moar blawgs

Let's start with "Writing Memoir? Use the Algorithm and Act Like Galileo in Walmart." As she recommends in this piece, Smith gets right to the point. In a nutshell, her point is to focus on the point. Alice Walker did this in Chicken Chronicles, and we noticed that there did seem to be a meaningful nugget in each vignette. And then those nuggets tied together nicely. (I will remind you that Bernard Cooper failed to do this in Maps to Anywhere.) Walker wrote her memoir from the perspective of a chicken farmer, and did not include details about other parts of her life, like her daughter, or how she got to be a writer, or other things you might expect reading the memoir of Alice Walker. While Smith was writing about memoirs in particular, I think having a point and an angle by which you make that point is generally good to do.

The Colorlines blog partially accomplishes what Smith suggests. She's writing about "the alleged ugliness of blackness," and she uses Blue Ivy Carter and Gwendolyn Brooks as the lens to examine it. And like the pragmatism she mentions in the Brooks excerpt, she writes "There’s nothing I can write to make this better," conceding that while there's a problem, there's nothing she can do about it. It seems like a few of my colleagues took issue with this. Indeed, it does seem rather defeatist. I think the fact that Solomon addresses this issue without attempting to change it or even offering ways we can stop the phenomenon leaves the reader unsatisfied.

Similarly, some of my colleagues seemed miffed that Davidson at The New Yorker doesn't go into more detail. And, flouting Smith's advice, she seems to just be making an observation that DSK is a jackass, when really the issue she (and all of us) should be talking about is how women who speak up about rape are systematically shut down. It would have been very powerful indeed if she was looking at this phenomenon through the lens of this case.

Sabrina, Alanna, and I examined what makes a letter to the editor of the NYT publishable in one of our other classes. The letters to the editor that we read were by and large concise, only talked about one point, used "$10 words," and often had a snarky ending. I'd say the New Yorker piece has all those components:
concise: only 388 words
made one point: DSK was a jackass when he said "I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman."
used $10 words: "and yet," "sundry," "one wonders."
snarky ending: check. And snarky beginning.

I suppose that after reading all these pieces, my conclusion is that it is hard to write about something well without including all the details (which runs its own risk of bogging down your story.) While our class seemed to collectively approve of Chicken Chronicles, we did wonder how she could write a memoir that lacked her major life events. The Colorlines and New Yorker pieces left us wanting more as well. In conclusions-- good writing: easier said than done!