WRITING: Character

Posted on February 23, 2005 by Susan

Excellent writers group meeting tonight, and I’ll post more on it tomorrow.  But one thing remains floating in my mind that I wanted to put down.

One of the workshopped pieces we felt needed a character buildup, fleshing out.  While I said at the time that we need to sympathize with the protagonist, the author rightly said that it is not a likeable character, and that’s exactly the reaction he wanted to him.

This is very true, of course.  It’s not sympathy or empathy we’re seeking from the reader for the character, it’s knowing him well enough to love or hate him.  Otherwise, we just really don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to him, or his story.

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EDUCATION: Campus Cool

Posted on February 23, 2005 by Susan

Okay, so it finally dawned on me that if I want to fit in, seem less old and nerdy, I have got to stop asking "Where’s your jacket?" when we’re outside on a smoking break.

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BLOGGING: Content

Posted on February 23, 2005 by Susan

Every now and then I think we need comeuppance.  To stop and look around at where we are and what we’re doing.  Although you’ve only missed some thoughts on writing, that’s very much what a good deal of Spinning is about.  And here, I can spout off my revelations and frustrations.  Because Spinning is a personal journal as well, authorly input is not a mortal sin–although a venial one (as clarified on J-Walk a few weeks ago). 

So I shall bore you here instead with all my learnings, leanings and the like. 

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WRITING: Direction

Posted on February 23, 2005 by Susan

Changing direction in many ways in writing lately.  Trying to grasp the heart of it, the part that makes you want to read on through the end.  Whatever web of words is spun, I need to find what draws the fly to land upon it, travel as far as he can before he’s stuck firmly in its slender threads, and overcome.

What does the spider have yet to teach me?

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REALITY: Quiet Time & Mini-Pizzas

Posted on February 22, 2005 by Susan

Got home a bit earlier from Western Civ tonight.  Despite the questions from the back of the room like, "So how did they (16th century & prior) know what an hour was?  Or when to go to bed?"

Honest to God.

Just about finished reading Voltaire’s "Candide".  Need to get into the heads of the time, but it’s practically timeless in its satire.  Although this is an English translation, so I’m sure the language is that much easier to follow in an updated form.  Good, good stuff.

Pizzas almost ready in the oven, out of English muffins and salsa (no sauce in the fridge) for a late snack.  Aside from dinner, all I ate today was chocolates and pretzel sticks.  And oh yes, a raspberry coffee that I desperately needed during class break.

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LITERATURE: Amazon Selects

Posted on February 22, 2005 by Susan

So now Amazon reaches into my mailbox, not content with my random visits.  But amidst the recommended dog and cat food (?) and plastic storage containers (okay, yes, that’s me) is this.  I want it.

And of course they have given me notice that Willie’s latest is out.  I already have all the songs compiled in this one, though.  But there seems to be a CD on the "folks who bought this also bought this…" that I may not have heard him sing yet.

Guess it’s time to start getting a shopping cart together.

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REALITY: A Year in Time

Posted on February 22, 2005 by Susan

I’m not exactly sure how it came about, for what I faced should have me in a different frame of mind.  Not melancholic, nor living for the day, but rather single-focused on a road ahead.

I’m not afraid, and yet I’m neither joyful.  But then again, I never was.  But racing for the pot of gold I ride the rainbow arc, live weeks in days in gathering all the colors into one.

Night and day aren’t marked by hours, and day is sometimes dark and nights are bright.  What topsy-turved my life around, what came and gripped my mind to wipe out fifty years of toil and treasures that mean everything, and nothing.

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WRITING: Gottado’s and Wannado’s

Posted on February 22, 2005 by Susan

Have been filling my days up with words, twisting them around in story, flat rolling them out in facts in essays, tossing them up and watching where they land.

Need to learn to budget my time, she said; a semi-annual traditional cry of forty years.  That which brings me pleasure brings me pain.  Delving deep into the time past to waste it, paste it into the present on a screen.  Flip it around some more with taste and memory.  Make it something that it maybe could have been.

This one I’ll share, an exercise that has been relegated to the corral of courses, that otherwise would have been directly given out to you.

Budget, yes.  Or drastic measures of a laptop locking device.

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REALITY: Singleminded Purpose

Posted on February 21, 2005 by Susan

Worse than that; blinders on.

To all that’s going on around me.  A free day today, no extra reading, no framing, no cleaning driveways from the snow, no class, no grumpy father-in-law for dinner, and yet there are several things I need catch up on, if I wanted to.

Or no, that’s not true completely and very honestly.  I want to rid myself of the stress of seeing things fall apart around me.  Or gather dust. 

But all I want to do is write.  I have tweaked and found a dozen better words since early dawn.   Circling round and slowing to a solid from a blur is an idea for yet another story.  I need write other things of course; e-mails, essays, presentations–but these aren’t really writing.

And all I want to do is write.

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EDUCATION: Acts of God

Posted on February 21, 2005 by Susan

No class tonight, because of snow.  I only have night courses this semester, and was happy that for once I didn’t need to worry about either driving in snow, or showing up with the campus closed.  Especially hairy last semester because of an 8:00 a.m. class, and the tendency of a community college to follow post office rules regarding "neither rain, nor sleet, nor dead of night, etc."

Needless to say, I was shocked to see the weather notice up by 6:10 a.m.  This would never have happened had I had early morning classes. 

What comes to mind, aside from the postponement till whenever of the workshopping planned in CW, is a trend I have noticed this semester that I haven’t really seen to this degree in four years of classes.  That is, the students seem to be pushing to get specifics on assignments to get work done early.  In both classes, they seem to be way ahead of the game on whatever writing needs to be done, and especially in Western Civ, have started badgering the professor for the take-home exam essays since the second class of the course.  Sort of a mad rush to get things done.  While I am suspect of the enthusiasm, it might be a phenomenon common to this semester’s possible ending in graduation.  Or, I wonder if they’re all heading somewhere for spring break and want the workload out of the way so they can take off worry-free.

Have to check into this.  Gotta get the bikini and beer ready, you know.

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REALITY: Song

Posted on February 20, 2005 by Susan

Melissa Etheridge singing the great Janis Joplin’s "Another Little Piece of My Heart" on an awards show clip on Dateline tonight.  Etheridge is bald, effects of chemotherapy.  She discusses all of it, her arm around her wife in their living room.  She is glowing, now cancer-free, a survivor.

Man, that’s when I’m glad I have a laptop and a tv.

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REALITY: Spring Sign

Posted on February 20, 2005 by Susan

Four times the first robin of spring today, there, at the end of my husband’s index finger.  I follow his pointing there, there, there and there–no, it’s not the same one, see!

Well, neato.  I see the spring trends are still orange and grey.  I hope they brought mittens with them as well.

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WRITING: Wondering

Posted on February 20, 2005 by Susan

Rough night last night.  Fell asleep on the couch and woke up around two a.m. I think.  Did a bit of computerizing, then went to bed.  But I couldn’t fall asleep. 

After writing so much these past few week, I came to feel like a sinner.  As if I were abusing the weight and purpose of language in diatribe and half-baked ideas.  Flaunting words like feathery fans without substance, unaware or unwilling to seek their real value and import.

I, who will not put so much as my name in a book to deface it, will write copious notes rather than highlight a text, toss words like confetti into the air, and they take flight or land in the dirt.

Unresolved, fretful, I fell into sleep, and woke up still somber this morning.

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EDGAR AND I: Influence

Posted on February 19, 2005 by Susan

As a writer, I am a blotter.  In reading I absorb the ink out of the words, suck it in, place it aside and it marks my own clean sheets of paper.

If I read contemporary literature, I come closer to the edge.  If I read Munro, I am matter of fact yet deep into character.  I do not dare read Edgar again; I still have  "baroque" accent that has held me for forty years.

I don’t know what my style, my voice is.  I think maybe that I have none at all.  Or the noise of a crowd.  Or who happens to be onstage at the mic. 

As a writer, I am merely a blotter.

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REALITY: Sunny Cold

Posted on February 19, 2005 by Susan

Winter is back.  I open the shop, turn on the heat and lights, take a sip from yesterday’s coffee cup.  And almost break my teeth. 

Just a thin sip unfrozen at the top of a half-full mug fooled me, then slid down to crash into my lips as I hoisted it high.  The teaser of warm days this past week is something I should be used to by now.  But we lie to ourselves, forget seasons soon as they pass, relearn them as if they are our very first experience with February. 

Or maybe I’m just too focused lately on writing and reading and all that good stuff.  Or, maybe just thick-headed and dopey.

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