From the age of twelve, I had my mind set on one task: writing. I was convinced, no matter what happened in life, it would have my full attention. I would spend my days working at a job that would pay my bills. College was not in my plans. But I went with the intent of improving my writing.
Somewhere in those four years, the sound of the calling weakened. I eventually found myself in the “real” world without the shelter of student life with a student job to fall back on. It was time to make more than my minimum-wage student job. Santa Barbara is an expensive city, and I had a dog-child depending on me.
Amidst my existential crisis, I realized part of my problem was I had lived so little up until that point. I wanted to learn to love life so I could capture that and relay that in my writing. It has taken me seven years to rediscover that spark.
I have lived more life in the past seven years than I had in the first twenty-two. I am in my final semester of a master’s program in Europe studying social and cultural anthropology. Anthropology has given me a new genre I can write in as well as a new way of thinking about the characters, or people, I write about.
It has also reminded me that real life has narratives as, and even more, exquisite than those I could ever imagine. It also introduced me to new ways of world-building, which I will get into.
Aside:
I know I said things would be less confessional, but some will have to be to give context. You can go ahead and skip over these if you are tired of reading what’s in my brain.
Anthropology and Ethnographic Texts as Narrative
Another Aside:
I wrote a bit about this yesterday, or maybe a lot. I am feeling a bit down today, so I don’t remember and don’t plan to go back to check. Does this make me a bad blogger? Am I a blogger at this point?
Ethnographic writing, a common form of anthropological writing, is a blend of narrative and theoretical discussion. The narrative element can offer a lot both for writers and readers of ethnographic work trying to improve their writing. For writers, it gives you another genre and form to practice with. For readers, which I assume most of you are, it provides additional examples of narratives, and the theoretical discussions give additional context that you could consider when writing your characters.
Writers are encouraged to both:
- Read within their genre.
- Read outside their genre.
Reading ethnographic work would be beneficial to any writer—whether or not they wrote ethnographic texts. For ethnographic writers, reading ethnographic texts is a no-brainer, but for non-ethnographic writers, reading them provides additional value, which you will find below.
Anthropology and Ethnographic Texts as Research
Anthropology explores nearly everything a writer could ever write about. It dives into the relationship between institutions of power and the every-person. It discusses cities, exclusion, movement, etc.
Reading ethnographic texts can contribute to world-building. If you are writing about life in a tropical environment but live in the desert in Southern California, reading an in-depth text could improve the depth of your descriptions. Especially if that text was written by an expert based on information gathered over years of fieldwork (living, researching, and spending time there) and insight provided by locals.
While reading a book over the summer, one of my favorite ethnographic texts, I was inspired to write a new book after years of not writing fiction. I literally had a dream with flashes of scenes and woke up the next morning before anyone else and set to work writing down everything I could remember. Over the next few days, I was making sense of what had happened and building a loose skeleton—almost a zero draft—of what would become my book.
This past semester, I only took courses that would help feed the world-building and plot of the book. I made sure the instruction, my research, and my final projects all fed into what this world would be.
Reading the work of those who do a deep dive into settings and experiences that are radically different from our own can help us add additional layers to the setting, conflict, and stakes in a way that is more realistic than if we operate on our assumptions.
Anthropology and Ethnographic Texts and Human Understanding
I have always been fascinated by humans: human behavior, motivations, small differences, genetics, language. Everything really. We are a fascinating species. Anthropology takes a deep dive into humanity and explores various phenomena to see how we react, engage with, and adapt to the circumstances around us.
As a fiction writer, I thought it was easy to imagine how something I had never experienced would be and how I would react to it. Then, a couple of those things happened in my real life, and I realized I had no idea how I would react to anything unless I had already faced it. Anthropology helps with that. Anthropology documents the experiences of real people who have experienced different circumstances than you have. It also analyzes social relations, how certain practices become norms, and how various communities address diversity.
By learning about a wider variety of experiences, we can open our minds to more scenarios. We can try out different patterns of behavior with characters. We can take inspiration from real people who have lived something related to what we are writing about in our fiction.
Conclusion
For a time, I thought I would give up on fiction writing for good. Partly because I hadn’t written it for years due to my internal turmoil but also because I had become, for lack of a better word, a snob. I convinced myself that fiction writing was not as serious as writing about the real world. Then I stopped reading fiction, writing fiction, or thinking about it entirely. Only things that could be seen, touched, measured, or a quantifiable impact had value. Where I got this CRAZY idea is beyond me.
Both coming to my senses, but also anthropology, helped me fix that real quick. Of course, I realized I was being an asshole. But studying anthropology and the different experiences of reality made me question the significance I attached to it in the first place. Who am I to say what is real? What is valuable? My experience of reality is just as valuable as your own. And they don’t have to be 100% the same. They probably aren’t.
If we assume the following are true:
- My version of reality can exist
- Your version of reality can exist
- It does not matter which version is more accurate
then what does it matter if I write about real or imagined characters, situations, or worlds?
Too out there?
Simply put, I stopped taking reality so seriously, and it made fiction fun again. Just because something is real does not always guarantee it is better.