On Writing. An excerpt from a chapter from a book called On Becoming an Ethnographer in the Academy.

…………..

It didn't matter that I wrote every day.

I didn't have an audience. At least not an audience beyond the Edenic women of my own imagination.

I didn't have a self, either. I hadn't used writing to learn what or who my self was.

I could write sentences. But I still didn't know how to tell a story.

- I include that account in this book for three reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that the performance of writing is relational. If you want to become a writer, you need to write stories that other people want to read, to relate to. It’s not enough to want- as all poseurs do – to “have written.” It is not enough to acquire the various clothing and accoutrements of the so-called “artistic life.” It not just enough to sit in on writing classes, hoping to soak up some kind of mysterious message that will suddenly transform you into a writer. And it is not enough to simply tell a story about something that happened to you. You need to use the process of writing to find to find a storyline and then have the discipline to work it into a narrative others want to engage. This means you need to create – out of the raw materials of lived experience, imagination, and reading and talking with others – some pattern in the storylinethat is symbolically rich and significant for an intended audience.

You must learn to engage readers in an evolving conversation. (Absolutely brilliant).

The second reason for including my story in this chapter is to underscore this truth: Audiences read stories not so much because they identify with the initial conflict as because they feel at one with the process of self-discovery and transformation caused by how the conflict is worked out. The characters in your story have to learn something out of what happens to them. They must grow into an understanding and maybe change, forever, because of it. They must get deeply in touch with something vital within themselves.

Good writing, like good conversation, is transformational.

(And I think this is a lot like the ideas presented in Telling the Truth by Beuchner.)

I love that storytelling is a universal tool of communication. That’s beautiful.