Jennifer Jordan

I am teaching a creative writing class in the fall, and I’m also working on a memoir manuscript, and I am hoping to make the two endeavors sync up together in meaningful ways by developing a reflective writing and teaching practice.

Currently, as I work on revising my manuscript, I am reading through it and working on structure. This is about my 11th draft over 20 years (I was busy the last twenty years, btw). During this go-around of revising for structure, I’m noticing other craft elements that need addressing, which is interesting and exciting, but also more work.

At the level of plot and theme, I can notice patterns in the character’s relationships, patterns I didn’t notice when I was writing about my life and patterns I didn’t notice while I was living my life (you know, because I’m writing memoir). Right now, I’m grappling with what to do now that I have noticed these patterns. Do I draw more attention? Reflect on it? Most likely, I will need to allow the reader discover these patterns and not bang them over the head with my themes. But I do think I need to critically reflect on these patterns.

Dinty Moore, in a blog post for the Brevity blog, calls patterns like these a magnetic river.

He says instead of theme, he likes to use the metaphor of a river. He says:

[R]ivers are deep, they are powerful, they always flow forward, changing speed and depth, but downstream they go, toward an inevitable end not yet visible to those of us floating along on our rafts — or those reading a story.

While I consider how to develop a river of meaning through my writing, I also realize that this work I’m doing can directly relate to teaching. I’m making notes about this in my journal. Moore adds the following:

Our metaphorical rivers are something we discover along the way, in our first drafts if we are lucky, in re-working our fourth or fifth drafts more likely. We don’t impose our underlying rivers of emotional resonance on the work; most often they reveal themselves to us.

I’m teaching a revision workshop, and students will write several drafts of their work, so that they have a draft that’s ready to send to literary magazines, if they wish, once the course is over.

I’ve started thinking about how to develop a lesson plan but I want to relate this to at least one lesson plan in the fall related to uncovering patterns in one’s writing and revising for larger meaning. Moore mentions the following:

These rivers are tightly connected to the specific and complex questions we are asking about our own experiences (in memoir) or what our main characters fervently desire (in memoir and fiction.) 

I think freewriting about these questions could help me develop this underlying current in my work (ha, see what I did there?). I wonder about the reader here, how do you connect larger pieces of your narratives together in meaningful ways?

I could keep going, but I have to get back to my manuscript!