(The) Writer's Mind: Preparing for the Lyric Essay:
The Combination Draft
We have been working, by degrees, to enter into the genre of the lyric memoir. In this genre of story telling, a writer constructs a character-narrator who, triggered by the right circumstances, recalls certain events from her life, and then weaves these events together, juxtaposing them in such a way that leaves the reader with an experience of aesthetic emotion, the simultaneous feeling and thought that grants some access to what it means to be a human being. What makes it lyric is the way it is arranged, and the way it is styled. But we must start with the bare-bones, so to speak, the scenes you have been curating from your past.
To prepare for your lyric essay will then be your attempt to arrange your developing memoir from the Memento project as a combination of the recent, success, and cause narratives you have written. That is, you are to combine at least one “recent” narrative with one or more "success" narratives, and ultimately with one or more “cause” narratives. For this first draft, you will employ the braided arrangement in the following way:
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Notes:
Do not be overly concerned with having the pattern of the failure in the cause event “match” the recent event. No matter how different these two things are, the power of metaphor will allow them to be connected: it’s more a matter of creatively envisioning how two entirely different things are related (the "juxtaposition of uninflected images"...). The bite: the nature of the bite is that once a significant drawback to our strength announces itself in scene, the character-narrator will be forced to pursue the cause—to grasp what the source of her identity is. The commonplace assumption you are working with is quite simple: human beings are predisposed to avoid/overlook/forget that which might challenge our being right/looking good/already knowing. Indeed, you ought to use this device as part of the story you are writing—dramatize the resistance of the character-narrator when facing that which she does not wish to face. |