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.