. Spinning .

What happens if, the light you finally see at the end of the tunnel…goes out?

If the black bear that chases you in dreams shows up in the backyard one morning?

When you discover that the gypsies really did steal you away in a basket as an infant from your loving family and left you on the doorstep of a psychotic surgeon?

If at age forty you notice you are suddenly growing two extra toes?

Life is never easy, except when left to the imagination to resolve.

It is no secret that I have been exceedingly pushy to the point of being annoying on the theory of read and write to learn to write something that someone wants to read.  There’s no sense of entitlement in me, lost long ago in the years of early youth that often needs even falsely placed self confidence to overcome barriers that we would stupidly stop and stare at if we knew better.

With the forced readings of diverse topics, with the flareup of new media in mind and the excitement of the potential mingling with the learning of the classics, I can only hope that I have enough time left to my life to finish–or even get started on–all I want to do.

It is also no secret (since I just can’t seem to keep it all in without exploding in fifty-million pieces that would be severely detrimental to the environment as I would tend to hang like a great grey cloud casting my shadow on the earth’s surface for all eternity) that personal realities have affected me deeply over the past couple of years.  Without telling more but enough to eliminate the mystery, my mother’s years with and death of Alzheimer’s, the deaths of both my father and my best friend last year, the family relations deteriorating from settlement of estate, and lack of stable employment in our household right now, have all taken their toll.  So I whined a bit and found it impossible to write, instead focusing on trying to comprehend human nature and man’s individual purpose and place in life.  This, it finally dawned on me, is a true resource for a writer.  How else can you understand a character enough to write about him if you don’t see all the various perceptions that we are capable of?  Do I want all my protagonists to think like me?  God, no.

So this reading and writing and watching is my newly established classroom.  No degree will be given, but then, no graduating end is in sight.  It goes on forever until we draw our last breath.  Learning.

Got some good advice from a friend last night regarding Big Tim Dawson, and I recognized it immediately as the path I should have taken yesterday in my thousand-word romp with him.

We can start out with a great opening, hit the ground running, as they say, but that necessarily brings up the want for backstory to bring in the needed information to the understanding of the story to that point (if applicable) so the reader has some idea of what’s going on before he can look forward to what will happen.

Well in working with Big Tim, somewhere along the way I got into research and reporting mode and started rambling with all those unnecessary bits of story that don’t add to the current story at all.  It just seemed as if I sat there and glowed with a mother’s pride to relate all Tim did since kindergarten.  I knew it was wrong, but having it pointed out was great because I won’t be tempted to keep going off in that direction.

So a large chunk of Tim’s life will be condensed or cut; but it will enable me to take a more interesting road with Tim now that I know him better.

A thought occurred to me this morning regarding the simple act of writing down in text the different language or accent nuances to bring the voice and tone in line with the setting of a story.  That said, I hope I don’t offend anyone from here on…

As writers, we may have a character who may say something like, "No, I cain’t do that anymore.  I jes plain don’t wanna."

Now this may give you a sense of the characters conversing in their own space in their own natural style of speech, but if you had one of these same characters sit down to write a letter instead, you’d most likely show it as, "No, I can’t do that anymore.  I just plain don’t want to."

So how much is enough to set an environment, culture, or social or educational standard, and how much is too much?  I once read a story with a heavy Irish brogue and while it was pretty accurately (as best I could tell) done, it was a bit annoying to read until I read it a few times.  Most often within a novel-length story you would get used to it (even McCarthy’s lack of punctuation in dialogue was wearying until you got into it).  But I think that there must be some standard for a writer to go by, some compromise that doesn’t distract from the flow nor from the flavor of the story.

Interesting though, how we revert to phonetic spelling to accomodate speech that is based on perfectly properly spelled-out language.

This is good.  I’m up at four a.m., but did catch a few hours’ sleep and am in a writing mood.  This afternoon I’d written some more on Big Tim Dawson (which I’ll post in a second) but more importantly, I just got one of those dark garage moments of answering the story line question, and just typed in the plot structure (narrative structure will not be strictly linear, but sprinkled with backstory more to give character information and needed info to get to the present and ending scene) so I have some idea of where the story is going and how best to set it out.

I’ve also submitted the unfinished story to the writers group for workshopping at its next meeting, which is a real no-no (unless of course a writer is stuck, in which case I could submit a dozen opening paragraphs of story at each meeting but will spare those good people the agony) but in this case, have warned them that it will be finished before the meeting date and has been posted just to impose a necessary deadline upon myself.  This works well for people of a procrastinating nature such as I possess, and why my academic studies never suffered except through some late night crash-writing and a pot of coffee. 

Also resurrected Where’s Alice? and The Player which I’d started here last month.  The writing style of these three recent pieces is different, and hopefully better skilled than anything I’ve done before. 

So then, shall I keep writing or make a couple of chocolate zucchini loaves and some cream filled chocolate cupcakes?  Every good writer needs sugar, you know.

An excellent post at Joe Faust’s entitled All I Have to Do is Dream (page stubbornly insists that you want to download Firefox, but for IE users, just click continue to read in plain text) regarding the creativity employed to expand upon dreams into artistic projects, whether paint or text.

I myself have used some portions of dreams in my writing, though not usually in a story.  My long forgotten and abandoned novel was based on daydreams, so I don’t suppose that would count…

While I have not made much more progress on the pseudohypertext narratives that I’m planning for the Spring issue of otto, I have at least become involved in the last two stories (posted recently) that show promise.

It has been difficult to write without the wordflow that had always started and completed narrative previously with little effort on my part in the creative process as more than almost a channeling experience, with the main effort put into editing and rewrites.  Whether it is the current obsession with real scenarios carving their paths in my life right now, or whether it is the focus and awareness on technique of storytelling brought about by reading thems that’ve been published and the resulting intimidation in the face of majesty, I seem to have stalled for several months in my own creative endeavors, but have seen just the slightest light from a door left ajar.

With these two new stories I may be able to make my way through and beyond.  I’m thinking of even self-imposing a deadline (I’ve grown lax since being out of the academic urgencies of a classroom environment) by submitting one of these stories to our Narratives group for critique even before it is finished.  That would give me a week’s deadline to aim toward and Lord knows, I still have it in me since childhood to not disappoint or fall short of a goal without a heavy accompanying load of guilt.