But I try to make sure they understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived. My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.
My students do not want to hear this. Nor do they want to hear that it wasn’t until my fourth book came out that I stopped being a starving artist. They do not want to hear that most of them probably won’t get published and that even fewer will make enough to live on.
Bird by bird. Anne Lamott
Auch. That hurts. And I should quit. I know. Specially with all those people selling courses on how to write saying they haven’t had a moment of bad times since they started writing. Pasto kalo.
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
Bird by bird. Anne Lamott
And that’s the alcoholic’s motto. Just today. Survive just today. However, it is not like writing is to be alcoholic. It’s just that life itself can be overwhelming.
Creating life, breathing life into something that only seems alive; for it can’t get up and exist just because, is exactly as taxing as coping with the real thing. Or it was. Now we have beautiful worlds in which the horrible people just get arrested, disappear through the door or stay behind with the shitty jockey team.
I wonder if that is us being more coward or being braver… Be brave. Survive today’s page, today’s scene, today’s poem. Pasto kalo.
«writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.»
E. L. Doctorow. Quote found in Bird by bird. Anne Lamott
Ahem. I need the ending. That’s like my GPS. True the bloody device urges to make U turns in forbidden places and wants me to change goals and add stops I’d prefer not taking but still. If I don’t know that at least, I’m so lost I can’t even divide into lesser tasks.
However, this time I feel like writing a nonogram. A very big nonogram. 80×80 squares. And Ziggy has a humongous memory.
Have fun trying to see beyond the headlights in the darkness. Pasto kalo.
An author is taken to be someone acknowledged as responsible for a given printed (or sometimes written) work; that is, authorship is taken to be a matter of attribution by others, not of self-election. A writer is anyone who composes such a work. A writer therefore mayor may not attain authorship. A text is the content of any written or printed work, considered apart from its particular material manifestation.
THE NATURE OF THE BOOK. Print and Knowledge in the making. ADRIAN JOHNS. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. CHICAGO AND LONDON
Then I’m only a writer because I comment on books about writing or books about books[1]. I have no authorship because nobody has called me an author yet.
That reminds me something I read (by a writer who prefers to use the pen name of a dead writer[2]); people discussing the writer as a person and not as an author. Do we, by denying the authorship of poems and novels to writers and comment, instead, about the author as a person; become the creators of garbage knowledge? Do we really kill the authorship by discussing the person and not the author?
It is a question. I understand why to discuss the writer (or the musician or the filmmaker or the singer) as a person and not as an author. We don’t want authors to become the creators of reality by forcing reality to adjust to what they think reality should be without practicing it. We don’t want, any longer, Jean Rousseaus marauding around.
I elaborate.
In Ovejas y mierda[3],the character of Eudald is capable[4] of messing up with his mother’s car in order to film the afterwards rehabilitation and film true reality. Because, for him, a documentary shouldn’t become the interviews after the incident but the incident itself. In his mind, things have to be shown the way they happen even If you have to help reality to happen. He won’t stop at almost killing or raping.
Sick? It is horrid! This person is an… Yes. That. But he creates wonderful documentaries! (fictitious of course). Such an author should be stripped of their authorship… I understand why we discuss the person and not the author. I’m as emotional as anyone. However, does the person being horrible cancel automatically that they wrote, sing, film… “beautifully”?
I’m a jobless, lazy person. Am I as sick as this character? It worries me. And no, sometimes worrying about is not enough to proof you’re not a horrible person. Should I be denied authorship?
And by worrying a lot more about the last, do I become a worse person than the one I am?
Pasto kalo.
[1] As Mikita Brottman remarks in The lonely vice, now we have lots of books about books. Though I’m starting to think that started much before. When folklorists and writers like Barthes started to write about myths and folklore. They were writing about how stories come to life and what they’re made up. At times when people still took a pen and started writing without a manual.
The Hero’s Journey is a skeletal framework that should be fleshed out with the details and surprises of the individual story. The structure should not call attention to itself, nor should it be followed too precisely.
THE WRITER’S JOURNEY ~ THIRD EDITION. Christopher Vogler. Published by Michael Wiese Productions
…. The problem of using a recipe is that, sooner or later you can tell the structure. The problem of not following a structure? There’s no satisfaction for the client.
There are ways to call attention into the structure in order to distract from the plot unfolding itself. Read Witches abroad to discover how. Pasto kalo.
The repeating characters of world myth such as the young hero, the wise old man or woman, the shapeshifter, and the shadowy antagonist are the same as the figures who appear repeatedly in our dreams and fantasies. That’s why myths and most stories constructed on the mythological model have the ring of psychological truth.
THE WRITER’S JOURNEY ~ THIRD EDITION. Christopher Vogler. Published by Michael Wiese Productions
Mmmm. Mmmm. And more mmmm. No young heros, no wise old men or women and no shadow antagonists in my dreams. If I were to follow the affirmation above, I would conclude that I am not human, I am deranged or something doesn’t really work there.
In my fantasies I live in a library… I have money enough to rent a Bentley… Sometimes I’m a mushroom goddess…
Fine. I’ll confess: I’m not human. I whished.
Have fun dealing with psychological truth. Pasto kalo.
As a specialized field of study, children’s literature has its own set of works and texts that address food (although these works often build upon theorists like Barthes). One of the first articles to specifically discuss food in children’s literature is Wendy R. Katz’s aptly titled “Some Uses of Food in Children’s Literature.” The article, though humble in its claim, argues that “children’s literature is filled with food-related images, notions, and values” because if one “understand[s] the relations between the child and food…[one] understand[s] the workings of the world of the young” (192). More importantly, Katz discusses the place of food in the child’s “adjustment to the social order”––their acclimation to society–– or perhaps even the adult world (193). […] As an integral part of reality, food fits seamlessly into fictional narratives, providing a multifaceted and symbolic vehicle for authors to communicate social change or lessons, whichever the case may be.
Stephens, Mary A., «Nothing More Delicious: Food as Temptation in Children’s Literature» (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 50. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/50
The amount of stuff that can be ritualized, imbued of meaning and worshiped. Human beings are never contented with reading things as they are. Oh, no. They need to complicate everything by creating symbols. Witty ideas about the meaning of images.
Oh, yes I do too. I write. If it is a conscious process or not it is irrelevant. I take the images I can recall from stories or design tools I learnt at school, in order to lie better.
That is the way writing stops being just the literal meaning to become THAT PERFECT MOMENT. The perfect instant in which the image summons the feelings needed. The cliché image as a vehicle of standard communication we need to connect.
Do you ever think what food means in your writing? Have a good time using its image. Pasto kalo.
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
Bird by bird. Anne Lamott
I think the one thing not working here is “the truth”. We don’t want the truth. We want excitement; we want things that aren’t there. We want the spirit of the lion watching over us because it is scary for random things happening; in spite of all our care trying not to fall down the hole we haven’t seen. And this is our first lie: we want the truth.
Sheep lice don’t write because they don’t have to record how many sheep they have sucked to pay taxes (and maybe, omit a few nano-litters in order to not go bloodrup). Add that they concentrate on sucking, not in pretending to be nice beings taking away the over exert of blood pressure for the sheep to feel better. Or, maybe, that sheep fuss is a signal from heaven to keep on sucking instead of letting go.
I don’t know. Maybe this is only because I don’t have such a good memory to remember what I got from the Three wise kings when I was 10 or what the adults said in this or that situation.
Maybe. Enjoy figuring out what you want to write about. If inventing is easier that telling the truth. Pasto kalo.
The writer of any book inevitably accrues debts, and when its theme is as interdisciplinary as this one those debts are particularly keenly felt. During the near-decade that it has taken to complete this work, I have received generous help from a wide range of people. I am conscious of the inadequacy of any acknowledgment I can now give in return.
THE NATURE OF THE BOOK. Print and Knowledge in the making. ADRIAN JOHNS. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.CHICAGO AND LONDON
I don’t know [to start like a Linkin Park song], but fiction writers owe a lot of what they write to the writers they read.
Sometimes reading earlier authors we hadn’t read before those that we already have [more contemporary ] is a discovery in itself. To know where certain ideas came from is a delight.
Here and there in my travels I learned that some cultures are not entirely comfortable with the term «hero» to begin with. Australia and Germany are two cultures that seem slightly «herophobic.»
THE WRITER’S JOURNEY ~ THIRD EDITION. Christopher Vogler. Published by Michael Wiese Productions
More than societies being herophobic, I’d like to point out they have realized imagined realities can be misused. They can be manipulated for governments to push people to go war. Wars in which the only sense is the ego of the fill in the blank with the leader of turn’s title. Too much for spending time in a trench or murdering kids and terrorists by pressing a button. Or too much to blindly go following certain idealisms such as genocide in order to have a proper order of things [ I know… what’s the proper order of things that allows such ideas[1]?].
Societies can also realize a single individual can’t be responsible for the actions of many. It was Mahatma Gandhi who came up with the idea of doing things being responsible of what he did himself and only of the things he did himself[2]. Indeed, the author explains Aussies prefer the not so trustable, ethereal hero; since they realized the English had them fighting their battles by using the word “hero”. I think they have learned cooperation works better. Of course there’s still the need for that one single manager but they know the manager alone can’t do much.
Narrative is not just a hero and their journey. Narrative is minding the imagined reality to make humans feel purposeful and cooperative. It is about making up what’s not there to have us not killing the neighbour. It’s imaginative and varied and truly strange.
Perhaps it is time to imagine something new. Have fun trying. Pasto kalo.
[1] Nonetheless, these ideologies happened and still happen.
[2] Reference to Diana Uribe’s podcasts… don’t ask which.
