Words / Time

Herman Wouk used to keep “work journals” that he generated while warming up for the day, and they give me confidence in having to work through innumerable thoughts before getting them on paper. He wrote fiction, which arguably takes a more creative mindset than nonfiction, but most fiction writers recognize that the story often comes from real experiences. And, as John Irving mentioned at the National Book Festival last weekend, people become much less bashful about their own lives as they age.

But nonfiction also takes great creative skill, and good works have a grand thesis behind them that synthesizes many disparate aspects into one provocative idea. In addition to creating realistic characters, dialogue also makes fiction difficult; the nonfiction writer must be genuine and authoritative. Both writers, if his/her books sell, do the same. A fiction writer must create realistic parents and social interactions that affect, for example, an elementary-school adolescent who later takes his own life. The trouble is putting into words what real people act like, how the whole picture is formed from the micro-interactions that take place day to day. It takes an incredible amount of work to develop characters who talk and act like real people, but the fact is, all we need to do is look around us and be observant. In nonfiction, the people are real and the difficult part is keeping it as close to reality as possible. As we saw with the work of James Frey, though, the line is thin, and both scenarios make for something passable in either genre.

Perhaps for many of us this is the essence of the practice of blogkeeping: we’re glad to put words on the page and render them vocational by publishing them on the web. As a group, posts in the end may indeed amount to something useful, words that in combination depict a certain slice of reality. And the words can be rediscovered--or better yet, further cultivated--and turned into the fiction and nonfiction that later in life produce readable work.

"Start with the trunk of a tree, and then take up one branch after another so that the casual hearer can get a general idea of the whole subject, and then of its different branches, and just what relation they bear to each other." - John Altgelt