This has little to do with anything, but I just relistened to The Microphones' incredible The Glow, Pt. 2 on headphones, and GOD DAMN is that a glorious experience. There are albums that should be played loud on speakers, albums that should be played on headphones, and then there's albums like this, which take on a beautiful pulsing life unfamiliar and exhilarating even after dozens of listens that only reveals itself on a pair of good-ass headphones. Phil Elverum certainly knows how to manipulate sounds, let me tell you.
Man, it's shit like this, this short-ass stuff that gives me that nagging feeling that I need to get a twitter. It's horrible. All the stuff I read about how to succeed as a writer has nothing to do with how to write better, or improve my work ethic or revision strategies, or craft more interesting plots, or shit like that. It's all about BUILDING YR PLATFORM--how often do you tweet? What kind of tweets, man? Do your tweets entice reader interest? But for the love of God, don't try to hard and do one of those "lure" tweets where you're intentionally vague so someone will ask you to elaborate. God damn, man, don't you let a single fucking day go by without a tweet for it is upon that day THAT YOU WILL BECOME NOTHING
Seriously, I don't want to have to tweet. I really don't. Please stop telling me I need to tweet, world, I really don't want to have to deal with that.
WHAT THE HELL THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT THE MICROPHONES
It's this stuff that makes me love and hate writing
Although I suppose you can't really love something unless you hate it too
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
A call for a new genre
So recently I posted on facebook a thought I was regularly having while agonizing over a piece of writing, namely, "fiction writing would be so much easier if it weren't for all these damn plots."
What feedback this received was mostly in the vein of "LOL there's no original plots" and "LOL there's only like 11 stories in the world!" While it is somewhat true that most plots have a similar structure (Man vs. Man, Man vs. Himself, Man vs. Nature, etc), those comments are reductive and insulting. Writers don't have trouble with plots because they're too dim to realize what the components of plot are. I wasn't running into issues because I didn't know what the plot was going to be--I was having issues because I didn't want the plot to need to be so heavily emphasized.
What I most like about writing, and what I'm most good at, if you'll pardon some shameless self-congratulation, is creating and maintaining a voice. This is why I almost always write in first-person. What's the point of coming up with an interesting character if you don't even know what they're thinking? And how much easier is it to characterize when you don't have to rely only on the character's words and actions but also on the way they choose to narrate?
My problem is that when my characters are talking, my writing is good (yeah, yeah, I'm supposed to be humble and all, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it. I am good at it). People like it, it's unique and clever (but not too clever). But when I actually have to move past the voice and have the voice actually engage in real-time with the plot, the quality dips. The voice lessens and I struggle to find ways to portray the on-page action with as much vitality as the less plot-based segments. I find the character and his mind much more interesting than little scenes he has to play in. It is much easier for me to effectively have characters commenting on the plot than to have them engaging in it. Why does stuff need to be happening for a piece of writing to be interesting? There can be conflict in a character's mind without him needing to go around doing things.
But this is not a good thing for fiction writing. There needs to be a plot. Something has to happen. Otherwise the story is unfocused. There's no arc. You're telling and not showing. I can see where these criticisms come from, but I don't think I'm "telling, not showing," I'm showing who the narrator is via what he tells the audience. What he's telling is unimportant. What the telling shows about him is what interests me as a writer and as a reader. So what I find myself being drawn to is fake non-fiction. That is to say, writing that reads as true, without the conventions of fiction and its need for action, but is from the point of view of a distinctly fictional character. This is easy to do comedically, but how can it be done seriously? And who would read it? Who would publish it?
Someone told me a story of mine was too much inside the narrator's head, shortly before they told me how they enjoyed the narrative voice. It's possible they were just being nice and they thought it sucked, but if both of these statements are true, I'm baffled. Of course it takes place inside his head--his head is by far the most interesting thing going on in the story. But if a story moves even further in that direction, leaves plot behind almost completely, is it even a story anymore? Is it fake non-fiction? Is it something else entirely? Who knows such things.
Of course this may just be a beginning writer struggling with taking a modicum of talent and focusing it into something of worth, and whining about the pointlessness of the parts he can't pull off right away. I'm fully prepared for that to be the case. This is basically like a diary entry--it's just I'm more comfortable typing than writing longhand.
What feedback this received was mostly in the vein of "LOL there's no original plots" and "LOL there's only like 11 stories in the world!" While it is somewhat true that most plots have a similar structure (Man vs. Man, Man vs. Himself, Man vs. Nature, etc), those comments are reductive and insulting. Writers don't have trouble with plots because they're too dim to realize what the components of plot are. I wasn't running into issues because I didn't know what the plot was going to be--I was having issues because I didn't want the plot to need to be so heavily emphasized.
What I most like about writing, and what I'm most good at, if you'll pardon some shameless self-congratulation, is creating and maintaining a voice. This is why I almost always write in first-person. What's the point of coming up with an interesting character if you don't even know what they're thinking? And how much easier is it to characterize when you don't have to rely only on the character's words and actions but also on the way they choose to narrate?
My problem is that when my characters are talking, my writing is good (yeah, yeah, I'm supposed to be humble and all, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it. I am good at it). People like it, it's unique and clever (but not too clever). But when I actually have to move past the voice and have the voice actually engage in real-time with the plot, the quality dips. The voice lessens and I struggle to find ways to portray the on-page action with as much vitality as the less plot-based segments. I find the character and his mind much more interesting than little scenes he has to play in. It is much easier for me to effectively have characters commenting on the plot than to have them engaging in it. Why does stuff need to be happening for a piece of writing to be interesting? There can be conflict in a character's mind without him needing to go around doing things.
But this is not a good thing for fiction writing. There needs to be a plot. Something has to happen. Otherwise the story is unfocused. There's no arc. You're telling and not showing. I can see where these criticisms come from, but I don't think I'm "telling, not showing," I'm showing who the narrator is via what he tells the audience. What he's telling is unimportant. What the telling shows about him is what interests me as a writer and as a reader. So what I find myself being drawn to is fake non-fiction. That is to say, writing that reads as true, without the conventions of fiction and its need for action, but is from the point of view of a distinctly fictional character. This is easy to do comedically, but how can it be done seriously? And who would read it? Who would publish it?
Someone told me a story of mine was too much inside the narrator's head, shortly before they told me how they enjoyed the narrative voice. It's possible they were just being nice and they thought it sucked, but if both of these statements are true, I'm baffled. Of course it takes place inside his head--his head is by far the most interesting thing going on in the story. But if a story moves even further in that direction, leaves plot behind almost completely, is it even a story anymore? Is it fake non-fiction? Is it something else entirely? Who knows such things.
Of course this may just be a beginning writer struggling with taking a modicum of talent and focusing it into something of worth, and whining about the pointlessness of the parts he can't pull off right away. I'm fully prepared for that to be the case. This is basically like a diary entry--it's just I'm more comfortable typing than writing longhand.
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