A Prose Craft Essay by Jillian Schedneck
WHAT WE CHASE AND WHAT STAYS: On Running After Stories, and Standing Still
When I moved to Abu Dhabi and then to Dubai in my mid-twenties, I thought I needed to seek out as many experiences as possible to justify writing about my time in both places. From the obligatory to the bizarre, the wild to the intimate, I sought invitations and said yes to everything. Volunteering at a woman’s shelter unsettled what I thought I understood about human rights and decency. Nights out at glossy clubs exposed me to a hedonist expat lifestyle I ultimately chose to avoid. A day trip to a camel beauty pageant, despite its strangeness, left me with almost nothing to say, at least nothing that felt alive once I tried to write about it.
I was busy chasing material for creative nonfiction, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. I only thought that if I kept moving, showing up to situations that felt new or uncomfortable or titillating or significant, something worth writing would reveal itself. And that, somehow, my memoir would unlock. That all those disparate experiences would rattle together in my brain until I had a story that would finally take shape.
But here’s what I learned when I finally sat down to write: while some encounters worked—making their way into my eventual memoir or becoming published pieces—many didn’t. The problem wasn’t access or the ultimate limits to my time and energy. Nor that I didn’t have enough material, or that I should have chased more, or chased something different. The problem was not knowing what, exactly, I was looking for.
Years later, after writing and publishing that two-year experience as a travel memoir, I found myself returning to this question, not only as a writer but also as a teacher of CNF. What are we actually doing when we go looking for material? Why do some experiences—especially those we sought out with such certainty beforehand— never make it to the page, while others refuse to let us go?
I don’t have complete answers, but lately I’ve been trying something different. To counter the indiscriminate approach I used in my twenties, I’ve started to be more intentional about the experiences I do pursue with an eye to maybe writing about them afterward—or maybe not. Unlike those heady days rushing around the emirates for some excitement to maybe write about, I now ask myself some basic questions before I embark on a hunt for material: What am I actually interested in? What holds meaning for me, both externally and internally? What fits within the arc of my larger journey within a memoir, or within my body of work?
Once, on a trip to London, I took a bus ride to the outskirts of the city, to a town called Streatham, where an eighteenth-century writer lived. Her name was Hester Thrale. I’d read her diaries and letters and was enamored by her wit and vivacity, particularly the story of her love affair with her daughter’s piano teacher, Gabriel Piozzi. I admired Hester Thrale’s bold choices in love, and I wanted some of that drama to rub off on me.
Those few hours I spent in Streatham? A disappointment. The place was run-down, with a dinky High Street and a small park with scatterings of litter. Hester Thrale’s mansion was long ago turned into rows of council flats. My intention had been clear: uncover Hester Thrale’s presence in Streatham. When I couldn’t, I realized I still had something. The disappointment was worth writing about because it mirrored my own disappointment in the lack of bold choices presented to me, the general absence of drama in my life at the time. I learned the attempt was all I needed. That was quest-driven writing, as I’d come to call it. And in that case, it had worked, just not in the way I’d envisioned.
I’ve also begun to notice something I hadn’t acknowledged in my mid-twenties: the power of the unplanned moment. Sometimes, an unexpected encounter exposes a reaction I don’t fully understand just then, or a feeling that doesn’t match the situation, or an emotion or memory that eventually lingers. I started calling those experiences moments of resonance. Sometimes, they’re big, dangerous moments, but for me, more likely they are small and quiet. I’m sure I had plenty of the latter when I was living in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, but they would have barely registered at the time.
Once, on a bus journey from Dubrovnik, Croatia, to Kotor, Montenegro, my family and I were severely delayed at two border checkpoints. What should have been a two-hour trip stretched into ten, and during that time, I became acutely aware of my own reactions: how claustrophobic and trapped I felt, how embarrassed I was by my response, and how calm and patient the younger passengers around me seemed—especially after an earlier incident when the bus had been over-booked. The external inconvenience created a pressure cooker of internal tension. I realized the story lay not just in the outer physical world of this unplanned delay, but in why it unsettled me so deeply within.
Soon, I’ll be traveling to Canada, and I’m going to plan a few quests to pursue, as well as stay open to unexpected moments of resonance. I’m a big science fiction fan, so one of my quests is to visit the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy at the Toronto Public Library. My aim will be to uncover what it feels like to stand among the ancestors of this genre I love so much. I also have a more abstract intention: to balance the pull of experience with the need to be fully present with the family we’re traveling with, particularly those with whom I don’t often get to spend time. These quests might lead somewhere, or nowhere at all. I can’t tell yet.
As I read Canadian guidebooks and travel blogs, a part of me still wants to do more, to do it all—just in case there’s some good material to write about. But I’ve learned to take a step back and let go. When I act with intention rather than taking a scattershot approach, I’m more likely to write about what matters to me, and more open to what I didn’t expect to find. I can’t predict what my moments of resonance might be on my next trip—the ambiguous kindness of a stranger, something the librarian at the Toronto Public Library shares with me, my daughter’s reaction to the art museum I take her to. Any of these might take hold, or none of them.
When I return, I’m likely to have richer stories on my hands than if I had spent day and night chasing every possible experience, or the opposite—waiting for something to announce itself as a story. I’ll likely have both: one or two pursued ideas that led somewhere, and a few encounters I won’t recognize as meaningful until later.
What I didn’t understand in Abu Dhabi, and what I’m still learning, is that experience alone isn’t enough. Sometimes I have to create direction and follow it through. Other times, the moment arrives uninvited, attached to something that feels disproportionate, confusing, or unresolved, and I must figure out its meaning later, on the page. The challenge isn’t choosing one approach over the other but learning to recognize the difference. To know when I’m moving toward something, and when something has already caught hold of me.
Jillian Schedneck writes speculative fiction and memoir. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Tahoma Literary Review, Brevity, Redivider and elsewhere. Her memoir was published with PanMacmillan. Her work has been chosen as a notable essay in the Best American Essays series and won multiple Solas Awards for Travel Writing. She lives in Australia with her partner and children. Follow her work at jillianschedneck.com.
