Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

It wasn’t until high school, when I took my first creative writing class, that I began to sense trouble. I realized, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these weren’t the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire. I already had my hands full writing about the people I actually knew, and all the things they said. That was what I needed writing for. Now I had to invent extra people and think of things for them to say? It turned out that writing what you were already thinking about wasn’t creative, or even writing. It was “navel-gazing.” To be obsessed by your own life experience was childish, egotistical, unartistic, and worthy of contempt. I tried to get around the problem by ascribing my own thoughts and observations to a fictional character—one with a neutral, universal name, because I didn’t want to seem like I was constantly harping on being Turkish. I didn’t like books where the whole point seemed to be that the person was from some country, and they kept going on about the food. And yet, the things I was writing about somehow didn’t make sense unless the people were from another country, and I didn’t know enough about any other countries besides Turkey.