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owlmylove · 3 years

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Do you have any advice on writing creative nonfiction for the first time? Your works are so beautifully (and sometimes painfully) vivid. -shoe

((To clarify about my creative nonfiction ask, I mean "painfully" vivid in the sense, the emotions are very well crafted and instilled, even when the work is about something painful or very vulnerable)).

Hello shoe!! First and foremost, thank you so much for your kind words and for asking me about my literal favorite thing in the world. I don’t get to ramble abt cnf a lot on here, and it makes me !!!! that you’re interested in writing it for the first time. If you’re just starting to get interested in the genre it’s a very weird little hybrid, and I’d love to share some of the basics before giving specific advice

Creative nonfiction is about seeing the movements of the mind on the page. It takes us somewhere new by the end, even if we end up returning to a premise or scene from the beginning. CNF thrives at the intersections of research, experience, and artistry, and combines elements of poetry, memoir, journalism, etc. There’s different forms and genres within creative nonfiction, and the limits are almost entirely up to your imagination.

CNF is the most playful sculptor of prose that I know of, second only to poetry, and some pieces end up looking like different creatures than essays entirely. Look at Lauren Trembath-Neuberger’s Drug Facts, or Dinty Moore’s Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge. It’s a species with remarkable biodiversity, so let’s talk taxonomy:

Lyric. Lyrical CNF is fueled by the beauty and imagery of the words. How they flow together, what the sentences sound like. Play with long and short sentences, with alliteration, with recurrent imagery. Highly descriptive, lyrical essays can be something akin to longform poetry. Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay may look like a poem, but it’s technically lyrical CNF.

Literary. Fact-based research is at the heart of literary CNF, and some pieces can appear to be regular journalistic articles at first glance. David Foster Wallace’s infamous Consider The Lobster is a fantastic example: it began as an assignment for Gourmet magazine, but Wallace combines research with experience, and moves from objective fact to abstraction.

Form. CNF forms help authors sculpt stories around things they may not always be comfortable confronting head-on. Hermit crab essays are exactly that: a borrowed textual structure (a shopping list, a how-to guide, a Wikipedia page) that fits around the soft, vulnerable heart of your topic. Eula Biss’ The Pain Scale (I think it’s also a braided essay?) and (my absolute favorite hermit crab) Drug Facts by Lauren Trembath-Neuberger are both hermit crabs.

Other forms include braided, when you weave 2-4 (but usually 3) strands of topics together; flash essays, which are generally less than 500 or 1,000 words; memoir, which is as the name suggests, but less strictly regimented and more creative than traditional autobiographies; and hybrid forms, which can be a collage of just about any genre or form you like.

A good CNF piece will probably combine all three of these elements, but will likely be driven by just one. I try to include relevant notes of research (etymology, biology, history) in my lyrical personal essays, because you’d be surprised what kind of narrative vehicles you’ll find, metaphors and facts that can serve as little hermit crab shells around things that hurt. But my pieces are still mostly lyrical, and driven by sentences and images rather than research or form. It might seem counterintuitive to writing emotions, but consider researching topics you’re interested in for metaphors and imagery that can help you emphasize your point.

As for rendering emotions or experience in painfully vivid detail, I love focusing on the movement of CNF. You can base your piece’s movement on your body, moving through a space. On your memories moving through time. Or, as I tend to do on the pieces posted here, the movement of cognition, as your thoughts develop. My pieces feel like trains of thought. I let the topics flow from one to another, including stops at the more painful memories if they arrive, and then keep going. My favorite thing is to try and let the reader feel, or see, what I’m experiencing in real time. When I wrote about on taking a night-walk during a dustbowl, there are no transitional statements and very few “I”s: every sentence is an order. The reader is forced to do what I’m doing, consider what I’m considering, but I balance this intimacy with some of my own thoughts so it doesn’t get overwhelming.

Your sentences are like a camera in CNF: they control the piece’s perspective and how much, or how little, you want to confess. Like a droid zooming up from the ground into the sky, your sentences control the scale of the reader’s understanding, and you can play with that for greater impact. You can write long, lingering sentences to make the reader slow down and focus, or you can blur out bigger things in their peripherals with brief, glancing mentions before changing the topic. You can write pieces that feel like years on a calendar flipping by. You can also write rapid, run-on sentences that feel like you’re being rushed along a busy street (which is where I got the dustbowl idea).

A good aim for CNF is to try moving from small, objective facts (physical objects, research, matter-of-fact memories recounted without any “I am” or emotional lens) to higher, abstracted wonderings (how do your facts connect to your memories? [i.e, I lived in a fireproof home but my heart feels like a pyromaniac] spin out some “perhaps” statements about your memories, or things you didn’t experience: “perhaps my mother knew what it felt like to burn” etc.). go from high concept to low and back again. play with form, and movement, and memory. with language. and consider strip-teasing your audience around what you may not wish to reveal.

So, basically! Creative nonfiction is about balancing words, research, and experience. It’s about developing a topic or memory or concept into something beyond objective fact. And above all else, it’s a beautiful kind of play. There’s honestly no right or wrong way to write CNF, and new forms are being invented all the time. If you’re still finding your style in CNF, I highly recommend trying to create imitations of interesting form to see what feels right (like a hermit crab, trying on different shells for the perfect fit) and make your sentences work for you. Try to worry less about confronting a big scary topic, and more about how (via form, metaphor, perspective, etc.) you can comfortably approach it.

Sorry this got so long, but I truly hope it helps!! And if you ever have further questions, or want a proofreader on your work, feel free to let me know<3

#cnf #creative nonfiction #writing #spilled ink #Anonymous

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trisscar368 · 2 years

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So the last lines of Secondhand Lions started living in my head recently and it made me rewatch the film.

The last two lines of the movie are between the protagonist and a character who confirms the legends about the two old coots (Garth and Hob) and their adventures in Africa were true:

“They really lived?”

“Yeah. They really lived.”

Secondhand Lions is a beautiful story about stories. Legends. The things we should believe in so they can become true. It’s also one of the rare stories where characters you love die and it’s 95% happy at the end.

There’s an absolute end to the story of those two old men but it was the point and the beauty of the entire narrative structure. Garth tells Walter (the kid) a romance story that needs a happily ever after, and then you learn that this present story is what happens after that ‘happily ever after’. Not every story gets a perfect ending, but you’re in multiple stories throughout your life. You’ll inspire some after you’re gone. And sometimes it matters more that a story tells you something worth believing in; how else can it become real?

(Yes, Hogfather has also been living rent free in my head, why do you ask?)

Because Hob and Garth committed to letting Walter into their lives, because you know they lived full lives and loved fiercely, the knowledge that they died (doing what they loved) is the final chord in a song instead of a knife cutting the strings. We know as the audience that the music will echo and continue. Walter has his comics about the summer with Jasmine. The sheikh’s son has told similar stories to his son.

It’s okay that things end. Because this was a good story, and the next story will continue.

All of this works because the themes match the structure. We know the end of all three story threads when they start - Hob and Garth die before we know their names, Walter stays with his uncles, Jasmine died years ago and Hon came home. What matters thematically is that the characters lived. We see that life in depth, from the beginning of the adventure to the point the characters are old and grey. We learn the value of telling stories, and see how they keep the past and loved ones alive. The ending is never a surprise, it’s the answer to “what happened?”

This is the point where I devolve into a somewhat sad Supernatural blogger, cause… this is what the spn writers said they were aiming at with 15x20. Heroes who lived and died and the story is what remains, and they carry on past the point where you think the story should end. They live, and then they don’t, and you’re supposed to be okay with it.

The structure is where themes live and die. S15 as a whole only flirted with Carry On After I’m Gone briefly before Chuck returned, mourning Rowena and grieving Mary instead of bringing her back. “What comes next” isn’t answered because the crisis never stops, unless you count starting a new (romantic) story as an answer. You end up with 42 minutes to build your theme and show the execution — carry on, death and the afterlife is your rest and peace. It’s a linear progression to the conclusion, with repeated empty spaces from the beginning to the end where wounds still ache, even if something else fills the space for a while.

It’s such a world away from “they really lived”. From “a legacy is a seed planted that will grow and blossom.”

“Life has many stories, and ours will live on in the lives of those we touched and saved, long after we’re gone.”

Anyway. Go watch Secondhand Lions or something.

#pyromaniac’s guide to burning your narrative structure #fwf #yes i still have spn brainrot #it’s just sad brainrot cause this was never hard to fix

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trisscar368 · 3 years

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Of Villains and Monsters, and the tragedy of Supernatural

Chuck is a writer. That’s how we’re introduced to him, the writer of Supernatural the novel series, and writers lie but the thing is, they lie with the truth and the truth is in the lies.

Fiction is all made up by a writer and put onto the page. It’s a lie. But when you create a story world, you pull it from your experiences and life, your traumas, your views on different things. You put yourself into the story to make it breathe, to make it authentic. The audience can tell a lot about you as a person based on the choices you make, which lies you use to tell what truths. 

The story Chuck keeps telling, keeps retelling, has several themes. Betrayal, the removal of the feminine, siblings fighting, corrupting the innocent, absent fathers, free will vs destiny. The themes are present in supernatural from the first season, and they scale up as the story grows — Sam and Dean’s conflict with each other, their anger over an absent father, is mirrored in the archangels Lucifer and Michael. John telling Dean he might have to kill Sam is mirrored in Michael locking Lucifer away, in Cain killing Abel to save him from the devil. Mary is mirrored in Jessica, in Eve, and finally in Amara. John’s absence is turned into loss and finally revealed as Chuck removing himself from the world.

And it all mirrors back, we discover, to an original conflict — Chuck locking away Amara. He fought with and betrayed his sister, removed the feminine from his life, corrupted the innocent (Lucifer taking on the Mark and “needing” to be put in another Cage), and finally became the absent father by stepping away from his creation in order to watch. The story Chuck is telling is his own, his family conflict and trauma forced onto the lives of others throughout the millennia until finally it lands on Sam and Dean Winchester.

He wants them to kill each other. For one of them to be dark and corrupted and a monster, the other heroic and light, but the darkness wins in the end. The conflict is inevitable, the conclusion forgone. There’s no forgiveness, no love left, because monsters are not capable of love, and who could ever learn to love a monster?

This is where Chuck loses control of the story. Every other iteration of this fight, the siblings go through with it having lost their love, despite their love, or because of their love, but this Sam and this Dean say “no” because they love each other. They try to find another way. And they have the love of family and friends that supports them and keeps them from despairing, helps them find solutions other than death.

And this is where Chuck is wrong, because Amara came out of the Cage and was furious and saw her brother as a monster; but in the end, she didn’t want revenge, she wanted to be reunited with her other half. She was willing to try, to forgive, to coexist as separate but equal, but Chuck didn’t know how to move past that story. He was stuck — Amara said in the text he was still wounded by their original split, by his actions, and he doesn’t know how to be vulnerable in order to let the wound heal.

Sam and Dean, though… they did know how to move past that. When given back Mary, the feminine influence torn out of their lives, they struggled with learning who she was as a person instead of a myth. But they found common ground, they had the difficult conversations about what life was like without her, they came to a point of peace where the absence mattered less than having her in the here and now. When this family fights with each other, they will eventually, always, find a way to forgive and reconcile And that’s where things go wrong for the story.

Chuck couldn’t have that conversation with Amara. She was able to voice her pain, and her anger, and how done she was with his attitude and his codependent traits, but Chuck hedges. He can admit that he wants to spend time with her, that he wants to create something new, that he wants to bridge that divide, but he can’t talk about the trauma his choices caused.

Much like Sam and Dean fighting in season 9 over Gadreel, Chuck leaves and goes back to what he knows best. Dean went hunting and took on the Mark of Cain, Chuck starts writing Supernatural again and messing with the Winchesters. He takes away their resolution with the feminine (Mary), and tells them the new life and hope and future they’ve been building (Jack) is an abomination and must die. He plays out his trauma on their lives, as above so below. And they do what they’ve always done in the end — they choose love and family and forgiveness.

Chuck is furious, and he runs back to Amara. And she’s done with him. This is the drive of the season — Chuck wants Amara, wants to be reunited with her and to create new things and a new life, and because he can’t have that -- because he can’t break his own silence and address his own trauma, because he can’t humble himself enough to acknowledge that he caused pain and ask for forgiveness instead of demanding acceptance -- he falls back on his old patterns. Creating by himself. Writing. And the writing is destructive and manipulative and focuses on characters who won’t do what he wants, the way she won’t do what he wants.

This is where the story of Supernatural breaks. This is where the house of cards begins to collapse.

Chuck reunites with Amara in 15.17 and nothing comes of it. He manipulates her into it, he writes situations she can’t escape, and leaves her hopeless and friendless and broken and her only possible option is to come back to him. This is not a healthy relationship, but it is the stated goal of the villain, the thing he wants most in the world. He achieves it three episodes before the end and it doesn’t immediately have any impact on the story.

Except it ends the story.

The problem isn’t that she was holding herself apart from him, the problem was in Chuck’s behaviors and actions, the traumatized-turned-abuser, the pain he couldn’t voice in order to address his bad behavior and grow. There are two endings to this story - Chuck is rejected and cast out and new balance is found with his successor; or Chuck discovers humanity, regret and remorse and humility, and… neither actually happens. Amara keeps him at a distance but she doesn’t reject his final bid for “unity”, she does not remain her own entity. Chuck and Amara “reunite”, but at the end of the day all this does is remove Amara’s agency from the narrative. She gives in to her brother’s desires and is locked away, put into a new Cage whose name is Chuck. She ceases to exist, folded back into an abusive situation, and the consequences are devastating.

Chuck goes back to his tragedy, torturing the Winchesters, taking away everything from them because there’s nothing left. He will never heal, he will never move on, he will never grow up.

The only motivation for those that oppose him (Billie) must be the desire for power. Love is met with silence (Cas and Eileen) and happiness is fleeting, and it’s in loving the things you can never have and the memory of joy instead of the possibility of it being real. Desire to be loved and reconciled is met with fury (Michael) and dismissal. The heroes of the story win but it’s an empty victory — they will live out their lives as they were before, with nothing changing but the aching ever-present absence of those who have been lost over the years.

When Sam and Dean stand defiant on the sand, and Jack strips away Chuck’s power, it’s validating his ending. He is the monster at the end of this book. He is to be discarded, abandoned, and forgotten. He was never going to be redeemed, because who could love a monster? And monsters are not capable of love.

Jack says that he is with Amara, but there is no reconciliation, no acknowledgement of trauma, no power in the narrative. She’s an afterthought, still held in her new Cage of “unity” and she vanishes with Jack into the ether and the wide world. She’s happy on the other side, in Heaven, the way Mary was. The way Dean will be.

They heroes have freedom, they can go anywhere they want. They can build new lives. They just… can never have what they hoped for. The things you lose are lost forever, and the balance you find is with the weight of absence and knowing that some things are final.

This is Chuck’s ending, still. The story doesn’t collapse at the last minute. It starts crumbling the second Chuck won. Because he did win, and winning was never going to give him what he wanted but it damned the rest of the world anyways. He wrote a tragedy.

This is Swan Song, heroic sacrifice for love defeats the villain and tears up the script and the divine plan, and in name the protagonists have freedom and have the life they asked for. But there will always be something missing. One sibling leaves the other — then it was Sam saying “it’s okay I’ve got him” and now it’s Dean being told “it’s okay you can rest.” One sibling is left to wander the earth, to live with the sense of something torn away (Dean missing Sam, Sam grieving Dean, Chuck without his divinity) while the other travels to the Otherworld (Sam in the Cage, Dean in Heaven, Amara with Jack). The family they had built is gone (Dean leaves the hunting life and doesn’t speak to Bobby, Jack and Cas and the elements of the supernatural vanish and leave Sam and Dean alone on the earth, Sam leaves the hunting life altogether), and what new they can create for themselves they will do on their own.

I’m reminded of a few quotes on that last one…

“The time of the elves is over. The time has come for the dominion of men.” “When I was a boy, there were dragons.”

This is a standard trope in a certain kind of fantasy, where you journey into the Beyond and then things must end when you come back to Reality. The fantasy is over. Magic was never meant to last in this world, but monsters… monsters do.

To which my response is to angrily quote Pratchett (who was misquoting Chesterton, but I like Pratchett’s phrasing better) —

“The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.”

Supernatural started with "there are monsters under the bed”, “normal” life was a fantasy and dream slapped over the gritty reality. We learned that in Pilot. Sam was born into that world and he did escape but he carried it with him. Knives in the closet, gun under the pillow, he was never truly out of that world, which means sending him back to it feels more akin to a Djinn dream than a story coming full circle.

But that’s where Chuck and Amara’s story leaves us. The characters cannot reconcile with what was missing, they cannot move past their trauma into something new without letting go, the potential for a family and a life is lost, and the fantasy world has to be left behind. Dean has to let go of Mary and the life he dreamed of, the one where things never went wrong, the one where he gets to be happy even in a synthesis of old and new. Sam has his adventure and gets to grow up and go back to the real world, carrying the lessons he learned along the way. Dean dies because he belongs in that world, the world we’re leaving behind, but Sam won’t ever leave and have his own life if his brother is alive acting as an anchor to the Otherworld.

The Darkness is locked away inside of the Light. There’s no happy ending, because that would require a monster to be capable of love, for a monster to discover their humanity and be able to speak their pain out loud, and for someone to love them in return and extend forgiveness instead of walking away.

The story was about balance, about duality, about synthesis, about the monstrosity of humans and the humanity of monsters, and we were given an ending about leaving the world of Gods and Myths for the modern age.

As if there are no monsters on the back roads of America, no ghosts asking for a ride.

After all, at the end of the day... you can never go home, can you?

#spn meta #spn 15x17 #spn 15x20 #fuck chuck #amara #pyromaniac’s guide to burning your narrative structure #*angrily chews on glass*#monster monster

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trisscar368 · 3 years

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I am still just sitting and glaring at Mystery Spot.

Die and be resurrected. Die again. Come back again. Keep coming back because the game isn’t over, the lesson hasn’t been learned, whatever the trickster wants from you hasn’t been achieved.

Win your way free by figuring out there’s a supernatural entity screwing with you and threatening to kill him. But the game isn’t over, and Dean dies, and Sam is supposed to keep going.

(I got wordy oops - negative comparison to the finale, rambling about the pattern of making deals, and glaring at the author because I don’t have a knife sharp enough rn)

Back in s3 he can’t do that because he’s carrying the weight of Dean’s hell deal - giving up on Dean, letting go of this, means accepting that Dean is in hell and being tortured because Sam is alive and who could live with that? But Gabriel was only getting involved because a) it’s fun and b) Sam being unable to let go of Dean is what was going to push him towards Ruby and eventually starting the apocalypse. (It is of course debatable whether Gabriel intended to stop Sam or to push Sam into making that choice, but we don’t have enough of Gabriel to actually make a solid argument, alas)

There’s cosmic level consequences to these two not being able to let go, because they won’t abide by the rules and *everyone else can use that against them*. It’s just not that “Death takes, a Winchester takes back and that disrupts the natural order” (though it does *waves hand at 2.01 and how that carries into the s2 narrative for Dean and pushing him into his choice in 2.22*) it’s “Death shows up for nachos, Death gets stabbed because Winchesters don’t like letting go and now we have to deal with God’s sister”.

*That’s* the issue on a narrative level back in Kripke’s era - there are *consequences* to the fact that these two can’t let go. Domino number one, John dying in a parking lot in the 70s, eventually sets off the apocalypse because these characters look at the possibility of a life alone and they can’t handle it when there’s another option right there. And every single supernatural entity on the board knows that, and takes advantage. The dynamic shifts in Carver era to personal consequences, “I can’t let go” vs “you should have let me go” (s9 post Gadreel Sam contrasts nicely with demon!Dean) and how it’s causing the characters harm, but the plot expands in 11/12 because the *family* expands. Cas starts making dumbass choices and sacrifices because Winchesters, and Jack learns it too. Dean and Sam both work on *letting* each other and their other family (Cas, Mary, Jack eventually) make choices that do not sit well.

Bad decisions still happen, but the characters are no longer dying as part of it. They’re being forced to live with it. Can you live with the choices you’ve made? Can you live with the consequences?

Which is the second half of mystery spot. We’ve done resurrection ad nauseum, time to live with the consequences of reality. Tv show is over, welcome to the end. Deal with it.

Except that six months of Sam not being able to let go happened because the game was rigged. What Sam was pushing for and fighting for was a chance to do things without interference. To beat the person who was writing that little darkfic.

And their entire *lives* were that. The game was always rigged, from well before Mary made her deal to save John. And those Original Sins of sacrificing themselves for a loved one were absolutely rigged. John selling his soul for Dean in 2x01 and Dean in 2x22, Sam trying in between 3/4... those didn’t happen in a void. Having the final breath of the narrative be Sam letting go of Dean... on top of all the other reasons why it doesn’t work for me, it’s punishing them for Chuck’s railroading. They didn’t react correctly by *not* reacting to terrible circumstances, and finally they get to undo that by dying.

“They should never have let an abusive authority figure manipulate their lives from before they were born and push them into making those decisions, how dare.” Like... what the fuck kind of message is this??? Yes, a lot of their decisions were things they shouldn’t have decided to do, but we have literally seen how many ways Chuck has tried to force them into his story. Their lives are one big pile of gaslighting now, by canon in explicit detail, so this is not and cannot be what is required to resolve the emotional threads of the story.

Dean wanted to get out and have the apple pie life, and the narrative told him everyone would die if he made that “selfish” decision (go look at 2.20). Even last season, it was “toes in the sand” if he knew people wouldn’t be hurt by that choice. Sam wanted to get out and the narrative told him everyone he loved would die no matter what he did (*gestures at the entire show*).

I keep waiting for the alarm clock to go off one more time. Put me back on Wednesday, because yeah maybe they weren’t going to necessarily have a happy ending and fluff because their lives are not a tv show - except oh wait, that conclusion that the characters themselves came to? That their lives were a horror and there wasn’t really any hope because happy endings don’t happen? Good things don’t happen? Was because the game was rigged.

For fuck’s sake give them a chance to try.

“I just had a really weird dream.”

“Clowns or midgets?”

#bit of a rant oops #negativity for ts #triss vs the narrative #this is basically what my next hyperfixation is - going through and documenting narrative threads and yelling about them into the void #and a few more tags in here so i'm not in the tracked ones #spn finale #spn 15x20 #spn 3x11 #pyromaniac's guide to burning your narrative structure

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