Fragments with an overarching theme

Author David Shields once told me something along the lines of "plot is irrelevant."  He believes that plot is old news, and those who use plot are behind the times.  He's also not a big fan of fiction, which shows as his older books tend to be novels containing plots while his newer works have evolved into memoir and fact driven collages of short scenes , or fragments, which only vaguely relate to one another, but, when read as a whole create an overarching theme or idea.

The benefits to such a structure are many.  You can say whatever you want at any given time, any idea you want to get across without worrying about masking or muddling your central ideas through necessary fiction devices such as themes and character dialog, etc.  It also makes a wholly unique reading experience, as you piece together the bits you feel as though you are being drawn into the depths of the author himself, rather than his story.





Creative Writing Prompt:  Write a short nonfiction piece with a central idea or theme governing the piece.  But rather than write on plot driven story, write three or more scenes from your life that support this idea, whether they are directly related or not, and write them in such a way that they make up a singular piece.  Experiment.

Recommended Reading:
"I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels," David Shields acknowledges in Reality Hunger, then seeks to understand how the conventional literary novel has become as lifeless a form as the mass market bodice-ripper. Shields provides an ars poetica for writers and other artists who, exhausted by the artificiality of our culture, "obsessed by real events because we experience hardly any," are taking larger and larger pieces of the real world and using them in their work. Reality Hunger is made of 600-odd numbered fragments, many of them quotations from other sources, some from Shields’s own books, but none properly sourced--the project being not a treasure hunt or a con but a good-faith presentation of what literature might look like if it caught up to contemporary strategies and devices used in the other arts, and allowed for samples (that is, quotation from art and from the world) to revivify existing forms. Shields challenges the perceived superiority of the imagination and exposes conventional literary pieties as imitation writing, the textual equivalent of artificial flavoring, sleepwalking, and small talk. I can’t name a more necessary or a more thrilling book. --Sarah Manguso