If you’ve been kind enough to wonder if I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, I’m afraid I have, more or less: I’m in graduate school now, working on my PhD. Until the holiday break, I won’t have much time to blog. For your amusement, however, I’ll post a flash fiction inspired by my studies.
I think writers are more familiar than anyone with the strange and unpredictable nature of inspiration. Suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, a brilliant idea strikes. You might be awake or dreaming. You have to write it down NOW or you risk losing it.
I’ve always known the best stories arose out of primordial mental chaos. Now, science has proved it.
Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability – “avalanches” of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable.
It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain’s ability to transmit information and solve problems.
…and write stories.
How are books selling in Great Depression II? Just great! As long as you take into account that “flat is the new up”!
Total U.S. book publishers’ net revenues reached $40.32 billion in 2008, up 1.0% over 2007, while 2008 unit sales reached nearly 3.1 billion, down 1.5% over 2007, according to Book Industry TRENDS 2009, the Book Industry Study Group’s comprehensive annual research study.
Ventriloquist is in coma — but his dummy’s still talking!
Bin Laden’s Vegas Video! High stakes, hookers and hummus
Girl Frozen in Ice in 1939 Alive!
Britney stole my body! Shocking phots of the “real” pop star inside
3 Die in rampage of Killer Sheep
Bat boy foils Nuclear Bomb plot
Phone Psychic’s head explodes
Robot Priests — Pope’s Secret Plan to stop sex scandals
I keep mom’s ashes in the vacuum cleaner
Amelia Earhart’s Plane Lands — with skeleton at the controls
Osama launches doomsday bomb into orbit
World’s smartest ape goes to college
Wife Sells Hubby’s Body Parts on Internet
Al Queda Breeding Killer Mosquitoes
3000 Year Old Mummy Pregnant — Janitor admits, “I’m thte father”
Iraqi Sub Prowling Lake Michigan
Three New Commandments Found
Saddam Challenges Bush to a Duel
Jap Sub still fighting WWII
Bat boy leads cops on 3 state chase
3000-year-old Mummy has baby boy!
Duck Hunters shot Angel!
Saddam Feeds Christians to Lions!
North Korean Plan to Invade America
Bat boy fights in Iraq!
Viking frozen in block of ice
Merman caught in South Pacific
Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons found in Cuba!
3000 year old priestess revived in Libya
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — Killer Dinosaurs!
Some thoughts on writers and internet addiction:
I am coming to suspect that the internet will be to my generation of journalists, and to any younger ones, what alcohol was to our predecessors’: a destroyer first of thought and then of productivity, destructive both of the capacity to reflect, and to react, blurring everything into a haze of talk and endlessly repeated variations on the same experience. Just like alcohol, and even cigarettes once were, it seems an inevitable part of the job, one of the things that distinguishes it from all others. Stories are chased and found on the net just as they once were in bars.
This won’t kill journalism, or thought, of course. There were always many journalists who functioned drunk, and some who could not function any other way.
…But the internet has no edges, any more than it has depth. The sudden movement of someone else’s thought across a screen is something you can follow far beyond the room in which your thoughts could be confined. There’s no tether to jerk you back and by the time your thoughts return, the room has changed: whatever lay in front of the next sentence has disappeared. And so I sit now in a room with a window and no telephone, waiting for the next sentence, patient and pious as a dried-out drunk.
Consider this my explanation for why my blogging has been light of late.
I’ve found a great way to come up with ideas for new blog posts is to just steal them from The Literary Lab and I’ve done that again. This post of theirs on revising has been percolating through my mind for some time now:
I consulted a poet friend that I have mentioned once or twice here before. His name is Craig Cotter, and over dinner I asked him why he made certain word choices or phrase constructions in several of his poems….
What I realized was that Craig had initially limited himself to what edits he was allowed to make. The source of his inspiration, the motivation that got him to write this poem in the first place, he felt, was preserved in that first draft, not in the idea of that first draft. That meant that he couldn’t revise everything. He couldn’t start from scratch with the same idea, because that would be a different poem–one that he could write at a different time.
My gut reaction reading this was to think, “But prose is different from poetry. A novel is different from a poem.” A novel — at least the kind of novel I write — is all about the idea. The words are merely buckets which I use to scoop it up. I could imagine changing the buckets without changing the idea carried therein.
I also vaguely felt like I had visited this argument before.
Sure enough, I consulted Dancing at the Edge of the World a collection of essays by Ursula Le Guin and found the argument in the essay “Reciprocity of Prose and Poetry.” She quotes Huntington Brown, who supported my gut’s reaction:
If it be asked wherein a poet’s attitude toward his matter diffres from that of a prose writer, my answer would be that in prose the characteristic assumption of both writer and reader is that the subject has an identity and an interest apart from the words, whereas in poetry it is assumed that word and idea are inseparable.
Fair enough, as far as I’m concerned, but Le Guin objects:
…there is in his definition an implication that cannot be avoided and should be made clear: It is the language that counts in poetry and the ideas that count in prose. Corollary: Poetry is untouchable, but prose may be freely paraphrased.
Er, yes. Precisely. What’s the problem?
The integrity of a piece of language, poetry or prose, is a function of its quality; and an essential element of its quality is the inseperability of idea and language. When a thing is said right it is said right, whether in prose or poetry, formal discourse or cursing the cat. If it is said wrong, if it lacks quality, if it is stupid poetry or careless prose, you may paraphrase it all you like; chances are you will improve it.
Oh. Quality. Yes, well, that does it explain it, doesn’t it. I daresay, you could take all of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, and paraphrase it, and as long as you kept the magnificent idea of it, you’d have lost little. But I don’t think you could do the same to A Wizard of Earthsea. This is not to insult either author, but simply reflects the fact that Asimov wrote his stories as though they were encyclopedia entries (and as a matter of fact, an encyclopedia entry on the fall of the Roman Empire inspired the entire Foundation series) whereas Le Guin wrote all her prose tales as though they were secretly poems.
Perhaps this is my problem, and why I’m struggling with uneven prose right now. At times, I also wish to gild my novel in secret poems. At other times, I merely want the easiest bucket to slosh it out onto the page. But sloshy words frustrate me, leading me to revise again and again. Each time I revise, I find that I have not merely paraphrased the poor wording, but changed the ideas, proving that words and ideas, after all, are inseparable. And so I’ve come around to the complete opposite conclusion of my gut reaction, but the same result. I must revise, like it or not, until the prose has more poesy.