Fiction

Over the Wall of Self: A Found Poem by David Foster Wallace

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 16, 2015 in Blog, Fiction, Healing Poetry

After writing about This is Water by David Foster Wallace a couple weeks ago, I ended up listening to the beginning of a documentary, Endnotes, done by BBC. The opening, in Wallace’s own words, struck me as a kind of poem which I’m including here. These are words that could serve as inspiration for anyone who writes and reads— There’s something magical for me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture can’t do, but that are urgent now. One is that by creating a character in a piece of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to imagine himself being not just somewhere else but someone else. In a way that television and movies that no other form can do because people I think are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone. I love his sense of urgency here. And his honesty—his vulnerability. And this image of leaping over the wall of self. A reason to read–and to write. His comments also dovetail well with research that has demonstrated a link between reading literary fiction and developing empathy and emotional intelligence. The BBC documentary, Endnotes is linked at YouTube...

When Writing Takes Us Outside Our Own Skins

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 28, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Fiction

The thread this month (though this may or may not be apparent) is the way that coming at things from a different perspective—a new angle—can sometimes lead to good things. And when I think about looking at things from a new angle—from a fresh perspective—one of the things that comes to mind for me is something I learned from college freshmen when I first started teaching them. When I first started teaching writing, I wanted the students in my classes to care about what they were writing. So I started out by telling them they could write about whatever they wanted. This did not go quite as well as I’d imagined it might. For the most part, the students wrote about their dormitories, their roommates, fraternities, beer. They seemed just a bit bored by their writing—and, I’ll admit, I was a bit bored by it as well. I suggested maybe they try writing about something more controversial—argument papers. They gave me papers on abortion and gun control. Lots and lots of papers on abortion and gun control. And, well—it was still boring. For them and for me. Their sentences seemed canned, as if someone else and not them had written them. They were giving me what they thought I wanted. They were giving me what they thought teachers wanted. I kept trying. Then at some point in the middle of the semester I remembered that story the teacher had told us about Sarah and her son—about writing fiction from a new point of view—and I told the students I wanted them to try stepping out of their skins. Their assignment: to write a paper from a different point of view. I invited them to imagine inhabiting some another body—animate, inanimate, I told them it made no difference. Just imagine being someone or something else, I told them. Be a different age. Be a different gender. Be a rock. And then write about it. And they wrote. John, an avid hockey player, imagined himself as a hockey player who had undergone a crippling accident and was left in a wheelchair. He wrote a story about this young man sitting in his wheel chair, watching movies, over and over, and then, one day, getting up and out of the wheelchair and travelling into the movie screen, onto a space cruiser, and then deep into the Andromeda System, to a planet called Saturn 9, which was like a place the young man used to dream about as a child. David became a police officer who got shot in the line of duty. Sam became a homeless man. Glenn became Alfred Einstein—Albert’s nephew. Chris became a white Camaro. The students leapt out of their skins in ways I had not anticipated. It was as if I’d pointed to a door and they flew through it. Actually, the five stories I’ve just described briefly here were chosen by these students as their best work of the semester, and they were in turn chosen for publication by the editors of the freshman review, a small magazine at the university of the best freshman prose and poetry. And, as it turned out, their stories accounted for half the prose pieces in the review, suggesting that I wasn’t the only person who found these new stories they’d...

Fiction and Truth

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 23, 2007 in Fiction

When I was in graduate school, one of my writing teachers told us this story, a true story about one of his students. Call her Sarah. Sarah’s young son had been ill for a long time with leukemia and then had died. It was a terrible grief, and one she had tried to write about many times—and couldn’t. My teacher suggested she try writing the story again, and this time switch the gender, telling the story from the point of view of a father who has lost a young son. Sarah wrote. The story began to come. And what she’d held in—a hard truth she’d believed was unacceptable—began to spill out into the story. Relief. One of the things the father in the story felt when the boy died, after months of watching him suffer, was relief. Question: Can writing fiction be a way of getting at something true? This same teacher who told us this story–or maybe it was another teacher–told us once that in order to write a good story you need to love all of your characters–have compassion towards them. And it occurs to me now that if an author could love all of the characters in a story, then it might become possible for one of those characters to express a feeling that the character might have thought was unacceptable. As the author felt compassion toward him–toward that character–an (apparently) unacceptable feeling might become, in that moment, more acceptable–ordinary–human. And that would be, I think, a good...