True life, even loudly exaggerated, has deficiencies in organization and plot line and a muddiness of symbolic content. It’s hard to draw even the most common wisdom from the messy events of daily existence until they’ve been told over and polished and improved upon a few hundred times. –P.J. O’Rourke
I’ve begun to ponder my honors thesis for my major concentration in Creative Writing. I will submit a proposal in the fall. The guidelines:
…an extensive piece of writing (novel, collection of stories, collection of poems, long poem, play, screenplay, sequence of essays, long-form nonfiction, documentary nonfiction, photojournalism, creative monograph, etc.) prefaced by a critical commentary of at least 8-10 pages in length. The critical commentary should describe the intellectual, theoretical, and/or aesthetic contexts or backgrounds to the work or should narrate the procedures or methodology used in creating the work.
My first thought was to pen a fictional memoir, loosely based upon that long malaise, my life. While my life has been long and story-provoking, it has also been disjointed. I have plenty of source material to draw upon, but I can’t easily see a beginning, a climax, or an end, not to mention proper themes, motifs, or symbols — the pillars of good fiction.
If I choose this genre, I will look to Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, and Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All as creative influences. Exley manages to memorialize a disjointed life while keeping the reader’s interest. He successfully integrates: compelling themes, fame and failure; great motifs, football and the perverted conception of the American Dream; and characters symbolic of his ideal, his father and Frank Gifford. Sean Wilsey’s life seems to have been every bit as eventful as mine; he recounts experiences just as disparate, and he manages to retain interest for 500 pages.
I just don’t know if I can pull it off. I’m not worried about my ability to write; I’m worried about my ability to write something worth reading. And I don’t want to write something my academic advisors would read, but something real people would enjoy. Some friends have suggested a sort of stories-from-college book, for which I have the source material, some already having been transmogrified for the page. The book would be fact fictionalized, with actual events polished and reorganized. It would be composed of chapters or stories rather than one flowing narrative.
Such a work would draw upon P.J. O’Rourke, Hunter S. Thompson, Neil Strauss, Tucker Max, and Philalawyer — an attempt at frat lit with more-than-frat takeaways. The humor and debauchery of young male life tempered by lessons learned — a kind of bildungsroman for the conscious, college-aged male. The danger would be a lapse into a less-funny Tucker Max rehash, a tired and cringeworthy chauvanistic self-caricature with little artistic value, that is, were the idea even approved. Philalawyer, who has been a great influence, has a demon or motif around which to structure his stories: his profession. Can college serve the same role in such a work?
Others have suggested a more cynical, philosophical work, influenced more by Foucault and Derrida, about living in those social worlds I have so despised and navigating those cultural constructs I have found so contemptible. I think this is something I could write were I to take a lot of acid, but in my current state I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around post-modernism as a theoretical underpinning. Plus, I half agree with Tucker Max’s takeaway from postmodernism — that it’s something for overeducated, upper-class liberals to discuss in the insulated ivory towers of academia.
I would appreciate some help. What kind of work would you find most worth reading? Which do you think I’m most prepared to write?
Disconnected College-aged bildungsroman with a mindful overture of philosophy sounds pretty readable to me. I remember reading some philosophical bit you wrote about adrenaline and overt spending, flying on a private jet to New York or some ridiculous shit.
I can’t find where you posted it, but I’ve got the quote: “try to hit the kill switch on that lightning rod of adrenaline, unplug the live wire of naked impulse that lurks within,”. That story was certainly thought provoking and a collection of them would be worth reading, particularly if they had a central theme.
All coming from my most humble opinion, of course.
Haha thanks for the comments. The quote came from here:
http://kileyaustinyoung.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/dark-thoughts-on-happiness/
But the specific tales to which you refer could have been those from my freshman year Facebook notes. I thought they might be a bit too much for polite company, so they aren’t anywhere public right now.
Kiley:
I should preface this by saying that I’m not at all familiar with Tucker Max, aside from the disdain a few friends have for him. So I can’t quite place the reference.
I admire the approach to write for an audience that is wider than your advisors. In the first potential angle, I worry that you’d walking over well-trodden ground. In addition, you’d be welcoming readers to approach your story as one of identification rather than insight. This is a particular worry of mine in any type of storytelling that covers a broad, identifiable subject. College, naturally, fits the bill.
I find the second angle more intriguing, but I’m a post-modern guy, so that shouldn’t be surprising. Perhaps I’m just showing my preferences. In this approach, though, my concern would be that you already seem too on-the-nose about your feelings on the culture. It sounds like something I’ve both read and heard before; I feel like it’s perhaps the first step. That the project would not be about pinning down the world you describe, but forcing yourself to take something away from it. That pinning down would essentially be your first act, and not the entire story.
An over-arching concern is that your advisors will want to push you, and won’t settle for something so immediately in your wheelhouse. I say that not to discourage you; in fact, I feel the opposite: if this is what you want, it’s smart to start pressing on the pitch now. If it’s good, the general subject you’re approaching won’t matter a lick.
Hope this is at least somewhat helpful; I look forward to reading more about it as you work through it.
Many thanks for your comments. What I am imagining as of late, and as I read and ponder more, is the transition — perhaps illustrated by fictionalized events from my life — from a Randian worldview to a Foucauldian worldview, a coming of age, the trip from trying to be Roark to knowing there’s no such objectivity, not now, not ever. How does one respond when the illusions fall? What is a conscious, college-aged male to do? Succumb while knowing it, always self-aware, or fight it? What have I done? What have you done?
The events of my life provide the excitement, I think, to make it readable. I think the key is getting the meta-themes right — the hypocrisy and destructive power of The System, the oppressive path forced upon us and the enduring allure of succumbing to a perverse social order.
Philalawyer does this expertly. He writes interesting tales with the sex, drugs, and rock and roll aspect balanced by a deep, biting social critique. It’s true, it’s been written, but he brings something unique to the table with a raucous wit, excellent writing, and scorn for his profession. Could I do the same? I don’t know. And would it be tired? I’m not sure; I don’t think so. I know I’m a bit vague about what it is that has made my experience unique, but only because this is a public forum.
Polite literary culture, I think, would regard Philalawyer as lowbrow, but it isn’t. Tucker Max is lowbrow, fair, even if hilarious. The funny thing is, Max is just as conscious, and were he a better writer, he could have written a book with more takeaways. He’s just trying to entertain. Can you think of other modern writers — Chuck Klosterman comes to mind — that are funny, interesting, while critiquing culture in some of the ways I might seek to?