Fuck. I walked in on the first day of class of Journalism 3170 all optimistic and spirited. Three months later into the course I’m burnt out and dying from trying too hard and reaping too little. Non-fiction is a bitch.
Beverley Sinclair. Poised and cut-throat, she conducts her one hour and fifty minute class delivering knowledge that will help transform our work into ready-to-be-published articles. Countless nights of caffeinated nightmares have boosted me through deadlines. I wake up in the morning, print my paper, and off I go. Satisfaction. Nope. That isn’t good enough.
Sitting in class, cheeks flushed pink with excitement to receive my first Personal Essay assignment back. She called out my name and handed me my paper. Questions, questions. questions. I couldn’t even distinguish my words from the criticism. The blue crossed out words on my paper felt like slits on my wrist. Wounded and dejected, my head sank behind my computer.
Thoughts fired through my head like bullets at target practice. Students were chattering around me discussing their well-achieved mark. A degree in English wasn’t good enough to write non-fiction – it was experience and attention to detail that mattered the most. Stories take shape everyday, all around us, and the best way to describe it is like a good cake recipe.
Flour, the foundation of a cake reflects the necessity of being able to distinguish a good story. Method. You sift through the flour to eliminate the unnecessary parts of your story, making you see the bigger issue, and narrating the people that it affects. What is the story I am trying to tell? What is my focus? Eggs act as your binding component – what do I need to do in order to narrate this story? Gather enough information from the people you are going to interview. Vegetable oil, gives your story a bit of grease to move around with. If your story sticks to the pan, it’s going to suck just like the cake. Sugar and chocolate chips are the additives that enhance the flavour of your writing. Don’t be afraid of being real and asking too many questions. The more information you have to work with, the easier it is to narrow down what is not necessary. Chocolate chips serve as the good quotes you include. It’s important to understand what you need and what’s just plain and boring. Baking soda, gives rise to your nonfiction piece, remember to show and don’t tell. Remove the useless crap and pay attention to narrative detail. The reader wants to empathize with your story and not dread reading it. My favourite part is the whisk; it is essential when wrapping up your nonfiction story. Stirring your elements is like transforming your raw materials into a liquidy golden batter. Combining your hard work to produce a flawless ready-to-be-baked nonfiction story is oh-so-satisfying when you have the right materials.
My biggest struggle was sifting through what was important; I would often clump up my batter. It seemed like everything was important, how do you know what to cut out? Either my batter was clumped, or I’d have less sugar, or sometimes I’d even burn the whole damn cake. Shit.
I breezed through this class worrying about my GPA too much and my writing too little. Sitting next to the clock, watching the seconds of time inch closer to the end of class kept me occupied, but emptied my brain of the knowledge I was supposed to be paying attention to. I’d often oversee the blue paragraphs of criticism on my papers and keep making the same mistakes over again, just because I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, when everything was wrong. My writing was a whole pile of wrongs. I lost hope somewhere in the middle of this semester, contemplating dropping out. My left shoulder angel, the good one, who looked a lot like me or maybe even better looking than me, haloed with optimism, motivated me to keep going.
Here I am, at the end of the semester, wrapping up this class. I learned at the end what I was supposed to know at the beginning, in order to achieve some success. I wrote some good pieces that lacked important elements and flavour, making my assignments monotonous, painful to read for my teacher, Beverley Sinclair. I tried too hard which screwed up my storytelling and here I am sitting in one of the last few classes trying to redeem myself. Blaming everyone else for my shortcomings was one of the stupidest things I did in retrospect.
I am leaving Journalism 3170 wiser than the foolish girl that thought she could just skim through with writing nonfiction. You can’t just write nonfiction, you have to make it come alive, embody it, feel it, breathe it. This class taught me a lot - more so at the end. Beverley Sinclair emphasized last class, “Having things turn out not the way you thought is a really good thing.” I guess I never really understood what she meant by that until after writing this final Personal Essay. I thought my writing was good enough to help me get at least a B. I was wrong. It took much more effort than that, and in the end this paper was much more fluid and easy to write. I tried too hard for what needed lesser effort and more tact. Exhale.I learned something, it wasn’t too late.
