The Magic of Radical Failure

Essay in 12 Steps | THREE | An unconventional exercise guaranteed to produce startling original writing + Annie Ernaux's flat writing + what creative writing and science have in common

We’ve reached step 3/12 in the lyric essay challenge! Hooray for us.

This week’s assignment should absolutely amaze you. I don’t say that often, but I feel genuinely confident in that prediction, because I have never seen this exercise not produce stunning and provocative results. It also produces nonsense, which is what this introductory craft essay is, in part, about—so you’ll want to at least skim the “front matter” before attempting this complex, magical, and and creatively freeing assignment. I honestly cannot wait to see what you produce. If you execute the assignment earnestly, you should get at least one fragment that takes your breath away.

Also, this is the last step before we begin homing in more directly on the topic of your essays, which will include beginning to imagine and compare possible shapes/containers, trying strategies for “making clay” in order to later carve it, and exploring the dynamic tension that can result from juxtaposing personal narrative with objective reportage. Also next week we’ll begin diving into some close reading of exemplary published lyric essays.

Until then, this week’s step is a crucial one, and I’m excited to see what you make of it as we build on our shimmers/shards and enliven your questions by adding answers (and then some).

And now, a word about flat writing, which is a cousin of the attention exercises we’ve been doing these past two weeks. Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, is widely renowned for her distinct voice, including her style of self-proclaimed style of flat writing.

The reason Ernaux’s flat writing methodology is in direct conversation with the work we’ve been doing in this lyric essay challenge is because she emphasizes stating “just the facts” without emotion or drama or any other kind of adornment or excess. So I guess another way we could think about flat writing would be as “naked writing,” since it is so laser focused on the thing itself and not our thoughts, ideas, and feelings about the thing. In an interview with First Post, Ernaux described her style of flat writing as …  “aiming for a very objective view of the events she is describing, unshaped by florid description or overwhelming emotions.”

Predictably, Ernaux gave a lot of interviews in the wake of the Nobel announcement, and you can find many articles about her online without much effort. But this Times Special interview gets the closest I’ve found to a very direct statement from Ernaux about flat writing (this link only allows you five minutes free access, so if you want to skim the whole thing, you might want to do so after you’ve finished this whole post—and to note, I’ve placed this link in the resources at the end of this post as well. Also, if you happen to find a better statement from Ernaux about flat writing than this one, please do share it in the comments):

Initially I did not start writing with this style. If you look at my first three books, the style of writing was the one that depicts a certain violence. But later on, when I started with a book about my father’s life, who was from the working class and who had a small grocery café, I realised that the violent style of writing did not correspond to writing his life. And then I wanted to shift to something which would just describe the facts and this is what you all call as flat writing and this is a term that I later started using myself. And so, it all comes from the subject that I’m talking about. Initially the books that I wrote were about my life and myself and that had a violent tone to it, and then eventually when I moved on to write about my father it had to be more real. So, the style of flat writing as you call it is something that comes from my confrontation with reality.

Now, Ernaux—whose parents were working class—is quite explicit that her reasons for flat writing are far more political than artistic. She says she is wielding language like a knife in order to “tear apart the veils of imagination.”

Ernaux told First Post:

It is a great responsibility… to testify, not necessarily in terms of my writing, but to testify with accuracy and justice in relation to the world.

I love this idea that we can, through our deliberate use of language, hope to “testify with accuracy and justice in relation to the world.”

I also believe that, in order to get very far with that endeavor, we need to be willing to interrogate our own biases and assumptions (including about ourselves) and work diligently to see the world through new eyes every day. To open ourselves to the possibility that our first answer to a question, our first guess or explanation, is often not the truest (by far).

Which is exactly what this week’s structured exercise is all about—and why if you are painstaking and faithful in your work on this prompt you will almost surely be stunned by what you uncover. This is also why I can truthfully say I have never seen this step not lead to small miracles (and sometimes large ones).