Soft, Mushy Shit
August 11, 2005
The writing course is not going the way I expected. The book I’m reading keeps asking me to dig deep within my unconscious, to find the forgotten fossils of my childhood, and from there to extract my stories. But I don’t want to relive my childhood traumas and all that bullshit. Writing fiction isn’t supposed to be a form of therapy — we have blogs for that.
For me, fiction (unlike blogs) has always been something external and hard, something you can hold in your hands like a thin sheet of metal and hammer into being. Fiction was never supposed to be this introspection, this mushy, internal thing. I want something outside myself, greater than myself.
But the book keeps pushing, keeps demanding painful intimacy:
“Tell me about the most frightening person in your childhood,” it says.
“Oh, leave me alone.”
“No really, tell me.”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Was it a clown? Was it your friend’s older brother? Was it that uncle you never got along with?”
“It was probably my mother. I used to cry and cry whenever I was around her.”
“That’s pretty fucked up.”
“I know. Let’s not go there.”
Posted by Tudor at 11:56 PM in Writing & the Media | TrackBackBrickmonkey in the Middle: THE BOOK.
Posted by: Trevor on August 12, 2005 at 08:09 AMIt IS a fiction class. Don’t be honest - make up something to answer the questions :)
There’s a school of writing that says you can only write what you know. Ducky, but when I took a creative writing class in uni, I was accused of writing about stuff that I knew nothing of (funny, since what I’d written about had only happened the night before) or, that I hadn’t followed through enough with the possible metaphor for life in a story in which a bird crashed into a big window in front of the protagonist. I felt like saying, “you know, there IS no metaphor. The f’-ing bird flew away and unless you want me to compare the bird crashing to the F I’m destined to get in this class, I suggest you drop this whole ‘larger metaphor’ bs”
Posted by: Opal on August 12, 2005 at 08:26 AMyou can never write total fiction — you’re always in there somewhere — but it’s a mite silly for a distance ed course textbook to suggest how to do inner examination in order to write better
Posted by: karen on August 12, 2005 at 10:26 AMJust drop this class and take your ideas and fiction to Dr. J. Or Jeff. Either of them are better than some book.
Posted by: David Alexander on August 12, 2005 at 02:00 PMWell, I guess what they want you to turn out is Capital L ‘Literature’… which is angsty, has bad grammar, and absolutely NO PLOT whatsoever. And quite frankly, they don’t deserve to know that much about you, especially if you don’t feel like sharing! I mean, who do they think they are to even ask? Screw em. Make something up. Or write about someone else you know(:
Posted by: spindriftdancer on August 12, 2005 at 02:06 PMI would love to take Dr. J’s class, Dave, but I want to graduate in October. So dropping the class isn’t much of an option.
And Opal, I’m weary of people who demand meaning and larger metaphors. Often there are none — birds just fly away, people just live their lives.
I’m quite enjoying the course, by the way. I just find the approach a bit odd, a bit too goddamn personal. I want to write about other people!
Posted by: Tudor on August 12, 2005 at 10:05 PMThis is what I would do if I had the money:
http://www.setonhill.edu/academics/wpf_homepage.cfm?ACID=102