All Literature Is Personal

We talked a few weeks ago about the degree to which we can legitimately frame creative non-fiction as fiction.  It’s worth mentioning that even when you’re self-consciously writing fiction (that’s not the same as writing self-conscious fiction), readers will always be tempted to take your character’s words and thoughts and gods and vices as your own.  

Yesterday I said all literature is local because it’s wrung through the life-narrative that’s shaped by your immediate setting. Another way to say this is that all literature is personal, all your pensive poetry and all your pretty prose, all your fiction and non-fiction–it’s really all the same. It’s the real and imagined ways you move up and down your world, it’s the conservations you’ve been having with yourself since there’s been a self to speak and listen to.  Let’s hear about that and forget about the filters.

Don’t protect yourself on paper. Don’t settle for cliche and tired phrasing. If someone else could have written what it is you have to say, then you probably haven’t said anything that’s you.  Your job as a writer is to discern the things worth saying and to say them in the same artful way you hear them, to use the same unsettled, shaky gut by which you know the ones to keep.  

 

Tags: craft, Literature, Realism, writing