Carpe Diem

My fondest memory of my Junior year of High School was watching The Dead Poets Society.  I was enthralled by the characters' love for literature, and I found myself in a similar situation, although I was alone in that aspect.  But the most recognizable line from that film is simply: Carpe Diem.  Seize the day.

I find it interesting that someone who presumably loves writing as much as I do identified instead with a relatively passive phrase.  Bernard Cooper's short essay, "Que Sera Sera," attempts to take an objective view on the aspect of waiting for something.  He uses Cinderella and Rip Van Winkle as several examples from literature, but there is no argument presented.  He simply poses a dilemma, which causes the reader to wonder which is more important.  Do we wait, or do we live in the now?

Interestingly enough, we aren't actually given an answer.  Cooper doesn't even try to convince us one way or another.  It's as if he attempted to remove all bias completely, leaving little else in the short essay.  I would argue that the greatest works of literature are essentially arguments.  We can look toward Tolkien's famous trilogy, Sauron is evil because...  The small will become great...  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.   When we compare that to this, we end up wanting.  We don't find ourselves having a fulfilled answer by the end of the writing.  Perhaps that was Cooper's point, although in a more traditional essay, if one is going to ask a question, one should supply an answer.

I Name Thee...

Names have significance.  Names define things.  Long ago ships would be given names, giving them character.  The same with swords.

Why are we obsessed with names?

I don't have the answer for that.  Truthfully, I would very much love to investigate that question, but I don't have the motivation or the time.

Not so long ago, I researched my own name, and I found that it fit me perfectly.  Why does this happen?  Do we grow into them, or do they grow into us?

Again, I don't have an answer.  I don't think Bernard Cooper does either, given that his essay, By Any Other Name, didn't end up going anywhere other than the surface fascination of names.  It was a wonderful piece of work, like the kind I would actually enjoy reading off of my Facebook homepage.  It was thoughtful, but it only seemed to be a lot of thinking and one or two memories to springboard the brain.

To be perfectly honest, I have little to no experience with creative non-fiction.  There was one memoir a while back...  So I will comment only on the focus.  The focus of these creative "essays" seems to be purely thought, speculation, and reflection, whereas poetry was emotion, and stories were development.

Putting it short, it's a essentially a Facebook rant, albeit an intelligent one.

Self-Help For Writers

I suppose my biggest disappointment in the entirety of the Goldberg packet is the fact that there are so many opportunities to explore about the aspect of writing in large groups that we never did.  I would enjoy, especially, "Writing Marathons" as Goldberg describes them.  Writing and then sharing sounds like something that would be fascinating for me.  We learn by hearing ourselves, hearing others, and talking about it.

Improvement by practice is, from personal experience, the best way to attain better skills as a writer.  Reading self-help confidence-boosting blurbs comes out to about the bottom of the list.  Sorry Goldberg, but I don't need to "claim my writing."  I get it; it's mine: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  The "everybody is a winner" speech doesn't really strike me as helpful.  I can write shitty; I realize that.  But that's where getting constructive criticism comes in.  With educated help, shit can be turned into gold.

And that is exactly what I want.  I don't need a confidence booster.  Artists typically have absolute and utter disdain for their work, and that's even after they're professional.  It's normal.  I shouldn't have to feign advice to prevent self-hatred.  Okay, so you don't like your stuff.  Get over it.  Somebody will love it, seriously.  But me?  I want to get better.  Improving my writing is my top priority.

Time Flies. People Fall.

Finality.  Such a fearsome word.  The end is the only certainty; this too shall pass.  Us.  Life.  We dream up various caricatures of death or the avoiding of it.  Be it the lumbering undead or immortal beings, death is an obsession, an addiction, and we're afraid of it.

Take all that you are, everything that mattered to you, and everything that forged your personal character.  Take it away.  We're afraid death will remove us from memory, from existence.  Will people remember us when we're gone?

The metaphor of this entirety of our cultures obsession with death is no better exemplified by "The Falling Girl" by Dino Buzzati.  Marta, at nineteen years of age, leaps off the edge of a skyscraper.  On the way down, time seems to slow.  People ask her where she's going, why she's headed to her destination.  As she progresses further down, she begins to notice others falling with her, as well as her finding of her own insecurity; she compared herself to the others.  Near the end, she becomes aware of her age, which progressed with the drop in altitude.  Before she even hits the ground, she becomes nothing more than dust.

Buzzati miraculously juxtaposes the thought of suicide and living one's life.  People always restless, moving, and trying to make it somewhere have already killed who they are.  They just haven't hit the ground yet.  Marta always said she was going somewhere, and was hopeful about it, and she looked back during her fall to see the skyscraper, which was once beautiful, sweet.  It became sinister and cold as it stared back.  "You could have done differently," it may as well have whispered back at her.  During the descent, Marta became increasingly unsatisfied with herself.  Regretful is a choice word.

Does leaving a legacy behind truly matter?  What is the point of being alive if living is a secondary goal?  I would argue that Buzzati is trying to tell us this very thing.  Falling is irreversible once we jump.  Why take the plunge before we're ready?

Exposition... Exposition Everywhere...

Could somebody please explain to me how exactly I could purchase a series of short stories and wind up reading a series of lectures?  I expected something... well... something from "Juice," maybe even something good, and now I'm thoroughly convinced that there is a new hallucinatory drug on the streets referred to as "juice."

I started reading with a hopeful heart.  On my break from work, I spent my half hour waiting in line for food and then sitting in front of the small pages with a burger in my hands.  The words droned on and on like an endless, animalistic bleat.  Goats could have been significantly more entertaining, even if they managed to piss on my work uniform (seriously, they "go" everywhere).  After a while, I wondered why exactly I'm supposed to care about this main character who is alone and constantly touching herself.

"Translation" was like a nightmarish version of Cast Away, but without any sympathy or sense.  What happened?  When is this?  Why does this matter?  I received no answers, leaving me with a bitter taste in my mouth after reading.  Gladman has a very sophisticated voice that did not in any way match the mood of the story.  It is great for writing essays, not stories.  Given that it is written in present tense, we should be getting fresh, off the cuff thoughts and phrases.  We should be placed right into the action, experiencing the narrator's emotions, wants, hopes, and fears.  What I got was exposition, exposition, exposition.

"My new home is right outside the shelter.  Of course I would want to go there and hang out with the things that root my people.  The hope being that upon their return I will have missed them less."

See, now I recall something heavily being stressed last class period.  DETAIL.  I remember us talking about describing something without actually saying it.  I remember applying that to my own writing.  Why on earth are we reading something that doesn't follow the class focus?  Unless this is an example of what NOT to do, I'm at a loss.

Here is how I would have written those three sentences above:

"Bits and bobbles of years past litter the mouth of the cave.  Their colors faded hues of blues, pinks, and gray, purposes meaningless and lost to me.  My hands chafe on the rough wooden surface of the makeshift planks that I pile nearby, turning the my light palms to a deep sunset red.  A throbbing sensation begins to set in, but I grit my teeth and strain to build my shelter.  Home.  Is it really home?  So close to what they were, what my village was, I can but turn to see the memories of a long forgotten past sitting there in the darkness of the cave.  The Past Shelter.  As I sit down in my newly assembled shack, I can't help but notice how empty it is.  Where are they?  Where?"

But instead, Gladman only tells us where things are and what the protagonist is thinking on in a tone that does not fit the setting.  If you were alone forever, would you stay so level-headed?  It fascinates me how Gladman is able to say absolutely nothing with so many words.  We receive absolutely no emotion in the entire piece, and we can't even get a clear image of what is going on.  What the actual hell is happening?  I don't know, and, after reading, I don't care.

And that is one of the biggest problems in the history of writing.  People love to hear about people they love to hear about.  When I don't know some random character in some random situation that only talks about what is going on (unclearly, I might add), the only thing that crosses my mind that resembles concern is the question: "I spent money on THIS?"  Renee Gladman obviously never heard the phrase, "Show, don't tell."  As a published author, she has no excuse... although I may just be living in a fantasy world; they seem to let anybody become published these days.

Perspectives and Post Cards

They say a picture's worth a thousand words.  I was given three, and I made a short story within... what?  A half hour?  Obviously, it didn't reach the supposed word cap.  Not even close.  That's why they're short stories.

This week's class (the only one, praise be) was staring at three post cards and describing them.  Then, after we described them, we were supposed to include each image in a short story.  I described one post card, saying that, "Had I known about what the assignment was before I picked the card, I would have avoided this one like the plague."  I must admit that the descriptions beforehand felt very dry at first.  The question as to what exactly the point was eluded me until I started to actually write the story.

But that was quite a way away yet, I was sitting with contempt brewing in my veins until I was tasked to connect the cards... somehow.  How on earth was I supposed to connect a weird painting, a nearly frozen pond, and a picture of the Mackinac Bridge?  Well, I found a way.

I spring-boarded off the fact that one post card looked like it was a painting.  I first imagined-up an art gallery.  Given my pointedly dark taste for stories, I added a little dust to it.  Now there was a story behind the painting.  Why was it dusty?  Why didn't people view it?

As a sort of parallel to the unwanted picture, I added a character who equally didn't belong.  The narrator has a very strong and analytical personality.  He swears occasionally, yes, but I've heard it said that real people don't censor themselves, and he does it only in his mind.  He was, I pictured, wearing a brown and slightly ragged suit, in stark comparison to the black and white expensive outfits surrounding him.  We understood that he was different at that point, and then he needed a reason for being somewhere he didn't belong.

The answer: the painting.  It seemed natural to connect the two, especially since they complement each other so well.  So I set to work with the oldest motivation for a man being in a place where he didn't belong.  Women.  Or, in this case, a woman.

After I get the general idea down, I just sort of charge into the work.  I don't draw out an outline, not for a short story, because I start to lose my "writing mood" that I got myself into.  The freshness wears away, and it becomes stale.  Short stories have so little time to be engaging.  They need to say something, even if the characters themselves don't actually change themselves.

Try it out for yourself, if you like.  Let go.  Figure out which cardinal direction you're going in, like North, and just go.  Maybe you'll hit a river that takes you a little to the East, and you might have to backtrack down South until you can get around something.  That's okay, but you learn the terrain as you go.  There's always time for revision later, especially now that the 2012 panic is over and you don't have to worry about the "end of the world..." until the next one rolls around.

And if that doesn't work out for you, I apologize.  No refunds.  Buyer beware.  What works for me won't work for everyone, and I know already that it doesn't.  Writing is something, I believe, that sits very close to the soul.  It'll be different for everyone.  I encourage you to try.

Fragmented Mentality

I am crazy.

My first realization of this was when I wrote a short story titled, "The Broken Window."  As I recorded what happened to the protagonist, whose mental state is called to question, I discovered he had a profound effect on me.  The terrible things that happened to him distressed me quite a bit, but the insanity came from more than just sympathizing for him.

He started to talk to me.  It wasn't a communication of words, per se, nor was it a Fight Club-esque hallucination.  As his own personality developed from the first few parts of the story, I felt as though his intersected with my own in some places.  In the middle of writing it, I remember freaking out because I reacted to something in school in the way that he would have, rather than myself.

Needless to say, I was glad once I finally forced him into the paper, out of my head.

But this entire episode revisited my memory because of the packet we read, by Lamott.  "Polaroids" talked about how characters come to life.  They begin as blank ideas before turning into full fledged persons.  They start wanting things on their own, doing things independently, and even rebelling.  They become real, not just to the writer, but in actuality.

Now I know what you're thinking.  "This kid's freakin' nuts!"  And, I would wholeheartedly agree.  Maybe you have to be crazy to be a writer; I don't know.  What I do know is this: stories come to life.  Maybe it can be explained away using the firing of certain neurons, but whatever causes this change doesn't matter.  I'm stuck with it and so are my fellow writers.