Saturday, May 13
A-ha?
Since my last couple of posts, I've gotten a couple of nice, smart, inspiring e-mails. You know who you are, and there are links to their sites over on the right there. Jeff wrote a great e-mail about, essentially, not giving up and not being so hard on myself. And Krell made a suggestion (in context of other praise) about choosing parameters, and I've been thinking about it all week. Form follows function? Or is the other way around. So this is my current state of thinking on the topic:
Maybe there are two kinds of fiction.
First is the kind I've been writing a lot of but can't share for some reason, which is perhaps rambling and self-absorbed and mostly about working out all that *crap* (feelings, emotions, pop-psychology, etc.) that we deal with in our normal lives,. And then maybe a second kind, fiction written to be read by others, to impress an agent, to be published and/or to be ambitious and clever or to top best seller lists or to be optioned and made into indy films or just to be made into Disney channel sit-coms or whatever. I don't know; I'm just thinking out loud here.
I think my recent and regularly recurring struggles have been because of the collision of those two, the mix-up, the clash, which leads to me getting about 80 percent done with novels and then putting them away, and not pursuing publishing them or even letting anyone read them.
Earlier this week, I went back and read the first chapter or two of three or four of the novels stuffed into my desk drawers, and they're all about the same thing. Odd? No. And so when I think about trying to publish that which I know (in my heart of hearts) should perhaps not be published or see the light of day, I get frustrated by my lack of ability to give it out to be read and critiqued. And my posts below, the ones about the selfish nature of my fiction, how it's all about me and just me, fit the profile of that first kind of fiction perfectly but prevent progress on the second kind. See what I'm saying?
And once I can make the switch in my brain to pursue the second kind, and then do it -- set or choose the right parameters in other words -- even just for fun, for the experience of it, of trying to write a novel that I'd want to read or others to read (rather than just processing my daily routines and life) maybe, just maybe, something will come out of that and I'll be on to something.
In other words: a-ha!
Maybe there are two kinds of fiction.
First is the kind I've been writing a lot of but can't share for some reason, which is perhaps rambling and self-absorbed and mostly about working out all that *crap* (feelings, emotions, pop-psychology, etc.) that we deal with in our normal lives,. And then maybe a second kind, fiction written to be read by others, to impress an agent, to be published and/or to be ambitious and clever or to top best seller lists or to be optioned and made into indy films or just to be made into Disney channel sit-coms or whatever. I don't know; I'm just thinking out loud here.
I think my recent and regularly recurring struggles have been because of the collision of those two, the mix-up, the clash, which leads to me getting about 80 percent done with novels and then putting them away, and not pursuing publishing them or even letting anyone read them.
Earlier this week, I went back and read the first chapter or two of three or four of the novels stuffed into my desk drawers, and they're all about the same thing. Odd? No. And so when I think about trying to publish that which I know (in my heart of hearts) should perhaps not be published or see the light of day, I get frustrated by my lack of ability to give it out to be read and critiqued. And my posts below, the ones about the selfish nature of my fiction, how it's all about me and just me, fit the profile of that first kind of fiction perfectly but prevent progress on the second kind. See what I'm saying?
And once I can make the switch in my brain to pursue the second kind, and then do it -- set or choose the right parameters in other words -- even just for fun, for the experience of it, of trying to write a novel that I'd want to read or others to read (rather than just processing my daily routines and life) maybe, just maybe, something will come out of that and I'll be on to something.
In other words: a-ha!
