Creative writing looks for authenticity

Thinking of writing a book about your own life — or your fantasy life? Terry Byrnes, a longtime teacher of creative writing in the English Department, offers this comment:

“The notion of the writer today is affected by the Internet, where people ‘publish’ everything from the record of their daily lives to long narratives based on the heroes of their favorite online games. Consequently, we see applications from students who announce that they’re interested in writing everything from sword-and-sorcery to romance to pornography, all of which are now called ‘genre fiction.’

“Those writers usually follow very strict guidelines for the plot, content, and voice of a story. Essentially, they want to recreate stories, not invent them. We’re interested in freshness of voice and sensibility — which isn’t the territory of genre fiction — so we advise those potential students to look elsewhere.

“We also see a number of prospective writers — often mature people — who wish to write a novel based on their lives. Their lives might be utterly fascinating, but those students eventually learn that printed narrative is a very poor representation of lived experience.

“The best story, they sometimes discover, is one that may be loyal to place and circumstance (growing up in Morocco, or fleeing Poland at the start of World War II and finding refuge in Samarkand), but quite disloyal to the events in which they actually participated.

“I remember a student from a number of years ago who wrote a huge, unmanageable novel/ autobiography about her time in Mexico after the revolution and, later, her political activism in Canada during the American McCarthy era and its Canadian echo.

“Publishers found the material both important and fascinating but the structure and the prose completely unmanageable. It wasn’t published, but it was deposited in the National Archives, where some future researcher will struggle to decipher the life actually lived from the story the author was trying to concoct.”