In the Details :: Personal Narrative Writing Papers

In the Details I started taking a fiction class at just the right moment in my life. It was a genre I had never been good at, and had even been afraid of since that day J.C. laughed at my pathetic attempt to write a short story about a lesbian returning home to the South, only to be welcomed by a non-accepting mother, who all but condones it when a man rapes her to teach her how a woman is supposed to be. Of course, it was an awful story, but it was agony to write. The dialogue was so forced, as I tried to spell it the way I heard it in my head, tried to capture inflections and drawls and pauses. In the end, it read more like a cartoon, and no one could empathize with my character when she got drunk, got in his truck, and didn’t scream for help or fight him off. The plot was thin, none of the characters had any motivation, and the devices I tried to use were not working. I learned then that fiction had these elements for a reason. In order to craft a good story, I had to learn to use the tools. In essays and poetry, all these things had never seemed important to me. They were usually crafted because of an idea, and I could execute that idea without worrying about literary devices or symbolism, or other large concepts. My sole needs for my writing had always been voice, subtlety, and sometimes, alliteration. Fiction was much harder than I had previously thought. It wouldn’t be until the spring of 2001 that I would try my hand at it again. I decided that spring to take an introductory fiction class at a community college. By that time, I was actually making a living as a writer (albeit a technical writer), and I was comfortable in every other aspect of my writing, but I was still afraid of fiction. It must have come at just the right time for me. Within a week after I joined the class, I was downsized at the company I had worked at for two years. My whole department was just not needed anymore, although we were the only ones writing the training for new employees. So, with nothing but time in my day between Internet searches for new jobs and calls to recruiters, I began to write some stories.