Amy Tan Creative Writing Process

An Analysis of the Creative Writing Process in Amy Tan’s "Rules of the Game" and Flannery O’Connor’s "Everything That Rises Must Converge”

Author Analysis:

In this literary analysis, the underlying methods of creative r\writing defined by Amy Tan and Flannery O’Connor are being defined in the short story medium. The creative methodology of Amy Tan defines a blend of personal experience through “childhood trauma” in the writing process, which suggests that immigrant Chinese culture sought to impose a strict sense of duty and performance on academics, which Tan has cited as an influence of her education in an American-Chinese home:

Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma. And I had the usual kind that

This writing approach is part of integrating perceived realities with personal experiences in the writing process. In this manner, Tan does not believe that the creative writing process should entail fabricating a story, but that it must be part of the writer’s experience in some form or another. Certainly, Flannery O’Connor is another writer that also believes in using personal experiences as a white woman to project a sense of personal background to stories, especially in stories about racial tensions in the United States:

I don’t understand them [African Americans] the way I do white people. I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro. In my stories, they’re seen from the outside. The negro in the South is quite isolated; he has to exist by himself (O’Connor” Conversations” 59).

This aspect of O’Connor’s understanding of African American is part of the personal experience, which she utilizes as a way to authenticate stories in the mode of creative writing. Much like Tan, O’Connor relies heavily on knowing the difference between personal experience and artificially created stories that deviate away from direct personal experiences of the

Julian must endure the racist taunts of his mother, as she is terrified of traveling on buses that allow African Americans: ““With the world in the mess it's in,” she said, “it's a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top” (O’Connor “Everything that Rises” p.2). With a world “in the mess it’s in”, Julian must learn to cope with his mother’s racism in terms of rejecting desegregation in the South. In this manner, O’Connor’s’ remains true, just as Tan, on the issue of reflecting a personal experience of white Americans without assuming to understand how African Americans may think of the segregation issue. However, O’Connor lived in the time of Desegregation and the characters that she creates have not been altered too greatly from her own personal experiences as a white southerner. This shows less creative writing stylistic s in the interpretation of the story, but does present a fictional view of the abstracted forms of racism that many whites project during this historical period. These are important aspects of O’Connor’s more personal understanding of racism she encountered in her own life, which does not exaggerate the fictional short story in the mode of Tan’s far more creative fabrication of Chinese-American life in “”Rules of the Game.