A Quote by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
One function of the imagination in autobiographical writing is to allow the writer to try out different versions of the self.
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Years and years of talking and writing versions of the script [Sausage Party] and looking at various versions of the animations - I mean, it's really a lot of workshopping and trying different things, and using the cast to try different voices and characters. And that's the good thing about animation. Because it takes so long, it allows you to explore in a way that you can't in live-action movies.
First of all, all writing includes some part of the self. The relationship of the self and the other exists in writing, whether autobiographical or novel. There is a self and an other.
The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
The process of writing can be a powerful tool for self-discovery. Writing demands self-knowledge; it forces the writer to become a student of human nature, to pay attention to his experience, to understand the nature of experience itself. By delving into raw experience and distilling it into a work of art, the writer is engaging in the heart and soul of philosophy - making sense out of life.
We have both a weak self and a strong self; the two are completely different. If we allow our weak side to dominate, we will be defeated. The thought ,"I am still young and have a lot of time, so I can relax and take life easy" is a function of our own weakness.
We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.
The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.
The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.
I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.
It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about.
What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.
With The Help, I knew folks involved in the project peripherally. I wanted to audition for Hilly Holbrook and part of the initial feedback was: "No, Bryce is too nice." That's part of the reason why I really love auditions as well - you get to try out a character and try out different versions of a character.
What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.
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