I was struck, though, with how difficult it was to write a
portrait that felt accurate, honest. Every selection of details seemed warped,
no characterisation totally fair. I felt a bit cheated; I’d managed to overcome
my fiction-writer’s desire to warp things, only to find that they were warping
themselves! I thought maybe it was a reflection on my writing abilities. After
all, we think of really good fiction writers as producing really well-rounded,
believable characters. CNF uses the techniques of fiction, so if you aren’t
quite up to producing a breathing fictional character, maybe you aren’t quite
up to being honest about a breathing human being either.
My girlfriend suggested something pretty insightful. She said
she’d done still-life drawing for an art class at uni (or college—she’s not from round these parts) and they’d told everybody that in order to draw still life, you need
to forget what you know a banana looks like, and instead just draw what you
actually see of the banana in front of you. And that maybe this was a bit like
that.
Bloody good advice, I reckon. Perhaps, instead of trying somehow
to reproduce on paper the complex and probably inexpressible feeling I have
about a person, I can be more faithful to my subject by simply sticking
strictly to what I actually see in front of me. Maybe it’ll actually come out
with more of the person intact that way. This way of thinking about things has
the added bonus, at least for certain forms of CNF, of getting the writer out
of the way of the subject.
Hopefully I pulled it off. I’ll post the story tomorrow—for now, I have first year
maths assignments to mark.
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