The Creative Writing Challenge: On Starting Out Where You are

One challenge confronts some college students new to the genre of Creative Nonfiction. On their own, away from the influences of family for the first time, busy reinventing themselves on some college campus, they may not want to be honest or vulnerable about where they've come from. But that is exactly what is needed.

It was this, and not the lack of experience, that made me write fiction and kept me from nonfiction when I was younger. About my own background, had someone given me a truth serum, I would have said this: When you come from around here, you start out wishing you were from somewhere else. This is very easy to do with a number of things. Your parents become invisible. The kitchen where your meals were cooked vanishes. You imagine a whole new neighborhood where you could have grown up, and even if it does begin to sound like a stereotype, at least it is not the tree lined suburb where your affairs were looked after in reasonable terms, where you sledded winters and rode your bike during summer months that threatened with rain or gave away the sun in an afternoon apocalypse that sent you out looking for glory and light.

Nothing There?

Nothing big or important happened to you there, you think. And you notice that people from elsewhere think they have it better than you. You don’t notice that they may be homesick or feeling strange and are compensating. You just hear what they say about their own places. And though people from the East coast visit and tell you that the landscape you’ve seen since early childhood is beautiful and you shouldn’t take it for granted, you find you want to be from where they are.

That’s what I did. The first story I tried to write was set in New York, a city I’d never been to.

When your parents aren’t from the area either, it’s easy to do this, and to claim to be a citizen of the world, where celebrities emerge.

Celebrity Class

That’s what I began to assume in college, even though I looked out at streets where students who were going to go back and do middle management for their relatives’ businesses would be busy building snow men or cross country skiing to class without worry, and where the snow billowed over the trees, cars going by, and windows of buildings, and the steam came up through the manhole covers and made spots where the dark pavement came through the snow.

It was easy to think you really belonged somewhere else and not too hard to start thinking about being from somewhere else.

And that is perhaps the first challenge facing the writer. You can go to a coast and re-invent yourself. Or you can start with what you know and become willing to go back and mine those early conflicts for real conflict, sorrow, and joy, conflicts you are busy right now rather strongly denying.