Forming a Personal Aesthetic

"Read good fiction. Analyze it. Then read some more. Try to figure out why your English teacher assigned those novels." - Ann LaFarge Editor, Zebra Books

"Distinguish yourself from the rest. And don't kid yourself that there aren't others." - Peternelle van Arsdale Editor, HarperCollins

"Daily I remind myself that my manuscript is the only thing over which I have control. It should be my focus." - Sandra Brown Send No Flowers (Bantam Doubleday)

These quotes remind me of a process that I went through, not so long ago, while taking Advanced Fiction Writing in the university -- developing a personal aesthetic. I had never even thought about the criteria I used to judge whether or not a piece was good. I just did it. I didn't have a criteria that I consciously thought of when writing my own pieces of fiction. So, when asked by Dr. Joseph to develop a working aesthetic for class, I thought it would be hard. The first quote of the three is the first step to developing an aesthetic. The second is what developing one does for you and your work. The third is what an aesthetic allows you to do with your work. Let me make myself clearer.

"All serious artists have a personal aesthetic, which is more or less a set of guidelines for shaping work. Often these guidelines are never articulated -- instead the artist claims work by instinct, "feeling" whether a piece is complete and whether it measures up to the original vision." This is how I was introduced to developing a personal aesthetic on a handout given to the class by Dr. Joseph. I had to pinpoint what it was that those "feelings" are, and distinguish between them and "feelings" that were really biases. Then, I developed an aesthetic for what I wanted my work to accomplish using those criteria.

To begin, I read all of the 1999 Best American Short Stories and I kept a response journal to keep track of what I liked about the stories and what I didn't. I tried to be as specific as possible. When I completed the task, I went through and chose the statements that I wrote about what made a piece good. Then, I decided what applied to what I was trying to do with my own work and the things I wanted to make different in my work from the work that I had read. It was not an easy process, but it was one that helped me to truly judge my own work by the standards that I set for myself and other work.

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