Person on the Page

People today are over-entertained.  They are barraged by a haphazard mix of useful and useless information. They are word-wearied.

As writers, if we want to attract and maintain the attention of today’s overstimulated readers, we must show them something new.

As a late-career English professor, I sometimes feel that I have seen it all. This semester, I told my creative writing students, I’m old.  I’ve been reading poems, short stories, and essays for decades. I’ve read it all.  So, show me something that I haven’t seen many times before. Surprise me! 

In my recent post Five Qualities of Good Writing, I suggested that good writing surprises the reader. It treats an unusual subject, or it approaches a familiar subject in an unexpected way. To do this, however—to surprise our readers with a new idea or an original way of expressing our ideas—we may need first to surprise ourselves. 

We tell ourselves stories about who we are all the time. But do they convey the truth about us?  Or do we cling to comfortable stories, the ones that make us appear likable, heroic, honorable—someone with whom others should empathize? Do we shape our own stories from the meta-narratives that our cultures provide for us about what it is to be human, to struggle, to become wise?

Writing personal nonfiction that attracts a reader’s attention may require a courageous plunge past the comfortable stories, past the meta-narratives, and deep into ourselves. We may need to plumb the ripe refuse at the depths of our consciousness—probing far beyond where we believed we could reach—to find what we didn’t know about ourselves or to bring to the surface what we may have avoided facing. When we navigate past familiar subjects and push our writing beyond the often-expressed and the expected, we may find, deep within us, that which surprises us and potentially our readers. 

Of course, I recognize that I need to cultivate the unexpected, the surprising, the new slant, and the original turn of phrase in my own writing. Particularly lately, every time I write I face my self-imposed imperative to bypass the safe, the comfortable, the already-done. To say something new, and to say it in a new way. My struggle has led me to search for ways to cultivate the unexpected in my writing. Here are three methods that I have found useful.

1. Take note of involuntary memories.

Involuntary memories present themselves without our conscious effort to invite them.  They seem to come out of nowhere. They may be prompted by a visual image, an aroma, or a sound, or they may arrive seemingly without any prompting. Involuntary memories cause us to ask, Why am I remembering this?  They surprise us.  And they are worth our examination. They may lead us to insights about ourselves that we have kept hidden from our consciousness. They may lead to unexpected subjects for personal nonfiction.

2. Examine remembered dreams. 

In my recent post “What Dreams Can Do for Creative Nonfiction Writers,” I considered how we might use the content of our dreams as a stimulus for our writing. Like involuntary memories, dreams provide an inroad to the truths about ourselves that we may have repressed. By examining them, we can confront the uncomfortable.  Our confrontation may lead to surprising subjects for our writing.  

3.  Analyze overheard conversations. 

We filter out much of the stimuli that we receive from our environment, but sometimes something in the conversations of others catches our attention. We hear something interesting or surprising that sets our imaginations in motion. We hear tensions in the dialogue that spark our curiosity and cause us to focus on the words spoken. We pay attention for a reason. Examining the stimuli that capture our interest may lead us to write about unexpected subjects.    

Our potential readers are bogged down by the familiar and the overdone.  They are numbed from encountering text after text with words strung together in predictable ways. To surprise and captivate them, we must first surprise ourselves. As writers, let’s make ourselves uncomfortable with our writing. Let’s find the subjects that we haven’t seen written about before. Let’s express ourselves with fresh language, devoid of the expected. Let’s strive to offer our readers something new.