A few weeks ago, a student of mine (who shall remain nameless) asked if I would stay after class. They were a bit bored in general, they said, and wanted to chat, but they were also confused about the direction of their writing and what my expectations of it were.
“There’s a sense that you want us (the class) to write very personally,” they said, “but at the same time, you want us to write for an audience. For publication. Sometimes, those two things don’t seem to coincide for me. I’m not even sure if I want to publish.”
I refused the obvious rebuttal that this student is in a writing class, one offered within a discipline of study meant to develop writers for publication, and took the question as a serious one. Why are personal essays—this thing I’m asking them to write—anything more than a glorified journal? What does writing such work, even if it is never published, offer?
Writing as a way of seeing
Without the safety that fiction offers—its anonymity, its veils, and its shrouds—many of my students feel exposed. So, I can understand their trepidation. They’re young, and many of them know they want to be writers but also don’t really know why they want to write. And in my travel writing class, which is really a personal essay class in disguise, I’m always searching for ways to express why writers write close to the bone and why that act can mean so much when it’s shaped with or without an audience in mind.
Which brings me to Annie Ernaux.
“Writing is saving, of course,” says Ernaux in this Louisiana Channel interview. “It’s saving what has happened, whether good or bad. [I am] saving because I have the vision of generations succeeding each other and falling into oblivion.”
Ernaux likes to point her gaze at the border between fictional and non-fictional spaces, creating auto-fiction in the process. Still, fiction or not, when Ernaux is compelled to write something down, to make a copy of something that is real and reify it in the act of writing as something worth saving, a different ambition than simple storytelling emerges. If we’re to listen to Annie Ernaux's reasons for writing, every sentence is an act of self-preservation. Ernaux, by narrowing down observations to the pointillistic, to the journal-like, is both emulating what goes unpublished while also doing more—she is discerning what in her life needs special treatment, what needs to be saved and handed down.
And maybe this is one answer for my students: to write personally, to look at the world around you and decide what’s worth noting, whether those considerations are published or not, whether they’re real or not, gives their writing purpose. It is a way of being in the world. It is a way of seeing. It is, in fact, a way of defining the reality of the world around them—what they choose to be fiction or not.
Writing as a way of becoming
In The Sleep of the Righteous, Wolfang Hilbig is also working within an auto-fictional space, creating a version of himself, a kind of doppelgänger, in a world that is almost real. He doesn’t pretend that his world is real or not, but he does represent a world he has known. His character in the book, the one that represents him, shovels coal in East Germany before defecting to the West to become a writer—the same biographical elements of Hilbig’s own life. But unlike real life, so we would believe, the Hilbig of The Sleep of the Righteous takes revenge on the state in violent ways, an imagined revenge against the polarized land he was born into.
It’s a bizarre book, one that’s sometimes difficult to follow, but there is one passage I’d like to point at. In the last chapter/story in the novel, Hilbig’s fictional stand-in is confronted by a former Stasi officer who has followed his activities for years. The Stasi agent has this to say about “Hilbig’s” intercepted correspondence:
“Nothing the whole time but letters, letters, words, phrases! And now and then you take notes and they’re in writing too. It’s like a blanket of writing covering everything … and often enough it’s illegible writing! A film you maybe can’t see through anymore. A haze of writing … and can you even still see the life behind it? Is there actually still flesh behind the writing? Or just more writing? Does this writing mean just writing now, or did there used to be something else behind it?”
Hilbig, it seems, is not the observer that Ernaux is, quietly scanning the crowd for what sticks out. He is in the thick of it, getting lost in the world he’s shaping. For him, there is very little division between what is fictional and what is not. And this is why he writes—yes, to find out what’s worth saving, but also to discover where, exactly, the meaning behind all the writing lies.
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In our paid newsletter later this month, we will take a closer look at the writing of Annie Ernaux to examine her writing style, why she writes, and how she takes the personal work of journaling and elevates it Nobel Prize-winning status.
This is a topic I’ll also be exploring in the upcoming masterclass Turning the Private into the Public: A Fiction(ish) Seminar. This three-hour class should be really exciting, with tons of generative exercises (and a glimpse or two of my beautiful dog Cleveland). It’s online, and subscribers to this newsletter can get an extra 10% off using the code: JOURNALING2024
I hope to see you there!