"Rising from the carpet when I walked in, there we stood, face to face in his barren apartment. My dad explained to me that he was going to get professional help. 'I'd hug you but you're a man now,' he told me before I left. I have yet to comprehend how the preservation of masculinity could be strong enough in him to cause us not to embrace. Instead I settled for a handshake."
This story grew from some of my most easily-accessible--yet morose--memories. Ever present throughout my life, my father's drug and alcohol addiction proved to be ample material for writing a vignette. No person or event in the piece is a fiction; I neither exaggerated nor undermined the happenings therein. I will say, however, that reading the piece now, I feel it to be too sentimental, as I did not stress the events themselves but rather my feelings toward them.
I cannot rightly say that I had any particular writer or narrative in mind while composing my vignette, but if I were to allot credit to any particular authors whose style I might have subconsciously bore in mind, they would have to be the great confessional poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
Revising this piece attentively will not be a deviation from my usual methods of revision. As stated above, I will also try to weed out some of what I feel to be the piece's overly emotional sections and replace them with more concrete detail.
The writing of vignettes is similar to other creative writings in that the thought process I undergo does not change much. In all forms I aim to be exact and I search for le mot juste as diligently as possible, as arduous a task as that often is for me. I found the difference, though, to be that I must do battle with my urge to fictionalize what I write. On the other hand, having also studied and written poetry, I believe I am somewhat balanced.
I normally write by hand first and then transfer that material to a computer, but this piece (due to lack of time) was not done in that fashion: I forwent the first step and began immediately with the second.
Thanks for reading what I have to say.
