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How to Become a Creative Non-Fiction Writer |
by Amanda Borozinski
First, decide you're a fiction writer. Pretend to be someone else, somewhere else, doing something else. While Miles Davis plays, do the dishes and imagine you have been forced to do hard labor, a captive who will escape. Hurry to do house chores before the master returns to punish you.
Next, have a character you like to write fiction stories about. Call him Griffin Dean. Write a lot of stories about him. The stories all start in a bar, and end in a tragedy. All of these stories should be very similar. Griffin Dean is walking home late at night after leaving the bar with a lovely stranger by his side. Sometimes she is blond, sometimes brunette, sometimes she is interested in him, sometimes she is not. The important part is the WHAM. The WHAM is when Griffin Dean is run over by a Jetta with a bumper sticker that says I See Dead People, hit by a bus full of varsity basketball girls returning from a game, or a woman rushing her cat who is in labor to the veterinary clinic.
You must write a story where Griffin Dean finds a human toe sticking out of some rosebushes. As he begins to investigate—WHAM—something gets him. His dying thought is centered on noticing that the bushes had just begun to bloom.
Read these stories to your 15-year-old brother, who is eight years younger than you. He thinks these stories are cool! Dream about all the money you will make when you finally publish a Griffin Dean story.
Ruminate on the thought—life needs theme music.
Realize that the Griffin Dean story-thing is a dumb idea.
Feel depressed. Consider never writing again.
Play the Garden State soundtrack while you take a bath. Think of your favorite things. Stare at your big toe sticking out of the bubbles.
Everyone's saying different things to me, different things to me.
Sing along with the songs.
I could have been one of these things first.
Memorize your favorite lines.
Hey, let your honesty shine, shine, shine.
The words are poetry sinking into your skin.
We live in a beautiful world, yeah we do, yeah we do.
They fill up your lungs along with steam. Hold your breath.
There's beauty in the breakdown.
Let your mind drift. Back to the time you were most honest, creative, yourself, most free. The time was 1985; you were five years old. Crawling around on your hands and knees, barking or yipping or growling, you would become a dog, a mountain lion, or a wild horse. No house cats. Remember lapping water out of bowls on the floor, and homemade necktie/belt collars.
Climb out of the bath and dry off with the blue towel, the one with the stain, because the white one seems too perfect to use. Feel clean, know that you cannot stop writing; you are in love with the world.
Consider that the reason you are having trouble writing may actually be Griffin Dean. Every time Griffin gets hit by a bus or sees a toe sticking out of rosebushes you lose interest and the story stops. You can't write science fiction or murder mysteries. Realize you have no idea what an alien looks like.
You are captivated by the idea that anything you imagine can be, but you also know you love to write about what is. Stare at the white page—there are so many options. Feel intimidated. Don't dream of endings. Try to birth possibilities.
Walk, in the blue towel, back to your computer and read your other stories. Read the one about your anorexic sister, your drunken step-father, the time you broke your jaw and had to be wired shut for a month, getting bells palsy when you gave birth to your son, your adopted mother. Read the letters you have written to your husband both in love and in anger. These don't seem like stories because they all really happened. But maybe they are—real—stories. Realize that is some of your best writing. This thought makes you restless.
Itch the side of your cheek.
Stare at your nail and contemplate biting it. Ask yourself, is there something here? Am I this brave? Can I find the personal within the universal? What are we having for dinner?
Write a note to yourself that goes like this: I will make a giant butterfly net and I will fly around my mind capturing my thoughts. And then, I will force them onto the paper. I will tack their tiny translucent wings with black-headed pins onto blank white sheets of paper. I will get a magnifying glass and I will make them come out into the light to be examined.
The essay is a nod at Lorrie Moore's essay, "How to Become a Writer."
Amanda Borozinski is a reporter for The Keene Sentinel. She is a MacDowell fellow. Her work has appeared in such magazines and journals as the Northern New England Review, The Boston Literary Journal, Guideposts Magazine, and The Oklahoma Review. You can read more from her at her blog.
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