While writing (or rather attempting to write) either short stories or even poetry, I have determined that I often say "how can I be profound?" or "what metaphor would fit in here?"
I am trying hard to distance myself from these "voices" and trying to make the writing flow naturally.
In getting assistance in this task, I turned to Stephen Leigh:

That's the essential goal of the writer: you slice out a piece of yourself and slap it down on the desk in front of you. You try to put it on paper, try to describe it in a way that the reader can see and feel and touch. You paste all your nerve endings into it and then give it out to strangers who don't know you or understand you. And you will feel everything that happens to that story -- if they like it, if they hate it. Because no matter how you try to distance yourself from it, to some degree you feel that if they hate it, they hate you.
Which isn't the truth, you understand. At least you understand that in your head...but not always in your heart.
- Stephen Leigh

While he is far more negative than I, I feel in some way that his is the best way to go about it. Sometimes I guess, being "natural" and "true" in describing yourself in often the hardest thing to do. I assume this is why I fall into the "attempting- to- be- earth-shattering" category. I shall strive for honesty and more raw emotion from now on...

Anyone else share my issue?

How Can You Create Fiction When Reality Comes to Call?

Ok guys,

Let me get a head start on next semester.

I picked up this book "Writers on writing: collected essays from The New York Times" and there's an interesting essay in there by Carolyn Chute, "How can you create Fiction when reality comes to call?". So she's basically writing about how it's impossible to come up with any work of creative fiction while being surrounded by the brouhahas of everyday urban life. Here is an interesting excerpt;

"Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission. Complete submission."

From Walt Whitman

Recently, I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting my stories where I want them. I’ve spent excruciating amounts of time breaking apart the sentences, rearranging and rewriting them into the ground. But I came across this passage by Walt Whitman in the introduction to his book Leaves of Grass, and it helped me see what I was doing wrong. For anybody interested, the introduction gives a lot of useful advice to new writers. It's a very tough read though; he forgets commas (purposefully).

“The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is... What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.”

And that rings true. It seems right to say that a writer should feel an idea/emotion deeply enough that it comes out in the writing without force. It seems right to say the writer should feel the thought’s own cadence, and channel this cadence, instead of forcing one on it (I think here of the overly-dressed prose of Dickens).

The fact is that I’ve been so far away from the content at every stage of the writing process recently, that I’ve had no idea what the right expression is. This has forced me into a cold editing process where one sentence seems just as good another one, with very little idea of which one works best.

Of course, that’s not to say that I’ll never work on style, but, rather, I’ll let the writing style develop as a function of and in relation to the story’s content in the future.

Quotable Quotes!

These may make you laugh at first, but seriously, they do speak truth ...LOADS of truth!
I am interested in seeing your responses as to which is your favorite! (and why...)
ENJOY

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
- Douglas Adams

PROOF-READER, n. A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world -- they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.
- C. N. Bovee

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
- Anthony Burgess

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
- Truman Capote

My task...is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more - and it is everything.
- Joseph Conrad

A word is dead/When it is said,/Some say./I say it just begins/to live that day.
- Emily Dickinson

The virtue of books is to be readable.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
- Gene Fowler

More to come!

I took this passage from a book of Earnest Hemingway's comments on writing, this passage was taken from Death in the afternoon p.191.

I really like the slight biting tone …

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writers assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time."

I really liked this passage for a two main reasons. First off, the idea of us creating people rung true (Joanna, you even used the word people in your comment). Secondly, I like the idea that for our work to be memorable we need to stay true to these people we create.

Some of you guys have already talked about how a character has to earn its keep and how its hard to throw them away because we created them. Hemingway says these 'people' come from our ' knowledge…experience….heart …and all there is of us'. –no wonder it is so hard to 'kill' them! According to Hemingway, what we have to do is make everything the character says or does relevant to the story or to the person we are creating; not just beautiful words for the sake of their beauty or irrelevant description or ramblings.

This is easier said than done. Sometimes I get a phrase stuck in my head and it sounds so great I just have to stick it in, or I get caught up with typical reactions to situations. I have to learn to ask myself is this what my 'person' would say or do? I'm going to try and work on this and hopefully I will end up with a really memorable character/person.

Anne Michaels on Writing

Anne Michaels is the author of one of the most wonderful pieces of literature I have ever read—Fugitive Pieces. It is so carefully and poetically written. If you haven’t read this novel yet, I suggest that you do it. Also, if you enjoy poetry, her collection, The Weight of Oranges, is also equally beautiful.

“Writing the book meant grappling with questions about faith, goodness and the existence of evil--an endeavor that Michaels initially tried to avoid because she found it too daunting. But over time, the characters’ voices became too insistent to ignore.

‘For me, writing is a question of supreme control and complete surrender. Both are essential, and you need to know when to do each.’” - Anne Michaels in an interview with McLeans. (Full article: http://www.geocities.com/annemichaels/MacleansHonorRoll.html).

What do you guys think?

Miriam Toews and Annie Proulx on Characters

In an interview with the Toronto Star about her new book on Sept 14, Miriam Toews said,

"I usually write in the first person, so I almost have to become that person or that narrator. If the voice doesn't sound natural to me, then the writing doesn't work."

I have only read one of her books, A Complicated Kindness, but the narrative voice in that novel seemed to jump right off the page and resonate with me in a unique way. I could so easily picture this character living in the real world. It's always a challenge to write a compelling character in the first person because, as Toews says, the writer has to become the character. It's not enough to think up the character and just start writing, but rather the writer has to inhabit the character, thinking their thoughts, understanding their feelings and actions. Since my story is written in the first person and is very heavily focused on a single character, I find Toews' advice very useful. (I have therefore been playing a lot of chess!)

Once the character has come into existence inside my head, I sometimes find it difficult to know what to do with them. I found another quote, this time from Annie Proulx, that provides one suggestion (it's on her Simon & Schuster website):

"The one thing that a character absolutely must do is carry the story along; characters have to bear some of the burden of the story moving forward. So if I have a character who isn't working out, or is becoming dull, or is just waltzing around in the background, I usually kill him. I don't fall in love with them. They are there to work; they have to earn their keep. If they don't work, if they don't do their job then they're gone."

This approach is not one that I have heard very frequently, but it seems to mesh very well with Toews' views on the genesis of character. If the writer can inhabit the character enough for him/her to become real and believable, then Proulx's argument that the character must move the story along could be put into effect. Once the writer has created this new person, he/she has to give something back. It seems that if an unbelievable or two-dimensional character has been created, the story will not go anywhere without the conscious help of the writer. I probably will not end up killing anybody off in my story, but I will definitely try to create a well-rounded character that can in a sense take over from me in the job of storyteller and propel the narrative forward on her own.