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creative nonfiction: personal essays

  • Writer's pictureVianna Cecilia

Craft Essay: Writing and Space

Author's Note: This essay is a craft essay (an essay about writing philosophy) made for WRIT105C, a creative nonfiction class taught by Kara Mae Brown at UCSB. The works mentioned are Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Kristen Radtke's Imagine Wanting Only This.


There’s something about driving through the 101, in that area between Ventura and Santa Barbara, that makes me miss California while still being here. It’s a five lane freeway with the Santa Ynez Mountains on one side and the Pacific Ocean on another. There’s nothing too special about it, only that my happiness seems to unreasonably spike everytime I drive through. Especially on good weather days, when the sun makes the blue water dance and the white of the crashing waves sparkle and fizz out, like spilled Seven-Up.


It is one of the most beautiful places in the world, although I say that with less conviction than Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire. This, to me, is one of the most beautiful places because of what it stands for. For me, it stands for the meaning of home: where it is and where I have to pass to get there. The town of where I’m from is Bakersfield, but the town of where I currently live is Isla Vista. The first, a desert in the middle of a valley with oil drills as trees and the political landscape of the 60’s; the latter a progressive college beach town confined within one square mile. Both California, and although I love one more than the other, both I consider home.


I bring this up because in order to get from Bakersfield to Isla Vista, one must pass this little snippet of freeway. I believe that it is during within this time frame when one becomes aware of the notion of where they come from and where they’re going to, who they were before and who they are now. If they’re growing out of growing in, if they choose to acknowledge the fact that as people, we link physical places we hold deep in our emotions as extensions of us. On that small stretch of freeway, I think about all these things.


Didion’s Goodbye to All That, Abbey’s The First Morning, and Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This, were the creative nonfiction pieces that stood out to me most. I’ve always considered the genre as something heavily dependent on thoughts and how to convey those thoughts – but these pieces made me think otherwise. Well, otherwise for the lack of a better word, but what I mean is that these pieces all have to do with this bond between place and person, and regardless of whether that relationship was intimate or overcooked, I feel as if both couldn’t have done without the other.

The question for this essay asks for the most important aspect of the genre, and the previous paragraphs help me to answer confidently: that it is place. Place, setting, space. Whatever you want to call it. It is the place wherein the narrator forms a relationship with. As writers and thinkers, I think that sometimes we heavily understate and underuse the way we use space. The way we feel about it, the way we portray it. Doesn’t it play such a bigger part than what we let it? Everything ever felt and written was done in a space. Even thinking about it stylistically, it makes sense: when writers describe place and the space, the audience is more likely to engage, the memories more stimulated in light of recollection.


As a writer, I think I underestimate the importance I put on a place. I always think about creative nonfiction writing as a written representation of people interacting with other people – and sometimes this does not always work towards my advantage because I overdo it. It makes me tell rather than show, and while this can be very entertaining at times, unfortunately it does not provide me with the kind of depth I would want for my writing in the future.


I’ve observed that I am an inwards writer, and that the ideas I resonate with the most in the pieces I read are thoughts regarding the self:  self exploration and skepticism, the act of growing out of a phase and getting into a new one. But what I overlook is that how those ideas and perspectives were shaped by places I’ve been in.


Setting and the writer’s relationship with that setting is what captured the most emotion for me in the texts I mentioned above. With Didion, it was about New York City and how its eccentricity became the one thing that essentially dulled it for her. The city lights flashed until it became one big light, transforming what she categorized as unnecessary. With Abbey, it was Utah’s pristine landscape; the self reliance discovered among being landlocked, that made him recognize its beauty. And with Radtke’s world tour (I suppose I identify with this the most), the emptiness that comes with being in a place for the first time, the realization that you’re only there in search for something physical to fill a void, only to discover that places are what you make of it.


In my own writing process, I find that what first inspires me is setting, but I get too overwhelmed with how to describe its beauty that I give up. I feel as if my descriptions aren’t doing it justice, kind of like when you’re trying to take a picture of something but nothing will ever come close to being as good as seeing it in person. But here is where the dynamics with writing about setting comes in: it’s not about depicting it in a way that transports the audience to the time and place where the writer documented it, but instead a second-hand, passed down feeling of how the place made the writer feel. That is what is passed on. And from there I suppose it is left to the reader to interpret.


All three of my projects for this class were made with space in mind. For my personal essay, it was the space within summer and the careless attitude it shared with the privileged. For my not-so-personal, it was the ocean and my love for surfing. And in my comic, a variety of places that seemed to encapsulate the most inspiration for me in regards to reimagining my parents relationship. When I think about what inspired me to write these pieces in the first place, it was setting. How it made me feel, what it made me do. And I like to think that the work we read by the writers felt the same way as well.


And so, feeling in the company of inspiration, I hope to move forward with my craft with the space I occupy in mind.

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