I like to tell my creative nonfiction students that an attentive writer shouldn't require remarkable events for inspiration but ought to be able to write compellingly about anything--or nothing. Personal essays do not require personal trauma, I tell them, hoping to head off an outbreak of the Peel-Off-the-Bandaid-and-Let's-Compare-Wounds game.
Nevertheless there's no denying that trauma attracts readers--and as evidence I offer my recent adventure with the car in the creek (here), which produced a readership spike like the ones I used to see when I wrote about cancer treatment (here). If I could produce a wreck in the creek or a needle in my arm every day of my life, I'd be the world's most popular blogger!
But frankly, I'd rather not. Once was enough. I'd rather write about birds and teaching and visiting my grandbaby and life in the very slow lane where I live, but this morning that slow lane took me to the cancer center for my annual round of blood tests and CT scans, and the results are clean. That's right: four years after finishing chemotherapy, my body snows no evidence of disease. I'm entirely unremarkable!
But who wants to read about that?
3 comments:
I do! Hooray!
I do, too!
YAY!
Thanks! Journalism geeks out there would say that this post is a textbook example of "burying the lede."
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