Reflection #2

In the essays "Sustained by Fiction While Facing Life's Facts" by Alice Hoffman and "Virtual Reality: The Perils of Seeking a Novelist's Facts in Her Fiction" by Sue Miller the authors discuss how their personal lives can affect them with their writing. Alice Hoffman discusses in her essay how she had gone through many times of pain with her family because of saddening news of cancer. Eventually she had been diagnosed with breast cancer as well. Her way of dealing with it was through her fiction writing. Reading this essay, I can feel the author's way of getting her emotions out about the terrible news was through her writing. In Alice Hoffman’s essay she states “When Jo Ann asked me to find her a grave site, a heartbreaking mission if ever there was one, my characters from ‘Local Girls’ made a similar trek on the very same day, although they were far wiser than I, and far more optimistic”, showing us that she was using the events happening in her life during the hard times in her fiction. This is what we learning to do with our Journal number 3. We took a memory in our lives that was deeply emotional for us and replaced us with new characters that had different qualities but experienced the emotions we did. Our fictions were based upon our experiences. In Sue Miller’s essay, she discusses basically how an author doesn’t really have to experience what they write about. You don’t have to force yourself to think of a specific past memory to make good fiction. Even the authors who choose this way towards their writing shape the specific memory or experience out, taking things out and putting things in, changing it. In the end it’s never completely like the true experience. I agreed with Sue Miller when she stated “Is it true that we have no choice but to echo what’s happened to us and those we know?….Surely not.” I feel if you want to become a fiction writer, you don’t necessarily need to use your past experiences in life to make “good” fiction. Writers are another form of artists. A group of artists can prefer to draw objects or people while looking at them while others just prefer to use their imagination and draw whatever comes to mind. Writers are the same way with writing. One could prefer using experiences while another would rather use their imagination to create every single bit of their story. I felt Alice Hoffman and Sue Miller both discussed in their essays points that have a lot to do with what we’re currently learning to do with our fiction writing and just how much it can do for us emotionally. I feel fiction writing is definitely a proper way of getting out emotions from current occurrences you may be experiencing but you don’t necessarily need to use those experiences to create great work.