Not an opinion from me, but very interesting ones from Amrit Hallan at The Writing Cave, in About Fiction, although I must say I would disagree with the two literary vs. pulp categories, and within that post being referred to Steve at This Space: The Fires Blog in GOB Stopper: Defining Literary Fiction.
Both well worth reading.
This is coming to you directly from a pc I built from scratch! Obviously, all I had to do was plug in the connector and I’m online in seconds! This of course is not due to any great abilities on my part, but the dudes over at Microsoft, I must admit, deserve the credit for developing an operating system that is easy for the amateur to load.
…so far. And I must admit that I’m slowly learning to love Windows XP. The installation of Win XP directly into my new system worked like a charm, and putting in the device drivers was a simple matter allowing the system to pick them correctly off the CD rather than hand-picking them out of the CAB files and delivering them up, all the while crossing my fingers hoping I was selecting the correct individual files.
I’m going to next tie the new computer in with the LAN network and hope that the connection automatically adapts, though the onboard LAN is not the Linksys of the other computers. Here is where I broke down and called my personal guru to get his suggestions. He also gave me some great ideas on trying to salvage the data off the dead hard drive by moving it around to different computers and changing master/slave settings on this physical drive as well as another where there should be a backup, as well as possibly a bootable system.
I am however having a little problem with my laptop and a sticking W key. My professional technological opinion? A food crumb.
I’ve spent the afternoon picture framing, putting off putting in the o/s on my new computer, and thinking up some nasty business for my storehouse of protagonists to face.
The guilt-ridden mother may have a worse secret than just the fact that she feels her husband only married her because she was pregnant. Marilyn is going to be surprised by who comes ringing her doorbell on New Year’s Eve. The lady in the mirror will find out her husband had an affair. Aunt Cara will die and the state will take the farm away from her devoted niece. And Few the garbage heap may soon see a dump truck in his future.
Conflict? I’ll give them conflict!
I read knowledge to learn, non-fiction to seek truth, and fiction to live within a different world.
I write non-fiction truthfully, have no great knowledge to impart, and fiction to live within a different world. All readers of fiction want some depth of character, a plot, a revelation or resolution. All fiction must have some conflict. And this is where I fail.
One would think that with experience comes more ideas, more sense of what human nature can dish out and by the same strength, absorb. And yes, unless we blind ourselves to our realities, we may write about the wonders and horrors that we’ve put into our pasts, add or leave out a few details, but draw upon the memories or impressions to create great fiction. Except for me. Unless I’m off in outer space with a story, my character is carefully framed to not be any part of me–or at least, as much as I can consciously separate them. Frankly, my reality has been much more adventurous and okay, darker, than any of my protagonists. Which leaves me with a weak character and story.
I’m just thinking out loud here–I’ve learned, I suppose, to write my thoughts out in a weblog though that isn’t perhaps wise. But this may tie in with my writerly/authorly situation, and the reason I try so hard to not put myself into a story is the very problem: I still feel I am the story, own it, am unwilling to give it away because I fear it is still me. If I can truly get over that concept, maybe it will enable me to feel free to draw from experience and still allow the experience to be one that belongs to the character, and of course, the reader.
I’m not sure I’m making any sense here, but another example of my thinking on this is that in reading some of the short blurbs by the authors included in some of the short story lit journals, I actually felt that they cheated if their story was based closely upon their background or events they experienced. It’s why I hate ceramics versus clay. But in writing, if the writer has had the experience and chooses to write about it, can present it and embellish or whatever and then–most importantly–let go of it as his or her own, it is not only well within their right, but smart because the feeling is there, the understanding of the moment and the story.
While I’m not a scarlet woman exactly, perhaps I should consider sharing with my characters a bit more of what I’ve learned personally. It will not change my past, nor will it change my future. It will only have the possibility of giving my characters some depth, something or someone to be challenged by and rise above. As have I.
If five customers come in on the same day, they will also come within the same half hour.
I cannot drive around to four towns, making nine stops, and be back home within forty-five minutes.
I am in fact seventeen people but have not as yet been formally introduced to all.
Each of those seventeen people is of a different mind and mood.
As the rooms are emptied of the clutter, and as the garden clutters up with growth to hide the brown dirt floor, I sense a calmer, satisfying substance flow within my veins, hear a murmur rather than a roar.
But still, somewhere deeply hidden, out of earshot of the mantra, something whispers dye your hair a floozy flaming red.
Maybe I just need to get away from the lit journals for a bit. Pulled out April Fool’s Day by Josip Novakovich, and I might take a stab at Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan. These in addition to 100 Jolts (some notes on this in a post soon) and Didascalicon, which demands much focus and quiet time.
Oh yes, and I want to throw Still Life back in and have some fun.
It used to be that I was inspired by good writing, and oddly enough by bad (jeezus, even I could write better than that!). But lately, between the ho-hum and the what the fu..? reactions I’m having to the majority of the short stories I have been reading lately–aside from the dear God, I may as well use the laptop for Freecell! reaction to the occasional phenomenally written or brilliantly conceived story, and the near impossibility of getting published by someone other than oneself, I’m kind of finding it impossible to write a single word in a creative narrative structure.
I don’t want to give up, but I seem to be letting the bonfire die to campsite ashes, and I can’t seem to kick myself into gathering more wood. It is depressing to think that one of the things I really want to do, according to market reports, is near impossible; and that even if I went the self-publishing route, right now I just don’t think I’m capable of writing a story anywhere good enough to be worth the paper and ink.
Plodding along though, because I’m obsessive. Or worse, stubborn and perhaps unwilling to face the realities of my capabilities. Maybe these traits alone will either see me to a goal, by study and learning and perseverance, or bring me up against the wall to force me to decision.
Though it seems as though it is happening very quickly, due perhaps to an overdose of short story reading, or maybe it has taken these five serious years of learning to write well, and maybe the lifetime behind it, but I feel myself getting sick and tired of it all.
I’m going to stop here and come back to this. For some reason it just seemed important to get that written down. I have just closed the book on another Glimmertrain issue, read some ongoing discussions on publishing and reading on various weblogs, and I’m growing weary of struggling. And that’s both in reading and in writing.
I need a few hours to think things through.
Where’s Harrogate when you need him?
Last night in pulling shut the large barn door to my shop, I noticed something black flicker down to the ground. A bat that probably was sleeping in the comforting dark behind the door that I woke up in daylight. I thought of mirrors, garlic, a crucifix, tieing up my hair, and Suttree’s Harrogate.
Very odd indeed, although the bat is common here and I have disturbed one once before within the folds of a patio umbrella. That was strange, to look up from beneath as I was cranking it open and see a silhouette against the sun. But what seems stranger to me now is that within a month I’d read of Harrogate’s great money-making plan to sell the bats for studies on rabies, and then a quite unplanned watching of Dracula one evening on tv. And closer now, within my touch a real one–for this morning he is still there, lying dead.
Or am I merely more aware?
How be the life without the care, no worry ever nor the joy? Smooth and straight the road, no signs nor lights and none are needed and the horizon clearly seen to break the time. The end of journey seen from the starting point, no maps to guide, no left turns–none–ah, but no rights.
You never know where you’ll find a bit of wisdom, although AARP Magazine should by it’s nature (at least as believed in some circles!) be a likely place. But this, in the Sept/Oct 2005 issue:
"The first half of life is essentially a mistake," says James Hollis. The genial, white-haired former literature professor makes this claim so calmly, so evenly, that it takes a minute to sink in that he has just taken the world as we know it and stood it on its ear."
In this article by Susan Roberts on Hollis, a Jungian analyst and author of Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up, Roberts clarifies:
"According to Hollis, we may believe choices made in our early years were made freely, but we were just learning to fit in, to find a place for ourselves in the world. (..) Often our true selves got lost in the process."
"At midlife, we face an important crossroads. We can continue along pathways established for us by others, or we can really grow up, break free of the past, and become true individuals."
Now obviously some of us are aware enough to have made the decisions according to our own needs, or have adjusted and been perfectly content; content enough to continue on the same road. But for others, things that are available today just weren’t options in our younger days, and we’re just fortunate enough to be able to take up on them just as the youngin’s do.
And I liked this info enough to check out Jung a bit deeper as well:
"Jung was chiefly interested in later life, a time he believed should be devoted to ‘individualism,’ or becoming the person one was meant to be.
"Jung used the sun’s daily journey across the sky as a metaphor for the human life. During the first part of the day, the sun climbs ever upward as the young person struggles to achieve a place in the world. At noon, corresponding roughly to age 40, the sun reaches the zenith. Now the sun’s direction changes. Instead of a limitless expanse of sky, the person at midlife perceives the horizon, the finite limit of his or her exisence. Whoever fails to adapt to this new direction, Jung wrote, ‘must pay with damage to his soul.’ "
I like that.
Cooling my heels, healing the sick parts of pc’s. Crawling around on the floor getting wrapped up in wires and blowing dust off as I entangle myself in the mess that is my mainstay of remaining in contact with the world of friends and literature and technology.
How very dependent I am on these things. I don’t know how, I am sure, to talk face to face anymore.
Very soon, very, very soon, I will be ready to make the transition.
Spent the morning pulling weeds and feeding flowers and vegetables. Though the garden is a time for clearing the mind of thoughts it sometimes clears the paths to see the way.
I pull out long blades of grass, the roots running out a foot or more tieing sentences together. Weeds like words not quite as meaningful as a tomato plant or tuber of a dahlia planted and tended with care. And yet despite the loving attention some pepper plants are not comfortable, not thriving in their selected spots and so I move them. They sit for days, run into weeks without a sign of growth. I fiddle with the soil around their feet, and during the night when I cannot even see them, they sprout and blossom.
Sometimes.
Maybe then I am not a gardener of words, as I would want to be. Maybe I need still to learn the soil and season.
Maybe.
Oh, I suppose I could figure it out, and I do love working with numbers, but I just don’t have the time to play with this though I am certainly intrigued…
In catching up with the four literary journals to which I subscribe, I have noticed that many of the authors included have quite a list of credits to their names, having been published in many of the other lit journals, or sometimes, by the same one. While I am sure that the answer lies in the cover letter being read first, and of course, often the author is of such high caliber that it shows in the writing regardless of the previous publishing credits, but it does boggle my mind that of the thousands of submissions that the lit journals claim to receive, what are the odds that an author will not only get published once, but, two, three, a half dozen or more times? Isn’t that sort of like lightening striking twice? I mean, often there are under ten stories in an issue, and some publish only two or three times a year. Boy, that’s luck, isn’t it? Or, you’d have to be really, really outstanding, I would think.
Hmmm.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology