Title: Reality Hunger: A ManifestoAuthor: David Shields
Do you view writing like visual arts, where experimentation and borrowing are routinely employed in highbrow works of art? Do you wonder if copyright laws are outdated and restrict creativity? Do you think that traditional novel and memoir are boring, dead forms, too focused on story and not willing to experiment with scratching away at a theme? Do you like "collage" writing with lots of short chapters and themes that could be easily reorganized and reordered? If so, you may be David Shields, or else one of his disciples.
Shields originally wrote Reality Hunger as a series of quotations from famous authors (and some of his own advice) to guide creative writing MFA students in his graduate seminars. After years of collecting, rewriting, and reordering his quotes, he published them as Reality Hunger, a book that argues for exploring the boundaries of creative writing, for not being hemmed in by traditional methods of telling stories.
I'll admit that I'm pretty skeptical about the idea. I feel that one of the main reasons I'm in an MFA program is to learn how to tell good stories, but Shields spoke to my class a few nights ago, and I hope I approached our conversation with an open mind. I agree that there need to be people like Shields (or Joyce, or Woolf) pushing the boundaries. But I don't feel equipped to push boundaries that I don't really understand yet. Maybe in another five or ten years I'll be able to approach Shields with more enlightenment.
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