The Demonstration of Abstraction

The great storyteller, Flannery O’Connor once gave a lecture to fledging writers in which she remarked how natural the act of telling a story was. She believed everyone could do it. But Flannery got fooled when she read their horrible attempts at creating coherent narratives. Her amended statement went like this – “I believed the most natural and easiest act for a human was to tell a story, and then I read yours.” Even though I don’t have any idea what happened to the students in that audience, I pretty sure of two things. First, O’Connor told the truth. The writing she had work-shopped with them was probably god-awful. Secondly, her brutal honesty did nothing to dissuade their mediocre attempts at writing.

Of all creatures on the planet, only humans evolve their societies through recorded cultural histories with myths, legends, yarns, anecdotes, accounts, tales, all forms of narrative. Before words existed, people told stories with cave paintings. If we could travel back in the shadowy realm before these paintings, we would find a community of nomads huddled close to a campfire making gestures and grunts that described the day’s events. The epic of Gilgamesh is the one of the earliest known written stories. 4,000 years before Edgar Allen Poe, the Egyptians wrote short fiction narratives. In some Native American tribes every question asked is answered with a story. This is the way we entertain ourselves, pass on wisdom, and sacred philosophies.

However, the idea that great writers create literature through inspiration alone is as misleading as the notion that mediocre writers achieve great stories through the exercise of their craft and technique alone. A genius must translate his magic to the page in recognizable and accessible language with universal meaning and emotion. A craftsman must hope for motivation from an unnamable energy, and then he must choose to use that source if his well-crafted language rises to art. If this were not true, then every knowledgeable short order cook would be a master chef, every auto mechanic would work on the Grand Prix circuit, and every stone mason would build cathedrals.

This reality does not mean we must be brilliant or in touch with a supernatural muse or become a craft virtuoso to have fun writing stories or to say something important and worth remembering in the stories we write. Simply be aware of two things before you begin to write. First, no one can teach us how to become inspired. On the other hand, we can and should learn to use time-tested tools and techniques for writing if we want to translate our experiences in the most meaningful way to readers. The point is this—even the greatest writers balance their writing lives between discovering ideas and then forming them into accessible material for an audience.

That brings me to another important point, there is no truth in the clichéd excuse, “I’m only writing this story for myself.” Although many people do reason this way, it is a delusion. Anyone who creates a structured narrative on paper expects an audience. If we write only for ourselves, then what we have written must be a grocery list. We sometimes use this false reasoning as a way not to learn and not to practice and not to revise because we are lazy or arrogant or maybe insecure about our abilities. The first obstacle to overcome in our quest for the “writing life” is the misunderstanding of the process itself. The first quality we must develop to deal with that obstacle is humility.

Each of us is born with some innate creativity. Many of us spend our lives ignoring the form it takes. Common sense tells me that if you have chosen to read this, then you have some interest in writing as a way to exercise and exorcise your creative urge. I wish I could tell you where great literature comes from, what makes one poem resonate for centuries and another disappear in a generation, what makes a story about love or hate or sex get retold over and over while another story with a similar theme is forgotten the instant it is shared. Most people who study writing believe the answer to that issue lies in a that magical realm I mentioned earlier playing alongside mystical concepts such as inspiration, muses, or something the great Spanish poet Lorca identified as duende.  Although many writers have travelled to this realm, they can never find their way back to it with the map of conscious thought. They must hitch a ride on a vehicle powered by imagination and be able to make universal connections along the way. No one has ever seen its driver.

On the other hand, all writers who take this creative act seriously realize the impossibility of even beginning the journey without a working knowledge of the tools that are part of its long and valuable history. For writers, we have only one toolbox, language. Each of us has only words to capture all the physical senses, all emotional experience, all human ambivalence, and translate those qualities into a believable and meaningful illusion of life. That is what great literary art does for the world. It translates the mysterious and unique experience of being human into a printed common language.

Inside our box of words are various techniques that writers who have gone before us have developed that have proved themselves practical in building a shared experience for writer and reader. These techniques involve the way we choose what parts of a narrative to highlight, how we make language paint pictures, to sing and dance, to echo in someone else’s mind and create layers of meaning. No carpenter would attempt to build a house without expertise in the use of hammer, saw, level, screwdriver, and other implements of the trade. No writer should expect a story to be interesting and readable without understanding how to develop character, plot, scene, and dialogue by using metaphor, syllabic rhythm, image, and a host of other tools.I could spend a thousand pages discussing theories on the use of all these things in the creation of literature. However, people much smarter than me already have. My time and yours will be much better spent if I simply show you some ways that I’ve learned to create narratives from the simplest and seemingly innocuous events of my own life. Why my life?

Two reasons best answer this question. First, every person in the world has a story to tell. All of us have lived lives worth sharing with other people. It’s the way we share the life that makes it worthwhile. Second, writing about our own lives in memoir or personal essay form is sometimes a good way to explore the craft by using events and characters that are familiar. Also, something important happens when we have a concrete starting point. The more we search for details in our memory, the more we build pathways of association between our memories and our imagination. Without imagination it is impossible to tell a story, even if the event really happened in your life.

Personally, I prefer memoir writing to fiction for another reason. Beyond the fact that we all enjoy a good story, we search for meaning in the narrative. By that, I mean human nature causes writers and readers alike to seek advice, try to discover patterns of behavior, explore our value systems, be moved to action by emotional substance, and finally, investigate common connections in hopes of discovering something of value. I believe, and people certainly disagree on this point, real past events in a writer’s life provide more opportunity for examination from current perspectives, thus encouraging more reflection from readers as well. Don’t get me wrong, this epistemological probing should remain submissive to the actual story being told, but its discreet inclusion may create valuable layers of meaning and add possibilities.

So, if you decide that the craft of nonfiction writing is something you are interested in learning more about, the question becomes where to start. One necessity in storytelling is the ability to turn abstract concepts into concrete detail. The demonstration of abstraction through diction (word choice) and imagery is the foundation of all good writing. Ezra Pound first said what many great writers knew by instinct already – “one moves the reader only through clarity.” What he meant had nothing to do with explanation, knowledge, or understanding. Pound based his belief on the premise that focusing a picture in the mind of a reader, creating an image with a word or series of words that eliminated any perception other than the visceral one intended would generate the specific emotional response the writer intended, a feeling to harmonize with the writer’s own vision in the poem or story. In this way, a bridge or a universal connection between reader and writer would be built not only intellectually, but emotionally as well, even if the reader had never experienced personally the event being recorded.

Since we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, it follows that diction or word choice became a seminal part of Pound’s idea and of good writing. Abstract and connotative words will always be too vague to arouse feeling in a reader. Pound realized the impossibility of getting a gut reaction to words such as love, death, war, courage, honor, and dignity, along with a host of other commonly used words unless specific images depicting the senses involved in their actions could be written. If one moves the reader only through clarity, then clarity can only come through the five senses. This is why the old adage “show don’t tell” is brow beaten into every writer in a class or workshop. It is human nature to want to tell a story, but stories only come alive in the mind when they are demonstrated, when people can interact. You can be told how to swim or ride a bike but are unlikely to learn without being shown.

Perhaps as a child you injured yourself playing ball and your father rushed to your side urging you to be brave till the doctor arrived. You, on the other hand, had no idea that being brave required courage, or even what courage was. Oh, you heard someone say that a neighbor had courage because he rescued a cat from a tree. Maybe someone else told you that a friend was brave because she had a tooth pulled and didn’t cry. Someone else might be fearless when sharing with you the fact that you smell bad, or heroic for eating raw oysters. It is easy to understand what these actions are as someone tells us about them, but much more difficult to experience how they create the abstract concept of courage unless someone shows us how each event was a struggle against a seemingly insurmountable situation. It that way we also get an idea of what type of courage the writer is intending to demonstrate—moral, ethical, physical, emotional, etc.

Narrative writing may seem daunting, whether fiction or nonfiction or poetry. Don’t let that apprehension stop you from doing it. Your story is a worthy one, and your ability to share it is unique. Whether some critic somewhere has a positive or negative analysis of that story is not nearly as important or fulfilling as that fact that you have engaged in a liberating process and by using the right tools, done it as well as you could. And, if no one but your best friend ever reads it, or you cousin, or your parents, you will have still shared a unique vision of what being human means with someone else, which means everyone concerned has an opportunity to grow.