PART VIII: Existential Space;
Chapter 32: Using Your Existential Intelligence
Existential intelligence ...is the intelligence that concerns you, as a writer, the most. It guides your writing themes, your writing choices, and your writing relationships. It helps you understand why you are bothering to write, why you are spending years on a recalcitrant book, why you are revising eight tines when you would rather go fishing. (207)
Partly because I prefer to write nonfiction (but read fiction) and partly because the kind of nonfiction I write most frequently is overtly interpretative and theoretical, my own writing would probably fall into Maisel's "existential" category (though not Sartre's -- I had to review my understanding of existentialism to recognize it at all in Maisel's use of the term).
That is, it's overtly concerned with the construction of meaning(s) -- by others (e.g., filmmakers, writers) or myself (when I'm in my autobiographical memoirist mode).
Personally and professionally, I don't believe meaning inheres in anything. Meaning exists because we create it. Which is all the more reason for constructing meaning in useful, humanitarian ways and living those meanings through our writing and our actions.
We can't control everything that happens to us. We can't always control how we respond to it. But we can construct meaningful accounts, find our own meanings, and render our our lives legible to ourselves and others.
And that's really quite an achievement, when you think about it.
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