ME IN MY WRITING

A SELF-DEPRECATING ANALYSISDave E. Ahlman

GOALS IN ENGLISH 3450 THIS SEMESTER:

Write “Self as Anti-Hero”Drive Narrative through SceneryUse Prose to Grip Reader’s Attention “A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it

when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with

interesting results. So he goes to work.”- Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (page 125)

WRITING SELF AS ANTI-HERO:

THE WAR WITHIN

“Blessed is he who has learned to laugh at himself, for he shall never cease to be

entertained.”- John Powell

AN EXCERPT FROM DEBORAH SOSIN’S

ESSAY “THE SELF AS ANTI-HERO”

“Sedaris wields a heavier hand as an antiheroic gay man in a predominantly heterosexual world. He mines the fertile fields of his memory and imagination to create an often selfish, petty, self-hating, contemptuous, even cruel character. And, somehow, he sets it up so that we laugh out loud, not in a mocking way, but, perhaps, in recognition of our own baser instincts and ugly qualities” (page 32 of The Writer’s Chronicle: Vol. 48, Num. 2, October/November 2015).

ME WRITING “SELF AS ANTI-HERO”:

EXCERPT FROM “OQUIRRH”“David, you know better!”

My mom had never been happy with the women I’ve dated, nor those my siblings have either passed “second base” or headed “home” with. A history of bad influences (like my sister Amberly’s ex-boyfriend Brian who led her down a path of diminished self-worth which, after they broke up, strung her from one “one night stand” to another, one unnamed man to the next) justified my mother’s reasoning though—at least in her mind.

“One day, you’ll understand what it’s like to be a mother,” my mother said tearfully, “You’ll know how it feels—the hell you’ll experience—once you’ve watched your child reject what you taught them, and what you know will keep them safe and happy. Did you know we thought Amberly had an STD? David, it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

Am I really rejecting what you taught me by dating a Non-Mormon? I thought …

ME WRITING “SELF AS ANTI-HERO” CONT’D:

EXCERPT FROM “OQUIRRH”In the Utah Mormon community, the level of one’s chastity is the measure of a member’s value; to a local LDS congregation, one’s virginity is as “precious” as Sauron’s glimmering ring was to Tolkien’s Gollum. I remember a lesson taught to me in seminary that illustrated this fact. My teacher, Brother Balfe, brought with him two Milky Way candy bars to class. The first of the two he left in its wrapper and asked every student to cautiously pass it around the room until everyone had at least touched the candy bar, then once it entered the eager palms of the last student in the room, that student was given the choice to unwrap the chocolate covered caramel from its safe and inhale or leave the star-studded sweet in its zip-locked sleeve and pass the salacious treat to another classmate to eat. But, since the final student in my class was Tenny—a 300 pound all-state defensive lineman—of course, he didn’t pass up the chance to masticate a Milky Way.

TENNY PALEPOI:DEFENSIVE LINEMAN

THE SAN DIEGO CHARGERS

MY GOAL FOR“SELF AS ANTI-

HERO”To create empathy in the reader for the narrator (aka: me) through depicting the “unmormoness” of the narrator’s (my) behavior coupled with his questioning, seemingly Anti-Mormon consciousness in order to highlight the hypocrisies of his duplicitous “Active Mormon” self unearthed by allusions to his promiscuous actions.

 ”If we don’t feel empathy ourselves, how can we ever expect to stir up

empathy in our readers?”- J. Leigh

DRIVING STORIES WITH SCENERY:THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

“Good buildings [like stories] make and are made by their settings, and they are appropriately different in different locations. Climate,

culture, topography and materials have helped create regional architectural languages that seem curiously right for their locations

and for all times.”- Jaquelin T. Robertson

ME DRIVING NARRATIVE WITH SCENERY:EXCERPT FROM “OQUIRRH”

Running 30 miles north-south in an almost straight line enigmatic, rising from the Salt Lake and Tooele Valleys to its highest peak of 10,620 feet, just over two miles, stands erect the Oquirrh Mountain Range do south of the Great Salt Lake. The name of these alps—“Oquirrh”—derives from a Native Goshute Indian root; the word itself meaning “wood sitting”: a title originally attributed for the area’s once lush tree population. Over the last decade and a half, however, many pines, oaks and douglas-firs have either been: burned in wildfires; torn down to make room for gaudy, new homes; or, worse, uprooted to continue the excavation of the world’s largest eye-sore, a chasm known as the Rio Tinto Kennecott, Utah Cooper or Bingham Canyon Mine …

Atop land donated by Kennecott to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sits South Jordan’s second Mormon templum, appropriately named the Oquirrh Mountain Temple. This building announced during the October 2005 General Conference and dedicated August 2009 lies on the Oquirrh Mountain Range’s eastern slopes, built on the Daybreak Community’s bluff edge. Since its dedication, it has been said to serve over 83,000 LDS members in the surrounding area, taking traffic away from the church’s busiest and most visited temple, Jordan River.

THE POWER OF POETIC PROSE:

BEWITCHING THE READER

“Going up a track of a road through the quarry woods where all about lay enormous blocks and tablets of stone weathered gray and grown with deep green moss, toppled

monoliths among the trees and vines like traces of an older race of man. This rainy summer day. He passed a dark lake of silent jade where the moss walls rose sheer and

plumb and a small blue bird sat slant upon a guywire in the void.”

- Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (page 25)

ME USING POETIC PROSE TO GRIP READER:EXCERPT FROM “ATOP HERRIMAN”

Before

The trees atop Herriman, once chopped and carried off by lumberjacks to lumberyards, returned in new forms as frames of homes and white painted fences paralleling score old concrete streets. We sharply wove through this elevated city’s witchy conjured blacktop separating the mirrored faces of houses and fences one from another, recalling as we sped passed them the famous words of Robert Frost: “the best way out is always through.”

The rickety clicks radiating from my ancient, gray-chipped 2003 Hyundai Elantra threw me back to reality following a revealing conversation with my girlfriend Danielle.

Should I wait for her? I asked myself.

After

The trees atop Herriman, once chopped and carried off by lumberjacks to lumberyards, returned in new forms as frames of homes and white painted picket fences paralleling score old concrete streets. We sharply raced passed them—house after house alike in both color and dimension—hovering, as it were, over this elevated city’s witchy conjured blacktop which bent and snaked as it rose: like a new flame fattened by the fueling of embers rising, losing strength, fizzling out and then dissolving into nothing; strung thin by unfamiliar atmospheric cold.

Should I wait for her? I asked myself.

MAIN TAKE AWAYS FROM ENGLIGH 3450

Stay in TenseWrite Episodically—better for prose

Write “Art for Art’s Sake”"There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.

Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.”

- Oscar Wilde

THE END (OR BEGINNING?)Questions?Thoughts?Concerns?