skeletal as line drawings in a coloring book. We must color them in” (151).

I find it fascinating that two of the major problems I have had this semester–remembering too much and remembering too little–have come up in the chapter on ethics of all things. Reading this chapter actually hasn’t helped with the terror attendant on writing about the people I love most (and who, not coincidentally, also scare me most), but it has put words to this Goldilocks problem I’ve been having.
In the Memory Chain piece, I couldn’t remember the details. What 80s horror film was playing? How exactly did the conversation get from film to teaching? And what the hell was Casey’s friend’s name? In the Telling a Secret piece, I had the opposite problem. I had to keep cutting things: how we named places, why those color capes, buying our first “real” daggers, the names of our dolls, how Duke Rosalind was named after my cat and how Roz was actually a boy cat, but, for reasons past understanding, had a girl’s name. When I made up dialogue, I felt like I was writing fiction, but I just couldn’t remember those things. And when I cut details, I also felt like I was writing fiction, but there was no way that I could keep all that stuff in there and maintain any sort of narrative momentum.
Now, I’m not actually sure that I’m wedded to non-fiction. I may be more in Pam Houston and Anna Quindlen’s camp than Joan Didion’s. So if I end up writing fiction, that may not be a bad thing. But I’m a control freak, so if I set out to write memoir, damnit, it’s going to be memoir, even if I decide to turn it into fiction later. All of which is to say, I’m relieved that addition and subtraction are both problems/techniques familiar to writers of memoir and that they do not violate the ethical code (although, frankly, at the time, it was the aesthetic code I was worried about violating; I hadn’t gotten around to worrying about the ethics, I was just worried the voice would be inconsistent depending on whether I was writing exactly what I remembered or adding/subtracting for convenience sake).

[Website Services Admin]

#885

Maggie,
It seems that the struggle for most people in creative nonfiction is the balance between the emotions and the facts – which you’ve captured really well in describing your process of writing the memory chain and the revealing a secret. What you seem to have down, from what I got in your response, is the intent behind the writing. You set out to tell the reader the truth, whatever that may be, and I can see that struggle with the back and forth you described in the editing phase. I find interesting the concept of an aesthetic truth (which I got from the last part of your response – about being worried of violating the aesthetic code) and how that may differ from other truths…although I can’t really name what other truths that may be.

[Anonymous]

#891

Hi Maggie – I definitely share your ambivalence between too little and too much, fact and memory, emotion and accuracy. Daimys makes a point that also struck me in the chapter – intent. But while we can aim to tell the truth, I think the strongest writing comes from an intent to focus on a specific piece of the truth instead of trying encompassing the whole thing. I think the chapter relates how intent helps clarify selection and omission, especially in the example of Scott Russell Sanders choosing to emphasize his father’s alcoholism in one piece but completely omitting it in another. I’ve had the same difficulty deciding which details to focus on that you experienced in your Memory Chain piece. The only way I can think of distilling the truth, the intent, is to let myself do a draft of the piece with absolutely no extra details. If I can find that “one true sentence” (insert stock Hemingway quote here), then I can start making choices one at a time from there.

(Just to milk that stock Hemingway quote, because sometimes it just makes me feel better:)
“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” -A Moveable Feast

[Sondra Perl]

#912

“one true sentence” — I can’t figure out if that would be generative or overly scary. I think that’s a true sentence.

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