Mar 17, 2016 / Inspiration

Art Isn’t Anecdote

Taking inspiration from author Cheryl Strayed, let’s explore the deeper themes that drive our stories and writing.

Photo via <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive#/media/File:California_Western_Railroad_Locomotive_45.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>. (<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>)

Last week, I finished reading Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a collection of writings by author Cheryl Strayed in her role as Dear Sugar, an advice columnist for TheRumpus.net.

In Tiny Beautiful Things, what’s most impressive isn’t how thoughtful or insightful Sugar’s replies are, but her uncanny ability to make each question seem so fragile and universally human. As a writer, it’s her columns on creativity, art, and the art of writing that stand out as little nuggets of artistic wisdom.

I teach memoir writing occasionally. I always ask my students to answer two questions about the work they and their peers have written: What happened in this story? and What is this story about? It’s a useful way to see what’s there. A lot of times, it isn’t much. Or rather, it’s a bunch of what happened that ends up being about nothing at all.

You get no points for the living, I tell my students. It isn’t enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

Writing, and reading, can be summarized as the act of taking an individual story and extrapolating the universal from it. Action and intrigue draws us in, but it’s the deeper, more human themes that make a story stick with us. Like Strayed says, the story must “transcend the limits of the personal.”

As you write your next post, or work through a piece you’ve been stuck on, take inspiration from the above quote and ask yourself: what happened in this story and what is it about? Has it transcended from the personal to the universal? Who are you speaking to and why are you driven to share this story?

Whether you’re a personal blogger, poet, fiction writer, or political commentator, the first step of writing is getting it down. The second part is where you twist and mold the raw material of your work into something that’s more than fact. As you share the anecdotes of your life, see what it means to let them be driven by the deeper meaning of your story.

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  3. I find stream of consciousness to be the most raw. Just stand back and observe your thoughts without criticism and see the random, mundane thoughts develop and morph. After all, James Joyce wrote Ulysses with a stream of consciousness approach. It seemed to be much ado about nothing on a shallow level.

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      1. That’s a great way to capture the dream! I have found that creation isn’t linear–it happens in chunks. If I were to see the entire completed project, I’d feel overwhelmed. I have seen completed ideas in my mind’s eye before however.

        Liked by 3 people

      2. I think it can come in both, there are times when I will watch the scenes play out in my head, and then it’ll be a different scene way after or before. The problem I have is bridging the gaps between them haha

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      3. I suppose I’m discussing creativity from a visual artist’s point of view. While I do write pretty regularly, I don’t write longer stories. I just record my nightly dreams. A majority of my dreams are pretty disjointed and they transmutate in baffling ways. I understand what you’re saying about bridging in that respect.

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      4. I wish I could do art in a visual sense but sadly my hand refuses to act in accordance to the images in my head haha.
        It’s why I prefer to write, the words can project the image that I see in a way that others can perceive it

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  5. That is the beautiful challenge of writing, the art of telling the story. What to leave, what to take away…and most importantly…why? For me, the who I’m writing to I’ve resolved :), as I currently write letters to my Mom, who is dead. But the way I write to her…that is my challenge.

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  7. I’ve come to love Leonard Cohen’s work lately. Even in his most personal poems/lyrics, he has that capacity to zoom in and out between the individual, cultural, and universal. And the more “irreducibly particular” an incident is, the more he seems able to extrapolate to something abstract in a way that matters (and isn’t cliché).

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  11. Crucial thing finally appeared on ‘a big screen’! 🙂 I’m sick of brainless pop culture! Mass media should promote the necessity of exploring classic-literature because only there we can find universal ideas. Forget almost every bestseller and read ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Crime and punishment’ for a change! It’s not about what happened in a novel, but about why it happened. People gravitate toward ‘interesting’ books and stick to exciting action instead of thinking and analysing.
    Thanks to Erica for sharing this and thus affecting the future writings, I see in the comments many people are enlightened! 🙂
    (Don’t judge me if I made a mistake while sounding arrogant, English is my second language and I don’t use it in creative writing).

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  14. Thank you, I think everyone has in his life one of a kind of a story about his one’s own experience, he wants to share with others, anybody else life is already lived, not nessecarly being a writer, it’s only sometimes by the anecdote, that we can get the hell out of it, what is going on in one’s mind. Sometimes, in one sentence, suffice to a narrator he can sums up the whole story the meaning of what is all about. The art is in how to tell the anecdote. “It’s already in the books while it still in the sky”_a phrase that still in the mind of the generations of fans of baseball, a TV commentator said about the ball, the Kid, a famous champion of baseball when he hits a home run in the 60ies, it’s John Updike, I think who wrote it, in his book, Why I write
    Thank you for sharing, it help us, we are only amateurs in blogging, a would-be writer by experience

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  17. I don’t usually follow this formula. My style of writing is a little more… head based before it hits the page.
    Generally I will watch a scene play out in my head, watching how the characters move, the environments and air, the whole scene like something from a movie.
    Then I will start to write it down, trying to keep up with what I picture, then as it’s playing things may change and so I adapt it when I’m writing them down.

    Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m a little crazy, but it’s how I’ve always written stuff.

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  20. The “twist and mold into something that’s more than fact” formula reads easily but that’s the crux and difficulty of the art of writing an interesting memoir. Thanks for the thoughtful advice.

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  29. Erica, I am glad someone could place the beauty of intent, with free thought association to guide both the factual meaning & a broader universal appeal for thinkers & writers like me. I will flow my thoughts with your advice, & come up with something more practical and meaningful in days to come! Thanks for BEING around!! Gracious!!!! trikarri.wordpress.com

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  30. Ah for that is the rub! We all feel our own experiences so strongly, it is a hard pill to swallow that our little stories do not always translate easily to universal truths. There is always a kernel of shared humanity – if one has the patience to uncover it!

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