Let's Get Personal

Creative non-fiction (as know as CNF) is a genre of writing that I've probably struggled with the longest. I remember writing my first (or rather, my first intentional) attempt at CNF in my eighth grade creative writing class. I was only thirteen at the time and I had no idea how anyone that age could have any good stories yet. I know now that a lot of people have rough lives and that often generates stories even at that young, but for me, my life has been pretty boring. I don't feel like any of the stories I could tell from my experience would be worth writing or reading about. Even to this day, there's only a few moments in my entire 21 years of living that seem worthy enough to write about. So, coming into this week, I felt a lot of pressure. Because I didn't have a lot of stories to begin with, all the stories that I did have seemed like I'd already over-done them for precious CNF writing assignments. This whole week I was at a loss for what to write.

As if on queue, however, this week my younger sister finally moved out of my bedroom, leaving me to finally have the bedroom to myself for the first time in four years. Because she moved, I was going through my room in order to make sure everything that was hers was taken to her new room. Part of this cleaning process was my bookshelf. As I was cleaning out the book shelf, I found the book Go Ask Alice by Anonymous. Go Ask Alice is a real diary from a girl who struggled with drug abuse, and was published as a CNF piece. Just then, the idea to do a mock-diary of the last year of my life for this week came to me. Although I don't often talk about it, last year has been one of the hardest years of my life, and the hardest year I had to face in college. In some upsetting turn of events, I lost all of my close friends over the summer because I was up north during that time. Coming into the year I thought I could just make new friends and be just as happy as I was last year, however this wasn't the case. I became a recluse who only did schoolwork and watched television. Because of this I lost all the other friends and acquaintances that I had, and I became pretty hopeless. I remember many days were I felt bleak inside and saw the outside world as bleak too. On days that were particularly rough, I recall writing down notes in my phone as I was upset so that, if nothing else, I would get some raw and real writing from that pain. I used these notes to put together the mock diary. Because the notes were few and far between, however, I had to do a lot of recalling and there are a lot of gaps in the story. I struggled with figuring out what was the truth and what was the Truth. Right now, the story is a bit of a patch-work, but I do feel that it has potential. I'm less intimidating by CNF now than I was at the start of this week, so I suppose my goal was met, even if the writing is still meh.

Thank you so much for reading. Because there's only one more week left for this project, I will not be having an assignment this week. Instead, I will be going back over everything I wrote and making notes on what I've done and what I've learned over this whole process. Next week will be my last post where I discuss this learning process.

#CNF #creativenonfiction #shortstories