Last week I marked a batch of stories from my college students. I marked so many lie/lay/lain – lay/laid errors that I got confused myself. I ended up “correcting” at least one lie/lay problem issue that turned out to be correct already. So I figured we could all use a refresher on this perennial trouble spot.

Transitive and Intransitive Verbs

Let’s start with the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs. A verb is transitive if it can take a direct object. Eat is a transitive verb because it takes a direct object, as in the sentence “Clarence eats an egg every morning” (the direct object is egg). Sleep is an intransitive verb because it doesn’t take a direct object. You can say “I slept this afternoon,” but not “I slept a nap this afternoon.” Note that a transitive verb doesn’t always take a direct object. If you say “I still haven’t eaten,” there’s no direct object, but have eaten is still a transitive verb.

The first TED talk I remember ever watching was “Your Elusive Creative Genius,” by Elizabeth Gilbert, in 2009. If you aren’t among the 19 million people (literally) who have watched this talk, or if you just want to relive the magic, here’s the link. There’s a lot of good stuff in that talk, but the thing that has most stuck with me these eleven years is Gilbert’s account of the way the word “genius” has changed through the centuries.

The ancients believed that “creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.” The Romans called this attendant spirit a “genius”:

They believed that a genius was a sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.

So, for the Romans, “genius” was something that existed outside the artist. But around the Renaissance or soon thereafter, people started to think of creativity as something that comes from the individual instead of something that comes to the individual. “And from that time in history,” says Elizabeth Gilbert, “you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius instead of having a genius.”

In recent weeks I’ve had a few people ask me about the term creative nonfiction and how it is different from other, presumably “non-creative” nonfiction. Alice LaPlante offers this definition in The Making of a Story:

Creative nonfiction is generally agreed to be nonfiction that is rendered using fictional techniques: dialogue, and narrative, and imagery, and other elements that are leveraged to evoke a certain emotional response.

In short, creative nonfiction is nonfiction that reads like fiction. It’s still nonfiction: the writer of creative nonfiction doesn’t suddenly have permission to make up facts or invent scenes that didn’t happen. But the presentation of those real-world facts and scenes closely resembles the presentation you would find in a novel or short story.

Creative nonfiction is not a sub-genre distinct from, say, journalism or biography or persuasive essays. Journalists, biographers, and essayists always have the option of using the techniques of creative nonfiction in their work.

Rather than thinking in terms of genre and sub-genre, think in terms of objective fact vs. subjective experience. (Stay with me: by using the term “subjective experience” I’m not talking about throwing away facts or truth; rather, I’m talking about the way we experience facts and truth.) Traditional journalism, textbooks, op-ed columns, biographies, etc., derive their authority from the marshaling of objective facts. It is true, of course, that this “traditional” kind of nonfiction might have an emotional impact on readers. This should come as no surprise, since we have emotional responses to objective facts all day every day. But for the writer of a textbook, the goal is to stand outside the scene at a healthy objective distance; any emotional impact is a byproduct.

Last week I got a puppy. In preparation for the blessed event, I read a book by Alexandra Horowitz called Inside of a Dog: What Dogs Smell, See, and Know. If you are interested in dogs, I commend it to you. It is full of fascinating insights, not only about dogs’ perception of the world, but also about human beings’ perception. 

As you probably remember from Psych 101, human beings are “gestalt” thinkers and lookers. When we survey a scene, we don’t typically pay attention to every detail—even when we think that’s what we’re doing—but instead see the big picture, the whole pattern or shape of things (gestalt is German for “shape”). As Alexandra Horowitz puts it, “Every time we enter a room, we take it in in broad strokes: if everything is where we expect it to be…we stop looking.”

Given the complexity of the human world, gestalt seeing and thinking can be a huge advantage. Imagine how overwhelming a trip to the grocery store would be if you were actually seeing and processing every sensory stimulus that presented itself. But the disadvantage of gestalt seeing and thinking is that we tend to see what we expect to see or what we are looking for rather than what is actually there. At the big-picture, philosophical level, this is true in the way we interpret facts. But it’s also true in a more immediate sense, in the way we perceive visual images and other sensory inputs. By way of example, I offer this basketball-related awareness test (it’s only a minute long and well worth watching):