So this week, as I understand it, I am supposed to blog on the expectations and standards I have for the reviewing process that we are doing for class. To begin with, I hope that the reviewers of my memoir first draft will not pull any punches. I have been through a couple of writing workshop classes now, and I feel that I have developed a pretty thick skin. I know that I will improve as a writer more from things that are pointed out to me that just aren't working for the reader. It's nice to get praise and compliments, but then, how do you improve if you think everything you write is gold? I just expect that the reviewers will let me know when a joke falls flat, when a scene is not set up well enough, or a character is not completely fleshed out. In short, I just want to know if the reader is "getting it."

As far as what my standards are for the memoirs I will be looking at, I will be as fair and honest as possible. I will try to balance the negatives with the positives. I will be looking at the overall effect of the narrative aspect of the memoirs. I will try to cite specific examples of things that aren't working for me. This might be an image that doesn't work. It might be an awkwarrd sentence that leaves me wondering what is meant. Overall, I will be looking to see if I got anything out of the memoir, even if it's just entertainment value.

Strunk & White's Elements of Style

While I was reading the part of Stephen King's On Writing entitled "Toolbox," it struck me how much respect he has for Strunk & White's Elements of Style. He makes frequent references to it and even quotes it. Then I flipped to the beginning of the book and read in the second foreword that King claims that the book should be read by every aspiring writer. This is a book that is now ninety years old (Strunk originally wrote it at that time - White revised the book in 1959, source Wikipedia), but yet still has great value in terms of the effect it has on the English language. King, a successful, modern novelist, is letting his readers know how much of an influence the book has had on his writing style.
I actually have Elements of Style, but I have never read it. The funny thing is that the professor of the very first college English Composition course I ever took recommended that everyone in the class get the book. It's not very long, but perusing it gives one the feeling that it's not meant to be read cover-to-cover. It seems more like a quick reference handbook. Either way, I've never done more than maybe read the introduction or start the first chapter. Perhaps Mr. King has given me the extra push I need to sit down and read it. With all of the changes in the English language over the past several decades, the book has seemingly stood the test of time.

Do memoirists have to tell the truth?

After reading Ben Yagoda's "A Brief History of Memoir-Bashing," I began to reaffirm, in my thinking, the absolute necessity for memoirists to tell the truth, to the best of their ability, in their writing. Given that there has been a long tradition of negative criticism towards the genre, writers who present falsehoods as fact are not only hurting theri credibility, but are also given more fodder for those critics who don't think much of memoir anyway.

I agree with the anonymous author that Yagoda quoted as saying, "the form should be the province of people of 'lofty reputation' or who have something of 'historical importance to say'—not of the 'vulgar' who try to 'excite prurient interest that may command a sale.'" I think if a memoirist feel the tempatation to stretch the truth, or to "sex up" his or her story, then perhaps they really have nothing of historical importance to say, and they are only trying to make big bucks off of a sensationalistic story.

Writing Across Gender

In his essay entitled, "First Person Female," author Jim Harrison discusses how he was able to successfully write in the voice of a woman. Along the way, he seems to suggest that male, heterosexual writers, in order to be able to write across gender, need to allow themselves the same emotional latitude that society affords women and gay men. I guess what he is saying is that men need to allow themselves to have feelings and emotions that perhaps culture has historically deemed as being feminine.

I can agree with that to a certain extent, but I think really, it just boils down to a writer being able to see things, or imagine things from another perspective other than their own. This goes for female writers writing from a man's POV, and male writers portraying women characters in their work.

I do think, too, that a writer needs to be observant of the world around him or her. In Harrison's case, he pointed to the women that he grew up with as being sources for his female characters. For fleshing out his female characters, he simply drew from his experiences with his mother, his aunts, and his dead sister. I know when I have written fiction, I have simply thought about people that I know, or have known, when developing characters. Admittedly, though, I don't think that I have yet successfully written anything from a woman's POV. I think mostly this is just because I am a noob writer and it's easiest to stick to what you know, which, in my case, is the male perspective.

So is There Really a Such Thing as Plagiarism?

I loved reading Jonathan Lethem's essay entitled, "The Ecstacy of Influence"; however, after reading it, I am not really sure where I stand on the issue of plagiarism. Reading the piece left me feeling like perhaps there really is no such thing. Or that the definition of plagiarism should be pulled in tighter so that it encompasses a smaller set of behaviors. The author seems to have a very loose attitude to artistic borrowing and makes a good case that it runs rampant throughout all artistic endeavors. He even seems to go so far as to say that it is the very nature of art to be influenced by, pay homage to, and mimic other artists.

One thing I found interesting was that Lethem mentioned his own first novel, Gun, With Occasinal Music. I loved this book and have read it twice. It totally made sense to me that Lethem would take the stance that he does on artistic borrowing since one of the concepts for this novel came about from a line that Lethem got from a Raymond Chandler book. The line ended with "the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket." Well, in his novel, which itself blends hardboiled detective fiction and sci-fi, animals are rapidly evolved so that they can talk and function as humans. So one of the antagonists in the story is actually a kangaroo wearing clothes who causes much trouble for the main character.

I have wrestled with the originality issue myself, before I even read the essay. I remember an argument with a colleague, a professional tech writer and hobbyist creative writer, where I argued that there were really not any NEW ideas. Anything that seems new is really only a twist on an old idea or a conjugation of existing ideas into something that appears "new." I had read somewhere that, depending on which scholar you believe, there are really only about a half a dozen or so plots that fictional stories can follow. Some number it as high as a couple of dozen.

After reading Lethem's essay, I have perhaps come to the conclusion that it is less important as a writer or other artist to try to come up with something new and original than it is to take the things that interest you and find new and interesting ways to show them or explore them. I remember when I once had a panic attack about a short story I turned in for a fiction workshop class. After turning it in, I began to wonder if I was guilty of plagarism. I sent a guilt-ridden confessional email to my professor explaining my concern (I took the song lyrics to an old Police song and tried to flesh out the basic song narrative into a short story), and her response was to relax and not worry. She assured me that there were only so many plot ideas out there and, especially in a six week class, it was hard to come up with "new" ideas. In the end, no one in my group even remembered the song or made the connection. Perhaps if I had read Lethem's essay before that incident, I might have been more relaxed about the whole thing. The story sucked anyway, and I was never going to get rich off of it, so what's the big deal, right?