9.10 Indirect brainstorming and analyzing creative nonfiction

Indirect brainstorming. We started class with some exploration of what I think of a indirect brainstorming.  A lot of brainstorming taught in writing courses is about developing ideas for a specific purpose.  Indirect brainstorming is more about spending some time inside your thoughts and feelings and watching what comes up.  Time spent in these kinds of processes helps in two ways.  It gives you some experience noticing what you are thinking/feeling; and it allows you to recognize and accumulate writing about ideas/feelings/thoughts/stories that are "in" you.  Think of it as pro-active brainstorming.  It puts you in a position where you might be able to  "look up" (in your journal) writing your thoughts on a topic - rather than generating it specifically for an assignment.

Variation on meditation.   IOur first exercise was to sit quietly with eyes closed and simply notice what passes through our mind -without judging or trying to control our thoughts in any way.  We did this together, for 5 minutes.  After sitting, I asked you to write about your experience - what you "saw" and how it felt.

Your reflections on the experience were about:
noticing the external world
feelings of sleepiness - in a daze - awareness of level of awakeness
realizing that you are alone in our head => can yell and scream in here and no one will know
chains of association: heart beat=> girl friend=>responsibilities
body sensations (feel hands disappear)
connections to music
visuals associations to places = see some place from past images => projecting into the future
image from recent experience (digital clock)

This is all pretty regular.  You also noticed that sometimes your ideas were more vivid.  Some of you had "thoughts" visually - for others it was in language.  There was curiosity and worry, and a wish not to think some of the things you were thinking.  Thoughts jumped around - followed by association.  And feelings were attached to thoughts.  This list reflects what many people notice in this kind of experience.

In our discussion of why we might want to spend time sitting and watching what comes up in our minds, we noticed that this kind of "brainstorming" can help access the unconscious; it can turn of the noise/editor in our heads and make room so we can see what is there in the quiet.  We also noted that it can work to  put the on-going narration of self on pause - so that we might actually have a moment to re-see ourselves outside those narratives.  We also noted that it could promote creativity by opening up new channels for "thinking" other than in words.  What came into your head took the form of images, sounds, movement, felt understanding, sensations AND words.   We also noted that this form of invention/gathering material could take some of the stress out of writing.  It can be a part of writing that is not so hard.  Along a similarline, it can also make a safe place to encounter ideas/feelings that might be too scary/difficult to deal with in words and outside of our own head.  So there are lots of reasons for engaging in indirect/meditative forms of invention.

Sensual association.  The second brainstorming activity was to associate to our sensual memories: smells, sounds, touches, sights and tastes.  In our talk, smells were particularly evocative.  As set up in the introduction to this exercise - memory is deeply associated with the senses.  Researchers have found that when we re-member our past, our nervous system actually re-feels the experience.  That makes sensory association an important technique for brainstorming - and for writing powerfully evocative prose.

Analysis of features of creative nonfiction.
During the second part of class you worked in groups to identify the "essential" features of the fourssample CNF pieces we read - and to note some of the things they did but that were necessarily essential to making them CNF.  I asked you to look at the writing in terms of: focus, organization, directness, literariness, word choice, and point of view.

Some of the points you noted (constructed from memory since I didn't get a chance to copy from the board) as essential were as follows:
told a story 
made a point
included real people and places
were descriptive => richly rendered (shown as opposed to told)
constructed in a way best suited to making the main point/exploring an idea (not necessarily chronological)
written in first person (mostly) => but with a broad range of relationships between the narrator and the material

non-essential features included
talk - included dialog or what people said
moved back and forth between showing and telling (between reflecting + telling a story)
included elements of "fiction" 

We didn't quite get finished with this classification,.  As class end I asked for you to think about one quintessential observation you would make about CNF (one brilliant statement).  Spend some time working on that on - and we will start class with some of your insights on what CNF is and what it does at the beginning of class next week.

Also, it said on the calendar that we were going to go over the first assignment (Long Essay - posted to the right), but I decided we would do that next week.  

For next class:
We will continue work on indirect, associative brainstorming and finish discussion of how to define creative nonfiction.

Read: Lott & Gutkind on creative nonfiction (handout in class )

Blog 2:  In light of your evolving definition of CNF, some writing about what experiences from your life you might write about,  and what you might say about them.  (Putting writing up here is not a commitment to a topic: it is practice exploring ideas => like we have been doing in class).