August 23rd, 2010%
Your characters are pretty smart, especially the half-created ones who you’re still getting to know.
When I start editing a cold draft, I have a better chance of understanding my characters as more than the playing pieces I’m using to tell the story.
Based on my workshop group during the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop, I’ve got two examples of why characters just show up:
- Issue: You want to avoid telling the hard part of the story
Result: You created a symbolic, feel-good character
- Issue: You’re not sure where the story is headed
Result: You’ve got half-developed character(s) lurking at the edges of scenes
I’ve also experienced characters who show up and misbehave. They won’t shut-up or leave a scene so I’m forced to write past my ideas of how much gets said and where the scene ends. I look forward to editing these parts when I’m ready to close on the story.
August 18th, 2010%
Certain thoughts, words, expressions, or moments may need to be written. You decide why or why not. Your relationship with your thoughts becomes your journal. It’s going to be dysfunctional. Get over it.
Only mean people judge themselves because they hate themselves. Seriously, get over it.
Old journals are useful tools for writers because they help us remember how to:
- Use language to express thoughts and feelings at different ages
- Understand how language is influenced by mood
- Notice patterns of comprehension within different phases of a relationship
I’ve gone back to my journals to get ideas on how to make characters and situations more artistically dysfunctional, not autobiographical.
August 16th, 2010%
This entry is pulled from my favorite journal from 1997-1998 which included photos and scraps of anything that would keep an idea until it found potential safety between two pages. I studied Art History and Creative Writing in undergrad which initiatied a viceral connection between image and language that sometimes makes my writing difficult to understand.
I attempt to capture meaning within the order of words.
By proclaiming it art, I subtract my identity from this work. Thus art is transformed from an idea into an inanimate stimulus.
Art invites the public to translate someone’s creativity by separating it into constants that they feel must designate art. For example, modern art is unacceptable to certain people who believe the artist should possess skills beyond their mastery. “I could paint this line” or “what does this have to do with art” are common utterances.
Abstraction requires a mastery of precision.
The first line had this quote from Thomas Merton’s A Message from the Horizon written in the margin: “When a message has no clothes on, how can it be spoken?”
August 15th, 2010%
When I decided to start writing again last October, my goal was to finish one short story every month.
I thought that I would know where to find the time, but it wasn’t so simple. For six of the past 10 years, I’ve worked full-time and attended school full-time. This required spending 10-15 hour days during the week, plus at least 8-10 hours during the weekend on either work or school. Therefore, I figured I could find at least 2-4 hours per day during the week, plus spend 4-5 hours during the weekend to write.
The quickest way to make the shift from work to writing was eating a meal or working out. Meeting or calling friends never seemed to be a good segue, but our conversations always seemed to make the writing flow a little easier on the following days. Certain things we’d talk about would find their way into the story to fill gaps between ideas.
When I actually started writing at the end of December, I finished my first story in 4 weeks, second story in 6 weeks, third story in 3 weeks, fourth story in 2 weeks, and fifth story in 3 weeks. Only one of these stories approaches the complexity and polish you would expect to see from published work, but I was able to explore several different topics and approaches in a relatively short time by working to my own standards rather than writing to be published.
August 6th, 2010%
I enjoy learning how a character thinks through dialogue rather than narration.
In her introduction to Plato’s Five Great Dialogues, Louise R. Loomis summarizes Plato’s solution to how we can discover knowledge that is true:
Our sense impressions, taken alone, are misleading and superficial and tell us nothing about the real nature of the things around us. Common opinion, grounded as it is on sensation, hearsay, and habit, cannot be trusted as a guide to truth. But through our reason we may arrive at what may be rightfully called true knowledge and understanding. Through reason we may use our sense experiences and memories of past experiences as material for a process of analysis, classification, and synthesis that bit by bit builds up for us a pattern of permanent, invisible order behind the perplexing panorama which is all that our sense alone perceive.
This conversation from His Girl Friday or this conversation from Born Yesterday, which were both written as plays and then adapted for film, use character reasoning to communicate a true knowledge within the context of the story.
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