A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Four-Hundred-And-Fifty-Two

Things in the story I am writing have taken a bit of a turn tonight.  I was not certain where it would go, exactly, and it has developed in a way that is a bit unexpected, but I am enjoying the shift.  It was already an odd story, and now it is getting to a place of real weirdness, I think.  I don't know if it is anything that anyone else would want to read, to be honest.  I am writing it and just keeping going because that is the task.  If I start worrying about the rest of it, about what is good or bad and whether it is working right now, I think it would overwhelm me in a certain way and I wouldn't have the ability to keep going.  It may just be that I need to get to the end and I will realize what I have been doing all along, or it may be junk and I won't ever want to look at it again, but most likely it will be somewhere in the middle and I will need to go back and work on it to make everything fit together.  At the moment, I am just allowing myself the freedom that I need to get the story on the page in the first place, and I have to realize that a big part of that, at least in writing fiction, is just letting myself go with no concern for what comes of it at first.  I think I had a similar need when I was first getting myself to the place where I was writing poetry regularly, so it may be that this is just a part of what I need to do to get myself to that point in relationship to fiction as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is this whole blog thing for anyway?

I am starting this because I said I would.  My friend Tim persuaded me, and that was probably a far more difficult and complicated maneuver on his part, that I should start this blog, and I made a commitment that I would, so here I am.  Which gives a reason for why this blog exists, but not really much of a purpose for that to lend meaning to that existence, which makes it like a lot of us, I suppose.  Of course, there are two purposes to this exercise, though there might only be one at a time, as they are largely about perspective, I think.  For instance, right now, a large part of the purpose, for me, is to have the commitment of adding to this blog consistently, as a matter of building the habit of working more steadily.  I have built that habit before, but it has always been intermittent, largely driven by situational demands.  In college, many years ago, I wrote daily, because I had an audience and because I was in classes that I felt committed to wr...
Read more

VanderMeer's Wonderbook, Chapter Four: Narrative Design (Continued)

Plot is often seen within certain fairly standard structures.  The Freytag pyramid, mentioned yesterday, like the three act structure, and many other standard plot diagrams, builds tension towards the climax, then resolves that tension as the story ends.  Vandermeer shows this through a series of diagrams, and then follows with some additional plot diagrams that provide further options.  The first of these comes from a film school illustration, and consists of a series of overlapping circles.  The progress of the story is similar to that in the traditional plot diagrams, but the focus is upon the way that the circles overlap, a symbol of the transitions that move the story from one phase to the next.  The diagram implies that at each step, the new elements begin to mingle with the old, washing them out, before the next phase begins introducing the elements necessary for that transition. After this we get a diagram describing the picaresque novel, a story whe...
Read more

Poem: It Was A Promise

It Was A Promise I did not say it without meaning it, all the way and without needing more or something else to be given, though it is  not without danger to trust and hope. You can choose and I  will feel whatever comes of your response.
Read more