Choose one of the archived articles from Writers on
Writing and create a blog post that describes the author’s
perspective on the writing process. Do you agree or disagree with the author? Has
your thinking changed throughout this course regarding a writer’s perspective
in the social media environment? Explain your answer by providing examples.
The article I chose was A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past
by Andrae Aciman. I wholeheartedly agree with his thoughts on the “hidden
nerve,” which is the heartbeat of their writing. Aciman states that he begins
his own journey by writing about a place, and his hidden nerve is to write
about loss or “feeling unhinged in provisional places where everyone else seems
to have a home and a place, and where everyone knows what he wants, who he is
and who he’s likely to become” (Aciman, 2000, p. 1). Although we’ve never
discussed this article, my belief is that my sister, who is an author, writes
from an emotion as opposed Aciman who writes from a place.
I love how Andrae closes his article by
suggesting that writing creates a parallel universe where the write is allowed
to takes liberty with their memories and re-creates them as they would like
them to be. He suggests that memoirists write about their lives in the way they
would like others to see their life, not about how it really was. This way, we
can see our lives through the eyes of others and begin to make sense of our
life story. For me, this whole idea opens up a psychological study of why we
feel the need to alter our own history. It could be argued that we alter it to
impress people or perhaps to gain their sympathy. But maybe it is something
entirely different. Maybe we do it to accept ourselves. What a thought-provoking article!
Aciman, A. (2000). A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past. Writers on Writing.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/082800aciman-writing.html
