it occurs to me

that i done a boneheaded thing. i posted a lovely blog entry in a blog i never use. i designed it in 2008, and never posted once. until earlier this month. kooky. i must've eaten too many french fries that day, buzzed on peanut oil or something. so i'm double-posting because this blog i linked to deserves more than what i gave. cripes.

A quote from Kafka. (via Moral Ambiguity)
June 4, 2010 by lauriemariepea

Miss Moral Ambiguity never fails to tweak me in the chestular region–sometimes she touches the heart, others she thumps me in the solar plexis. can never predict. But she writes true and strong and chock full of personality and brains. I love this girl’s blog.


25th February 1912, "Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment." Kafka. Yesterday, as I was out and about in Liverpool, I found myself in News From Nowhere again, flicking through the second-hand books. And what did I find? 'The Writer's Workbook, 2nd Edition', written largely in part by Edmund Cusick, the Head of the Imaginative Writing Departm

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via Moral Ambiguity

visit this blog at www.moralambiguity.wordpress.com

back in the saddle again

i've been trying to make headway with any of the three novels, stumped for a clear path forward and not trusting my own judgment with developing plot on that scale. in an effort to coerce myself to keep to it, i've not let myself work on anything else, including the flash fiction i enjoy so much--so i haven't really written much of anything since about, oh, february. color me stoppered up.

this weekend, a good writer friend challenged me to write something--anything--about 1500 words long, and to do it by tuesday. i decided that working on something--anything--was better than nothing at all, and finished a new first draft about an hour ago.

i love having written something! anything! the writing of it was stimulating, satisfying, FUN, and the finishing of it gave me a giddy head for a solid 15 minutes. yes, writing is my drug, apparently. i don't know if it's fabulous, or drivel, but at this point i'm okay with either. at least i can still do it. something. anything writing.

here's a wee excerpt:

The breeze moved the thick grass to trembling, ghostly fingers of the long and newly dead plucking at the blades planted above them. The sun paused before setting, and the air hung gray-blue over the graveyard. Tam swept away the tears caught in her lashes, her knuckles rough. The scars sat on her skin like flat, pink toads.

keep in mind, it's a first draft. the extra-interesting aspect for me is that i ended up writing straight dramatic fiction, no monsters. it's still pretty dark, but well, that's just who i am.

O, the yearning.

i've been reading "from where you dream" (http://www.robertolenbutler.com/writings/non-fiction/from-where-you-dream/)
by robert olen butler--a dude i admire and respect, and kinda wish i could stand next to sometimes in case that mojo rubs off on people in the vicinity. it's a book about the process of writing fiction, and while i've read several of these books and parts of several more, what's different about this one so far is the approach. most of these writing instruction manuals work from the outside in. butler's book works from the inside out.

he talks about how to access the creative zone, that untamed nether region of unreason somewhere between dreaming and not, and how to get there on a regular basis and channel that frame of mind into the writing. it's exciting and relatable stuff.

of the three sections in the book (lectures, workshop, analysis) i'm still working on the first, so i'll let you know if he gets weird later on. his third lecture is on the subject of yearning, from the character's perspective. we're all familiar with the question we ask while building our characters: what does this character want? yearning is about that, but even more it's about the intensity of that wanting. butler links the idea also to that of epiphany, or "shining forth."

from p. 40: "James Joyce appropriated from the Catholic church the term epiphany. An epiphany literally means 'a shining forth.' He brought that concept to bear on the moment in a work of art when something shines forth in its essence. That, he said, is the epiphany in a story or novel."

the idea sounds kind of vague in this tiny excerpt, but he goes on to clarify so the reader's heart is all atwitter. i won't quote more of his book here, but i'll hint at one of the reasons i like him so much: he acknowledges that genre writers never forget about the importance of yearning in their characters, while the literary writer's most common mistake is doing just that. they leave out the intensity in their exploration of the human condition--that's why so many people read genre, and why literature gathers dust on the shelf.

people want to feel like the world's at stake in their stories; too often, in literature the only risk involved is whether the main character finds happiness. or matching socks. either way, the reader needs more than that.

i want to find (and write) more stories that combine aspects of both: exciting plot and depth of character. why is it so hard to excel at one and not the other? they can't be mutually exclusive, can they?