Writing In The Particular:

Hegel's arrangement of the individual and the universal with the particular as a sort of mediating instance of both reminded me of the advice I've gotten many times in fiction workshops. In fact, the evolution of my work has a sort of consciousness-quest spirit to it: I began (as do many beginning writers, I imagine) with writing from experience. But the first thing new members of workshops learn is that true stories never convince anyone. There's a disconnect between what's being told and its significance for the author and the reader; as you write from memory, you struggle to construct what you know perfectly, not to give it resonance as a piece of literature. There's a relationship between specific events and people that you know and the ones everyone else does, and it's that relationship that gives fiction its power.
So I jumped, by default, to blanket universals. But pointing constantly to characteristics shared with others is overwhelming and uninteresting, and that method encounters the same problems consciousness had with choosing between the one and the many. The characters get lost in generalities and it starts to seem irrelevant to what extent they exist.
A good fiction professor (if mine are any indication) will advise students to start with the particular. It’s a strange phenomenon – less strange to we phenomenologists – that using specific details as a way toward universal experience influences readers more effectively. There’s some solace to be found in an interestingly nuanced creation that gently reminds you of your own world. Reading Hegel has given me an extended appreciation for how this works – it seems a function of the way we construct our understandings of the world and the way he explains our relation of that understanding to other consciousnesses.
It’s an interesting example of a question I’ve struggled with in terms of Hegel’s system. It seems that if the “truth is the whole” – that is, that each part of this individual-particular-universal arrangement is equally necessary and important, that what choices one makes don’t matter. I’m thinking especially in terms of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model we talked about early on; in that case, which side of the argument I’m on is irrelevant as long as my opinion exists. And the fiction writing analogy I’m trying to draw here supports that idea. The particular details don’t actually matter, as long as they’re there to provide a pathway to the universal.

Halley