A Writer's Notebook, Day Six-Hundred-And-Seventy-Eight

I am finding the story I am writing a bit more difficult at the moment, but I know that working on it each day, I will get there.  I have a sense of it, but am not certain yet of how it will turn out,  At the moment, it actually does feel more of a traditional adventure narrative, in many ways, but I think their is more going on within it that I have yet to discover.  I have, again, found those moments when I was aware of that I wrote something on the spur of the moment which implied other ideas I had not considered in my awareness, but which made perfect sense, even bridging gaps between ideas I had been struggling to comprehend.  I tend to trust that sort of occurrence as evidence that I am moving in the right direction with the story, so even if I am uncertain about the larger picture, I trust the process.  If I think about it, the previous story was also a bit unclear to me for a while, as I wrote.  The big difference is that this new story is more plot driven and their are certain details that I am yet to sort out for myself.

In terms of my poetry, I feel quite good about the work I am doing.  I have a wide variety of poems at the moment, a result of writing so much, and I think I am coming to a place where I feel a real freedom in writing my poetry.  I recognize that it is not always important for me to understand and impose an idea of what a poem is doing or meaning.  I don't hesitate to let myself go further than I might have considered in the past, in many different ways.  One of the most obvious is just continuing to write, and I can think of at least one poem today where I reached a place that I might have ended the poem, but I just decided to continue and I think what resulted created a further layer to change the meaning of much that was before.  I also think I am more willing to go farther in terms of indulging particular ideas, and in terms of my willingness to just allow a poem to turn as crazy as it wishes.  I might be writing a poem about a simple scene of a couple at dinner in their living room, and I may be quite a ways in, and suddenly a penguin comes into the poem.  It may be that the penguin is only a metaphor, or it might be a metaphor and then turn real, or it may just be that a penguin waddles into the room.  Do the people respond in any way, or is just a normal thing to them?  I think my work is getting stronger because I recognize that I don't always know or need to know the reasoning for some of this.  I mean, it is clear, as a reader, that a great deal of meaning in the work I encounter comes from me and my experience of the world, so why should I, as a writer, not be writing with the awareness that I do not have a monopoly on the meaning in my work, at least to some extent?

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