The Old Man and the Sea

    I think the anecdote I mentioned the other day in class might be a good topic to explore in writing for class. However with this topic as well as others, the trouble I have is what I'm going to say about it. Telling the story itself I am not as worried about. Certainly I would want to do drafts and rework the material into its best form, but I'm much more concerned with why, or to what end. I've tried to work in creative nonfiction before, and at those times I was mainly focused on the storytelling element. It was my goal to run a thread through events as best I could to make them read like a coherent story with a beginning and an end and hopefully some type of a plot. And as much as they were reflective and I hope emotionally resonant with the reader, I worry those two criteria, while valuable to me, still fall short of what might be called a "point" or a purpose.

    In telling the story of the time my dad almost drowned himself to save a $25 oar, I could talk about my dad's peculiarities, my relationship with my dad, his relationship with the beach and the sea and the difficulty he has had reconciling his advancing age with his previously held notion of that relationship. I could talk about my own feelings about the ocean, I could speak self-depricatingly about my own "heroism" or I could be falsely modest and transparently self-aggrandizing about what a big deal I thought it was that I jumped into the ocean to save my dad from an as-yet unknown danger. I could talk about what an idiot my brother is, because when I told him "stay here, and if I'm not back in 5 minutes, go for help" he waited 4 minutes and took a surfboard and came in after me. Or I could talk about how much I love him for doing that. I could talk about both of those things or a dozen of them together. As for now I'm uncertain about anchoring any anecdote in a "why." I worry about my affectation in general, so in trying to drive home a specific point, I am especially wary of sounding contrived and insincere and compromising the whole piece.

First blog

    It seems like the essential component of creative nonfiction is some type of personal narrative. These are stories in which a narrator tells about him or herself. They all do this differently, some talking about an event, others about aspects of themselves, but in any case these are stories centered around the narrator. They offer biographical information in varying degrees. Lopate's "Portrait of My Body" is composed almost exclusively of autobiographical detail, whereas Marquart's "Some Things About That Day" offers few if any hard informational facts about the speaker of the piece. While that narrator is nonetheless characterized by her thoughts and actions and the tone of her narration, the piece is much more focused on elements of her experience than details about her as a person. These two extremes of style are synthesized in Beard's "Out There" in which the narrator talks about herself and her life while relating the tale of her harrowing experience.
    Largely absent from these pieces is any element of dialogue. This serves to further the self-centeredness of the style. Short pieces, like "Some Things About That Day" are short all the way through, favoring short, terse sentences, whereas the slightly longer form "Portrait of My Body" tends to weave longer, more relaxed sentences. Certainly this reflects the differences in subject matter between the two pieces, but also may indicate their character on the whole.