I kept searching for that flash of inspiration. Like, if waited long enough and looked and listened to all the goings on surrounding me, eventually something would just click in my brain and I’d be able to say, yes, I can write about that. In my mind I knew that I can write about anything, but I wanted to be inspired—to see something and then see its entire story flicker by in my mind’s eye. I also knew that it probably didn’t really work this way, but preconceived notions are difficult to simply disregard, so I kept looking.
After a while, it actually kind of happened.
I live in a college house with five girls. Every day when I come home something is different, whether it’s a pile of library books on the coffee table, a scarf on the lamp, a poster of Michigan hung on the wall, or the decorative blue vases on the fireplace mantle rearranged. One day, there was a line of daisies—just the flower parts, stems ripped away, in red and white—lined up beneath the kitchen window, above the sink. Next to the sink, there was a cap-less bottle of olive oil and a stick of butter. It was late-ish, the sun was just beginning to go down, and so the room was cast in this sort of slightly eerie yellow dust-glow. It made me think of Italy, a place I haven’t been for nine years (but somehow feels like home). It made me feel nostalgic, made me think of my Nana’s kitchen back home, which was smaller and cleaner and more crowded but smelt like wine and garlic even in the morning.
It made me feel happy, and made me feel like I could write about that kitchen—any kitchen—and so I did. I wrote in my new “creative thinking notebook” over several days, as more images caught my eye around my house (…mostly food). I used different colored pens so I could see my thoughts shifting each time, the characters and the kitchen changing as I went.
Probably pretty predictably, it started off as my family. Smaller, and more intense, but still people I knew. I knew Bea, too. She was like me, or my sister. Aunt Mary was half like an aunt that I don’t see often and half like an aunt I see every other weekend. But the more I wrote, the more Aunt Mary became someone I wasn’t so sure I had shared a glass of wine with, and the more Bea started to think things and notice things that I never had, and more idiosyncrasies emerged in this family that weren’t in mine. I started to feel a little bit like I was creating these people and their home, and I started to feel like I was getting somewhere.
The more alternating colored segments appeared in my notebook about Bea and the sound of a knife on a cutting board, the more relief I felt that I had begun. It was started.
I didn’t write “Hail Mary” with any special literary meaning in mind, it was just inspired by the window in my kitchen and a bottle of olive oil—just a single image. That place became more vivid in my mind, and it needed vivid people to inhabit it. I never had any plan when I was writing; I just wanted to practice describing things. “Hail Mary” is about a kitchen.
But, is it? The English major in me is twitching at the mere thought. So I did what English majors do best, printed the story out, and I took to it with a pencil in hand ready to annotate. I almost immediately learned something important: It’s amazingly hard to analyze my own fiction. The biggest reason for this is that, for once, these are my characters and my setting and my story, and I know more about these things than I wrote. For once, I know. But then again, I had written “Hail Mary” without any themes or motifs or such things in mind, and reading it back, critically and with an as open and detached mind as possible, I began to see things I never intended.
I saw a lot of things that I threw in thinking, “hey, this might be an interesting detail,” start to add up to new things. I saw it become about growing out of your home, learning the person you idolize isn’t flawless, learning you can’t learn everything from watching, and learning you can’t learn everything. Families are not fixtures on the wall, they’re not scents or recipes or the scarves they wear any more than you are. People are flesh and blood; kitchens are walls and stoves. Life makes them what you will. Feelings change as easily as place settings.
I also saw some patterns in the technique; for instance, this story makes nearly excessive use of metaphor and simile to enhance its imagery. This heavy use of simile can be attributed to my own literary bias, insomuch that I associated fantastically vivid writing with a lot of simile and metaphor, and attempted to replicate what I knew. When I read fiction, simile and metaphor are things that I am naturally drawn to as a reader, and I tend to associate these tactics with really powerful writing. I discovered that these things are very difficult to enact effectively, which is probably why I am so drawn to successful metaphor and so repulsed by my own. As I discussed early, this story was entirely based off of an image and a short combination of words, and the best way I knew how to paint a vivid picture was to make everything “like” something else so that the reader would be bombarded with even more imagery than the basics.
This bias, however, could have some significance to Bea as the central character and some of the overarching ideas of the story. The overuse or overreliance and metaphor in relation to the visual stimuli of the house are possibly relevant because Bea is very explicitly a watcher. She observes everything constantly, naturally preferring to key into sights, smells, and vague sounds than the spoken words around her. She seems to find more personal meaning in what she observes than in anything else, and in this way it seems reasonably natural for her to relate what she is seeing to other things that she sees or has seen and remembers.
Observance and memory are highly present throughout the story, so the way she relates images with “like” can provide even more insight into what she observes and remembers. Given this line of thinking, however, it might make more sense for “Hail Mary” to have been written in first person, so as to really be inside Bea’s head rather than revolving around it. By “revolving around” Bea’s head rather than seeing the house more directly from her point of view, the reader is allowed more of a sense of the house and the people who occupy it.
The main effect of the third person narration in combination with the consistent past tense in this instance is that doesn’t initially allow the reader to get any sense of time. The limited perspective doesn’t even allow us a sense of the central character age in relation to her observations. The third person, although limited, allows for the creation of a rich scene with many characters. Although we primarily see the house on 1224 Maple from Bea’s perspective, we also see her as part of a much larger whole with many additional moving parts.
On the level of sentence structure, the story contains a mixture of short, plain descriptive language and longer, more complex descriptive sentences. This inconsistency in sentence style and structure creates a “stop and go” effect as the reader gets pulled in and out of Bea’s memories and observations in a way that is almost jarring, as we are sometimes unsure of precisely where we are in Bea’s timeline at any given moment. Although all of this was unintentional (honestly—shockingly, perhaps—I did not even consider the point of view when I wrote “Hail Mary”), it does seem slightly relevant to the main ideas of the story.
“Hail Mary” explores the relationship between place and memory. The story starts off with a description of the view from the kitchen window, which feels almost isolated against the following several paragraphs which are devoted primarily to Bea’s Aunt Mary. We do learn in this first paragraph that this is the place that Bea sits (or, sat) and watched Aunt Mary cook, and this immediately establishes a seemingly significant connection between this exact place—the window, the counter—and Aunt Mary. Bea sitting on the counter watching her aunt cook is paralleled in the final paragraph of the story, which, following an instance of Bea being older and less interested in the house, feels like more of a of nostalgic memory than anywhere else in the story.
These instances act as a sort of frame of memory, particularly with the final line, “as if Bea would remember it all, just as it was.” The importance lies in the words “as if,” which implies that Bea has, in fact, not, remembered things just as they were. As we read through the story, we cannot be entirely positive at any given moment “when” Bea is. Is she reflecting back on her childhood as an adult, a teenager? Or did this happen last week? The past tense provides us with very little temporal context until very near the end when we explicitly read about Bea aging, “her hair grew longer and then shorter again,” and we get the sense that perhaps she has been old the whole time, and these scenes have all been altered by time and distorted memory.
This is most present with depictions of Aunt Mary, who Bea seems to both idolize and harbor some sense of resentment towards. Bea is in awe of her aunt as she cooks in the kitchen, graceful, knowledgeable, and apparently loving as she seeks to impart her knowledge on a young Bea. In other moments, she is crass, perhaps cruel in her scoffing at her niece’s fear, her words empty. Bea notes that she doesn’t believe her aunt can truly be both of these things.
Words are continually devalued. Bea thinks all of the conversations she hears are “aimless,” “absent-minded,” and saying very little. The devaluation is capped off by Bea’s growing distaste for prayer, which should be extremely laced with meaning and earnestness, but she finds to be hallow and false. Interestingly, Aunt Mary gains some rather religious associations as the story goes on. Her name, of course, is Mary, she wears a crucifix, is very insistent on saying grace, she drinks wine at the head of the table beneath a replica of The Last Supper (Jesus, anyone), and yet Bea seems to question how genuine she is. The story ends with the Hail Mary prayer—something the reader knows Bea would find to be hallow, and by associating this hollowness directly with “Mary,” we are thus ending the story with a rather negative impression of Aunt Mary, and the impression that Bea, does, in fact, not, hail Mary.
Doing a casual literary analysis of my own beginner’s fiction made me think of both writing fiction and writing literary analysis in new ways. In doing literary analysis of my own fiction, I felt like I was making things up about my own story. It was a strange feeling, essentially arguing that there was meaning in something that I know wasn’t written with that intention in mind at all. It was also interesting to notice things that did seem really intentional to me but I actually had not noticed while writing, such as the parallel beginning and end and the connection between The Last Supper and Aunt Mary. Both of these things are fairly stock as far as fiction goes, imagery or techniques that have appeared in all sorts of writing, and this got me thinking about what I absorb or learn and replicate without ever being conscious of it.
How difficult is it to shake off these inclinations? Is this creativity if it is based off of real persons, or if it recycles old tropes? Is creativity a state of mind? Is it a form of intelligence? (Will I ever have anything but questions?!)
So, can you learn it? The 1999 report “All our futures” thinks about creativity within certain domains, with people having certain creative proclivities that are, in essence, not transferrable— “a creative artist will not necessarily be a creative mathematician, and a creative pianist is very seldom a creative cellist.” This method of thinking about creativity suggests that the creative function is skill-specific in an individual, which suggests either a certain level topic understanding necessary to creativity, or perhaps the inherence of that certain kind of intelligence within the individual.
Suffice to say, creativity and the study of it is highly dynamic, and it may be impossible to generate a definition that applies perfectly to every individual and the ways in which they think about and experience creativity.
I seek to explore the middle ground. One explanation of creativity popular in research is the idea that for one to be creative in a given field, they must have a fairly in depth amount of knowledge in that field, so they are able to manipulate the moving pieces accordingly, and know when they are creating something original (Lucas 2001 / Teaching Creativity). I, an avid reader but little more, do not identify as a creative anything. This being said, having dedicated the majority of my education and passion to literature, words are the medium through which I feel most able to experiment with creatively—although I have no recent experience with doing so.
As a kid, though, I wanted to be an author. I was much less content with reading stories and much more enthused by writing my own—creative writing was not only a hobby and something I did for fun, but something that was present in school, always encouraging me to keep writing. Writing creative stories in school made me feel as if it was a worthy pursuit. When I got older and writing stopped being something for fun and expression and started being something to be judged on.
In the fourth grade, my teacher announced a writing competition where we would write stories and he would select five to be published in the local newspaper as representative of our class. I wrote a quest story about three girls trying to find three hidden gems around the world in order to save the world. The main character, I no longer remember her name, found the final stone inside of a grape, which she so happened to snack on during their adventures. Nine years old and speaking primarily in The Lord of the Rings movie quotes, the structure of my story, unbeknownst to me at the time, was a tale as old as time, but I thought it was brilliant. I was proud of the thing, excited to turn it in, unafraid to show it to my classmates, and thrilled to have it published in the paper where everyone else could see it, too.
The assignment was to write a one page front and back story, and my quest narrative was a little too ambitious for the page limit, the text curling up and around the margins in multiple tiny lines, taking up all of the blank space on that single piece of paper available. I got a B because it was “over the page limit.” Amazing how something things stick with you, right? I remember that B and that story, even though I don’t remember any other grades I received or the details of any other story I wrote, and perhaps this is why creativity it so seldom brought into academia. How do we judge it? Is there a grading rubric for creative, innovative thought—do we assign a number or letter value to the quality of an idea, the technique and skill with which that idea is conveyed?
In elementary school, creative writing assignments were the norm. I regularly wrote short stories, even attempted a book, outside of school and sought feedback from friends and family. I even wrote a book for my best friend for her birthday. We still talk about it today, it was called “Cici and Pepper,” and it told the story of two unlikely friends—a dog and a cat—who went bowling and got into a fight.
In middle school, I learned what a five paragraph essay was, and the weekly creative writing assignments slowly became special writing opportunities, rather than regular ones.
In high school, I was not assigned a single piece of creative writing, and I didn’t write outside of class, either.
In college, I have written creatively in an academic context only once by choice, as a short writing exercise not to be turned in, with other, non-creative options available to me.
As I have grown older, and my education has grown more focused, the less education seems to care about the importance of creativity.
As a nine year old, my creativity was praised. My teachers would tell my mom that I was a great writer, they would ask if I wrote at home, they would tell me to keep up the good work. Being imaginative was whispered as a half-praise / half-warning, kind of like a first grade teacher might call the kid in the back of the class “spirited.” As a twenty-two year old college student, my encounters with ‘creativity’ and the attitude regarding it are equally as vague as they were as a child. In a design class, risky ideas and attempts are commended by my professor—even if it was not executed perfectly or didn’t turn out as I (or another student) had envisioned it, the vision itself, as something novel, contributes to the final product’s success (or, in this case, grade). This attitude towards creativity is not expressed the same in the typical English class, where something more concrete is expected of you. This is not to say that a creative idea is never rewarded, but, in the typical English class I have very little opportunity to “create.”
We analyze only the time-tested or the popular, things that had been seen by millions of eyes, and let’s be honest, whatever I think or write about it has probably, almost certainly, been thought or written before. This is what I face now, having started to write some short flash fiction for myself. Going back over my story and attempting to analyze it from a removed perspective (impossible!), I saw patterns emerging from things that often I analyzed in fiction, even though I had done these things unconsciously.
I created something, and to me it felt immensely large and new and exciting. And then I looked at it again, and kept thinking about what I had made intensely, and I can’t help but wonder if it came from a creative state of mind, or a mind of imitation.
