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.

OUR Stories!

Should we make a seperate section where we can help each other out with the creation of our stories and maybe read over sections, etc for comments?
Let me know
-Yoelit

Writing Truth--In Fiction

Elie Wiesel, a Nobel prize winning author and Holocaust survivor, has written many books most of them semi-autobiographic.
This is an exerpt from his article about writing. In it, he expresses difficulty in describing truth.
The idea that one can glean from this passage is thus: if truth is so hard to grasp and articulate, how then are we to grasp at the images in our imagination to properly articulate them?
Yet, as Wiesel says "it was neccesary to continue" and hopefully, we can learn from this man how to add truth and imagery into our stories, no matter how difficult the subject matter...
Enjoy reading!

"Acutely aware of the poverty of my means, language became obstacle. At every page I thought, "That's not it." So I began again with other verbs and other images. No, that wasn't it either. But what exactly was that it I was searching for? It must have been all that eludes us, hidden behind a veil so as not to be stolen, usurped and trivialized. Words seemed weak and pale.
Which ones could be used to tell of the long journey in sealed cattle cars toward the unknown? And of the discovery of a twisted and cold universe where some people came to kill and others to die? And of the separation, during nights engulfed by flames, the brutal disruption of families, what words could describe them? And the disappearance of a small Jewish child so wise and so beautiful when she smiled, killed together with her mother the very night of their arrival? Before these images, all words disintegrate and fall lifeless into the ashes.
And yet it was necessary to continue. And speak without words; more precisely, without the proper words. And to try to trust the silence that surrounds and transcends them, while knowing, "That was still not it."
Writing, however, is getting more and more difficult. Not to repeat oneself is every writer's obsession. Not to slide into sentimentality, not to imitate, not to spread oneself too thin. To respect words that are heavy with their own past. Every word both separates and links; it depends on the writer whether it becomes wound or balm, curse or promise. It would be simple and comfortable to play with words and win; all it takes is to play the game and practice a bit of self-delusion.
But for my generation, playing games is not an option. We need to bear witness, we need to hope, with Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, that with a measure of luck, some of our testimonies will safeguard the essence of our prayer.
Ultimately the Jewish boy from my little Jewish town was wrong: writing is anything but easy. "

"not got up"--C. Bronte

Great paragraph by Charlotte Bronte, especially the last sentence, explaining why she explores the "simple" subjects of her own life:

"I cannot write books handling the topics of the day; it is of no use trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral. Nor can I take up a philanthropic scheme, though I honour philanthropy; and voluntarily and sincerely veil my face before such almighty subject as that handled in Mrs. Beecher Stowe's work, Uncle Tom's Cabin. To manage these great matters rightly, they must be long and practically studied-their bearing known intimately, and their evils felt genuinely; they must not be taken up as a business matter, and a trading speculation. I doubt not, Mrs. Stowe had felt the iron of slavery enter her heart, from childhood upwards, long before she ever thought of writing books. The feeling throughout her work is sincere, and not got up. "

Shafiq

Writers on Writing - Margaret Atwood's "Survival"

One of our tasks, in this course, is to read books that relate to "Writers on Writing" and to share information/our reading experiences for the purpose of discussion and debate. I would like to propose a discussion about "Survival - A Thematic Guide To Canadian Literature" by Margaret Atwood.

If you have read this book, let's discuss. If you have not, I encourage you to go to the library, a book store, or used book store and seek this book. There are so many wonderful, and informed, insights throughout Atwood's work that will only serve to better help you explore your own writing.

I am going to begin by typing out a section that we may all discuss. I hope this passage will get you excited enough to go get the book. Atwood's book is about what Canadians write about and how this writing is preoccupied by survival and victims. She also compares Canadians to American and British writers. Throughout the book she discusses a variety of Canadian genres. Quite early, she talks about "Basic Victim Positions" because Canadians (according to this book) tend to see themselves as victims or in survival mode (hence the title of the book). Although written in 1972, this book is still relevant and is also an excellent exploration of past Canadian writing. Here is what Atwood says about victims, from "Survival" pages 36-39:

If Canada is a collective victim, it should pay some attention to the Basic Victim Positions. These are like the basic positions in ballet or the scales on the piano: they are primary, though all kinds of song-and-dance variations on them are possible. The positions are the same whether you are a victimized country, a victimized minority gorup or a victimized individual.

Basic Victim Positions

Position One:
To deny the fact that you are a victim. This uses up a lot of energy, as you must spend much time explaining away the obvious, suppressing anger, and pretending that certain visible facts do not exist. The position is usually taken by those in a Victim group who are a little better off than the others in that group. They are afraid to recognize they are victims for fear of losing the privileges they possess, and they are forced to account somehow for the disadvantages suffered by the rest of the people in the group by disparaging them. As in: "I made it, therefore it's obvious we aren't victims. The rest are just lazy (or neurotic, or stupid); anyway it's their own fault if they aren't happy, look at all the opportunities available for them!"

If anger is felt by Victims in Position One, it is likely to be directed against one's fellow-victims, particularly those who try to talk about their victimization.

The Basic game in Position One is "Deny your Victim-experience."

Position Two:
To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim, but to explain this as an act of Fate, the Will of God, the dictates of Biology (in the case of women, for instance), the necessity decreed by History, or Economics, or the Unconscious, or any other large general powerful idea.

In any case, since it is the fault of this large "thing" and not your own fault, you can neither be blamed for your position nor be expected to do anything about it. You can be resigned and long-suffering, or you can kick against the pricks and make a fuss; in the latter case your rebellion will be deemed foolish or evil even by you, and you will expect to lose and be punished, for who can fight Fate (or the Will of God, or Biology)?

Notice that:
1. The explanation displaces the cause from the real source of oppression to something else.
2. Because the fake cause is so vast, nebulous and unchangeable, you are permanently excused from changing it, and also from deciding how much of your situation (e.g. the climate) is unchangeable, how much can be changed and how much is caused by habit or tradition or your own need to be a victim.
3. Anger, when present - or scorn, since everyone in the category is defined as inferior - is directed against both fellow-victims and oneself.

The basic game in Position Two is Victor/Victim.

Position Three:
To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable.

As in: "Look what's being done to me, and it isn't Fate, it isn't the Will of God. Therefore I can stop seeing myself as a fated Victim."

To put it differently: you can distinguish between the role of Victim (which probably leads you to seek victimization even when there's no call for it), and the objective experience that is making you a victim. And you can probably go further and decide how much of the objective experience could be changed if you made the effort.

This is a dynamic position, rather than a static one; from it you can move on to Position Four, but if you become locked into your anger and fail to change your situation, you might find yourself back in Position Two.

Notice that:
1. In this position the real cause of oppression is for the first time identified.
2. Anger can be directed against the real source of oppression, and energy channelled into constructive action.
3. You can make real decisions about how much of your position can be changed and how much can't (you can't make it stop snowing; you can stop blaming the snow for everything that's wrong).

The basic game of Position Three is repuidating the Victim role.

Position Four:
To be a creative non-victim.

Strictly speaking, Position Four is a position not for victims but for those who have never been victims at all, or for ex-victims: those who have been able to move into it from Position Three because the external and/or the internal causes of victimization have been removed. (In an oppressed society, of course, you can't become an ex-victim - insofar as you are connected with your society - until the entire society's position has been changed.)

In Position Four, creative activity of all kinds becomes possible. Energy is no longer being suppressed (as in Position One) or used up for displacement of the cause, or for passing your victimization along to others (Man kicks Child, Child kicks Dog) as in Position Two; nor is it being used for the dynamic anger of Position Three.

And you are able to accept your own experience for what it is, rather than having to distort it to make it correspond with others' versions of it (particularly those of your oppressors).

In Position Four, Victor/Victim games are obsolete. You don't even have to concentrate on rejecting the role of Victim, because the role is no longer a temptation for you.

(There may be a Position Five, for mystics; I postulate it but will not explore it here, since mystics do not as a rule write books.)

I devised this model not as the Secret of Life or the answer to everything (though you can apply it to world politics or your friends if you like), but as a helpful method of approaching our literature. It's a model about Victims for the simple reason that I found a superabundance of victims in Canadian Literature...stick a pin in Canadian literature at random, and nine times out of ten you'll hit a victim. My model, then, is a product of my Canadian literary experiences.
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I reread that story by Anton Chekhov that Professor Maracle mentioned: "Vanka," available at

http://www.americanliterature.com/Chekhov/SS/Vanka.html

Not only does it engage the anti-child labour sentiment, but I think it's also a strong example of the classic Russian authors. A kind of brooding and tragically fated soul facing the inevitable.

Shafiq