Somewhere in my past, I was told that creative writers aren't good academic writers. Creative writing is emotional, imaginative, exciting. Academic writing is dull, tedious, fact-driven. I believed this so much that I was terrible at writing academic papers throughout high school. Self-fulfilling prophecy is a tricky little thing. Then, in my freshman Humanities class, I read Rewriting by Joseph Harris, and I could suddenly write academically. I usually don't like to use words like "suddenly," but it's appropriate and necessary in this case. Rewriting taught me to write a college essay overnight. Okay, maybe a semester, but that's still pretty fast. I've learned many things since then about academic writing, and I still have much to learn, but that book talked about writing in a way I could understand.
Over the past four years, I've developed a process for writing academic essays. I thought most of that process stemmed from what I learned in my Humanities class, but now I'm beginning to think differently. I begin writing an academic essay with quotes that I find interesting or that I'm puzzled by. I then write everything that comes to mind when I read each quote. Once I've done this with about five or six quotes, I begin to find a pattern, a focus, an argument, the thing that I'm interested in. This is my prewriting, my shitty first draft. Only then do I start organizing my thoughts, making them more complex. Finally, I can write topic sentences and my thesis. This process has always been exciting and fun for me, not dull and tedious (most of the time, at least).
After reading Jane Vanderburgh's chapter about Plot, something clicked in my mind. Creative writing and academic writing aren't that different at all! Why had it taken me so long to realize this?! Sure, fiction and essays each have their own set of challenges and rewards, but the process - the root - isn't that different -- at least for me. Vanderburgh talks about Story the way I think about beginning an academic paper with quotes. You start with a bunch of seemingly random episodes that you know will somehow come together and reveal something to you. Once you've got the story, you can start thinking about Plot. Plot has to do with structure, with emphasis and meaning. Vanderburgh writes:
The job of your novel's plot is to show us -- by way of demonstration rather than by pointing out and shouting -- this echoic, repetitive, gathering sense by which we gradually move toward an understanding of significance. (page 76)
Here, Vanderburgh could be talking about the second step of my academic writing process. It's the moment when I start to understand what my argument is going to be; I start forming more complex ideas, but the outcome -- the thesis -- is still unknown. Vanderburgh continues, "Story tells us what happens, while plot tells us what we're to make of these events" (page 76). Here, she could be talking about finding the thesis, discovering the real argument. This process is enlightening and frustrating, and I often find myself thinking "this is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life." But the thesis is always there, waiting almost. Sometimes I have to rewrite my whole paper, find new quotes to support the thesis that I've discovered, but it's different than the first time because I have direction.
I think that this connection between creative and academic writing has always been evident to my subconscious, it just took awhile for me to say it out loud and believe it.
So what, right?
Well, I think that this has made the big scary monster called Plot a lot less scary. One the first day of short story workshop last semester, Professor Cox asked us what we thought we were good at and what we thought we were bad at in terms of writing. I said I was most definitely bad at plot. The thing about plot is that it just seems so darn seamless and easy when you read a book. When I read novels or short stories, I can't ever imagine creating those situations, those worlds. When I start a story, I'm always worried about plot right off the bat. My mind is blank, frozen in panic. At some point, I get frustrated and just focus on the characters or the setting and eventually the plot comes sneaking onto the page without me realizing it. This is exactly what Vanderburgh is talking about when she talks about Story and Plot. I have to let the story show me the plot, just like I have to let my thoughts of individual quotes show me my thesis.
So no more excuses, academics! You can write creatively, too!
Oh so true!!!!! I think the two are so very connected, and you have really nailed what it is that connects them.
ReplyDeleteI don't know why people think writers can't do both. What an awful thing for someone to say to you at the start of your writing career!
And here's a sneaky thing I truly believe---I think nonficton writers (ESPECIALLY historians) should be made to earn to craft stories. I think the reason so many historians stink as writers is because they forget that their job is to be a storyteller first. Historians have looked down their collective noses at 'narrative,' yet they wonder why their books don't sell very well. I think if every historian worked first at fiction, what he'd learn is lessons about crafting story and plot. After all, the story and plot are there for the historian, but there is still 'art' involved in the process.
I hope that made some manner of sense!
I loved this. For a long time I held the same opinion. I saw the academy as stuffy and verbose. One reads scholarship at the risk of being put to sleep. But the more I read, the more I learn how academic work can be creative; in fact, it's creative scholarship that I like the best. Sometimes creativity even works to the benefit of scholarship. Anne McClintock wrote an article critiquing the presentation of history as a type of endless linear progress. Her article is creative for the metaphors it uses and also because, to prove her point, she starts and ends the paper with the same image, creating a circular narrative that contrasts with the linear progress she is trying to deconstruct. Only such a creative foray could so effectively illustrate her scholarly point.
ReplyDeleteOn top of that, I think that scholarship that is personal is also the most interesting. I'm always interested not only in knowing what people write but why they write it (I'm also writing this in the middle of drafting my personal statement, a document meant to tell - what else - what I write and why I write it). It's cool when you tell me you write on midwestern prostitutes from the Great Depression; it's even cooler when you tell me you were inspired to explore the subject after accidentally discovering that your great aunt was one. (For the record, this is an actual reason a professor I know at another school gave me to explain what drives her to research what she studies.)