About thirty minutes into Cathy Gildiner’s visit to our class, I felt that she had blended into our high-spirited environment so well that it was easy to forget the presence of a guest author. The only way to capture the attention of high school students is to gain their respect, and Cathy was able to do so as a result of her modesty. By listening to us voice our questions and concerns, she offered relevant advice. Over the past couple of years, each of us has developed a skill set as writers, but we tend to become frustrated in keeping a narrow focus. Cathy, an acclaimed novelist, advised us to read over the piece and eliminate useless information, which I will consider throughout this blog and every writing piece I submit over the course of the year. Her editing board, which ran on a chapter-to-chapter basis, demonstrated the importance of organization to maintain effective structure.
Afterwards, I thought of the general teenage tendency to appreciate fiction novels more so than memoirs, yet by general consensus, our class considers After the Falls superior to Seduction. Would you be surprised to know this? How important is it to include personal experience in literature? Should it be essential to some degree? Is there a writer from whom you draw inspiration? What technique makes him or her special? Also, where does your excellent sense of humour come from? Is Colin Stitt the funniest student you’ve ever encountered? These are some of the many questions that arose from her discussion, but unfortunately, I was too exhausted to articulate any of these in class. On a more serious note, Cathy’s visit was quite effective, and because she was able to relate to our class, I was able to draw a number of lessons to aid my development as a clearer writer.
You are not alone. Most people like my memoirs to SEDUCTION. Who knows they might just be better books.
ReplyDeletePersonal experience has to be in literature. If you haven't experienced it from the inside out then it is superficial. Someone wrote a screenplay of TOO CLOSE TO THE FALLS and all the black dialogue was cliched and taken from TV. It was not part of his experience so it didn't work.
Colin Stitt was a scream.
My favourite writers are George Eliot and Dickens. That guy knows how to create a character in 2 lines.