Relax with a glass of wine. A good day. Off and running on a story I began months ago, but ran aground and put it away. Wrote some 700 words, then accidentally, stupidly, deleted them before I'd saved the file. Quite upset and angry at myself for a time, but sat down and easily recreated what I'd done in no longer than the time it took to type the words... and I type 90 to 100 words a minute when I'm relaxed and in the groove. . Then wrote another 300 words on my novel... which I'm more and more inclined to call Found Things.
I'm especially pleased with the story. I know precisely where it went wrong, and this by discovering how to make it right.
I call it Freedom Arms. Everything takes place in an enormous complex of apartments and condominiums. That's the world of the story. No reference to anything outside. There are strange rumors of dissidents, tenants in revolt, of secret cafés in sub-sub level basements. Tales of violence in distant wings. People disappear without trace. I started to write this in the usual "realist" mode, world-building. Background. History. How did this state of affairs come about.
Awful. Bad on so many levels. If nothing else, I would have to anchor it in time: past, future... absolutely Wrong. I almost tore it up and threw it away.
I took it out on Saturday and began to rewrite from the beginning. It's first person. Why would the narrator have any need to "explain" the obvious? We seldom give thought to those things that make up our world. Let it all be... at best... suggested. Mostly, just left in the dark.
It made me think of how science fiction and fantasy have this in common, this world-building. Historical fiction, too. The more "historically accurate" the fiction, the more it is really in the same class as science fiction and fantasy. I don't hold this against those forms, but it is absolutely not what I want to do.
And if we don't, for the most part, see our world... but merely live within it, a clearly defined fictive world will be nothing like any world that anyone has ever lived in... other than through fiction. Propaganda. Historical narrative.
Here is the way out--or a way out--of what I've been trying to get away from in my short fiction. Here is one part of the convention I can choose to dispense with. Interesting, in dispensing with "world building, I find that I've cut myself loose from stylistic conventions used in earlier stories. Description-- takes on an entirely different function. All that stage-setting, the attention to little set pieces...the melody announced by the violins taken up by the flutes, raised to a pitch by the horns, turned elegiac by the oboes. Instead, an acapella solo, a voice singing to itself. Singing to itself to be overheard. But with a rather poor sense of pitch. Going regularly off-key.
The great advantage, the source of my excitement--is that it keeps me in the dark. I can't see more than a few words ahead of me. The pleasure of discovery.... recovered.
Found things.
Not me.
More than me.
... and maybe... this, of course, remains to be seen... or rather, found, found out, by others...
not mine
Sounds like you just found your imagination.
ReplyDeleteThe "imagination"... whatever that is, is not something, the finding of which, is a claim to a thing one can possess.
ReplyDeleteOne finds and loses and finds again... and what one found before will not do for a second application... though many have found a load so laden with gold that they've spent a lifetime pounding it into leafs each one thinner than the last...
Why so emphatic a denial here? I meant to just say it appears you plugged into a train of images that were happening unattached, as if automatically, in the dark.
ReplyDeleteDid I sound emphatic? I suppose, all that repetition could be read as "emphatic."
ReplyDeleteDoes it make more sense to say that, what I think I found was a disposable something that (I hope) I can work into this interminable project. Maybe it was my imagination that did the finding?
You see, I have this problem with words... I mean, outside of fiction and poetry. (In fiction and poetry, I have even more problems with words but not of the same kind). It comes of having read too much philosophy in my youth. There's this awful temptation to exactitude, but have lack discipline or patience (thank Fred) to follow through. So I start off with a correction ("Imagination, whatever that is... ")... sure to make things worse in trying to make the better.
Let this comment stand as a cautionary example.
I can't help myself... it wasn't a string of images, it was releasing myself from the need to do something else--making images to represent a "world." That "world building" thing.
Maybe, giving up the need to be coherent. I seem to be getting closer, no? To incoherence, I mean.
Did I sound emphatic? I suppose, all that repetition must come across as "emphatic."
ReplyDeleteDoes it make more sense to say that, what I think I found was a disposable something that (I hope) I can work into this interminable project. This endless "novel."
Maybe it was my imagination that did the finding? The finder, not the found?
You see, I have this problem with words... I mean, outside of fiction and poetry. (In fiction and poetry, I have even more problems with words but not of the same kind). It comes of having read too much philosophy in my youth. There's this awful temptation to exactitude, but I lack either the discipline or patience (thank Fred) to follow through. So I start off with a correction ("Imagination, whatever that is... ")... which is sure to make things worse in trying to make them better.
Let this comment stand as a cautionary example.
I can't help myself... it wasn't a string of images, it was releasing myself from the need produce images.. images to represent a "world." That "world building" thing. Giving up, maybe, the need to be coherent? I seem to be getting closer to that, no? To incoherence, I mean?
My Schyllis and Chyberdis. I vant to be rational. I vant to be understood, but I also vant to be alone.
In my own head, my own world. My world, not yours.
Like being half cat, half dog.
I have a post-it stuck on the bottom of the LCD screen.
ReplyDelete"All messages and comments composed after the 2nd glass of wine, MUST be saved as drafts to be reconsidered by morning light."
You see, I am quite capable of wisdom.
Living up to it something else again.