Embellishing What You Know
Apr. 4th, 2012 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ziparumpazooI remember in high school being given about half of George Orwell's essay, 'Shooting An Elephant, and being told to 'write what happened when the constable decided to actually shoot the elephant'. Now, I doubt very few fifteen year old North American students have ever been to colonial Burma, nor have they ever been forced by social pressures to take down one of the largest land mammals in existence while it was busy minding its own business, but the whole point of the exercise was to force us to use our imaginations to extrapolate about what happened next and what it would feel like to take responsibility for those actions. I remember a couple of the guys, avid game hunters who went after moose as much for the food and for the sport coming closest to retelling the actual ending of Orwell's story (without having read the ending), based on their own hunting experiences. They could describe the kick of the .44 and how long is takes an animal to die if the shot isn't clean because they'd been witness to those events before. They understood the difference between shooting at an animal to scare it off, and shooting to make a kill, and making a kill because the shot had gone badly. It was an interesting exercise.
Bret Anthony Johston probably sums it up better here:
"To be perfectly clear: I don’t tell students not to ferret through their lives for potential stories. I don’t want, say, a soldier who served in Iraq to shy away from writing war stories. Quite the opposite. I want him to freight his fiction with rich details of combat. I want the story to evoke the texture of the sand and the noise of a Baghdad bazaar, the terrible and beautiful shade of blue smoke ribboning from the barrel of his M-4. His experience should liberate his imagination, not restrict it. Of course I want him to take inspiration where he can find it. What I don’t want—and what’s prone to happen when writers set out to write what they know—is for him to think an imagined story is less urgent, less harrowing or authentic, than a true story."
*The lesson? Don't shy away from telling a story because you haven't experienced exactly what it's like to shoot an elephant. Use what you know to embellish what you imagine it to be like. Use it to sucker your reader in and sell the narrative.
*This assumes I know anything about anything about writing. Which I don't. You should probably just read the article instead.
Bret Anthony Johston probably sums it up better here:
"To be perfectly clear: I don’t tell students not to ferret through their lives for potential stories. I don’t want, say, a soldier who served in Iraq to shy away from writing war stories. Quite the opposite. I want him to freight his fiction with rich details of combat. I want the story to evoke the texture of the sand and the noise of a Baghdad bazaar, the terrible and beautiful shade of blue smoke ribboning from the barrel of his M-4. His experience should liberate his imagination, not restrict it. Of course I want him to take inspiration where he can find it. What I don’t want—and what’s prone to happen when writers set out to write what they know—is for him to think an imagined story is less urgent, less harrowing or authentic, than a true story."
*The lesson? Don't shy away from telling a story because you haven't experienced exactly what it's like to shoot an elephant. Use what you know to embellish what you imagine it to be like. Use it to sucker your reader in and sell the narrative.
*This assumes I know anything about anything about writing. Which I don't. You should probably just read the article instead.
