lapis_lazuli022

In a way, everyone assumes that first person is the most authentic and gripping. But sometimes you want to give a reader the sheer pleasure of getting to know a character who is a bit enigmatic and tricky and plays games and doesn’t reveal themselves. But to do that you’re better off doing that through the point of view of somebody else. There’s a reason that The Great Gatsby is not narrated by Gatsby, y’know? Could you imagine? “Here I am, this enigmatic lover and figure, let me tell you my story!” It’s not the same thing; you want to triangulate through the quiet and watchful narrator.

- Emma Donoghue, interviewed for Lambda Literary

I was looking back through old correspondence for something tonight, and I ran across this, which is worth keeping:

The short story is coming along. Well, no...honestly, it's plodding along like a turtle glued to a snail, nailed to a board.

This can serve as inspiration for future writing -- the story did get finished and did sell, despite the turtle, the snail, and the board. :)

"What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be--not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined--as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one’s own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more."

-James Baldwin (1924-1987)

me: the ideas are the hard part. i can't get my own ideas, some opportunity has to seed them. the curse of collaborative roleplay, maybe?
xannish: There is no magical idea bucket.
me: there is!
xannish: I haven't found it. :(
me: I saw it on LOLcats!
me: The walrus always wants it.

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we being to see images—a dog hunting through garbage cans, a plan circling above Alaskan mountains, an old lady furtively licking her napkin at a party. We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we’re sitting in, forgetting it’s lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again. If the dream is to be vivid the writer’s ‘language signals’—his words, rhythms, metaphors, and so on—must be sharp and sufficient: if they’re vague, careless, blurry, or if there aren’t enough of them to let us see clearly what is being presented, then the dream as we dream it will be cloudy, confusing, ultimately annoying and boring. And if the dream is to be continuous, we must not be roughly jerked from the dream back to the words on the page by language that’s distracting. Thus, for example, if the writer makes some grammatical mistake, the reader stops thinking about the old lady at the party and looks, instead, at the words on the page, seeing if the sentence really is, as it seems, ungrammatical. If it is, the reader thinks about the writer, or possibly about the editor—’How come they let him get away with a thing like that?’—not about the lady whose story has been interrupted.” John Gardner

"Let me talk a bit about how I view the difference between science fiction and fantasy, and more specifically, the difference between science and magic. John Crowley gave a talk in which he talked about the Romanian scholar Ioan Couliano, a scholar of Renaissance history. Couliano said that real magic is inter-subjective, meaning that real magic is the influence of one consciousness on another. For example, when one person casts a spell on another person, to make that person do their bidding. This was at the heart of a lot of Renaissance magic. What this clarified for me was the role of consciousness in magic, as opposed to science and technology. Because in the scientific method, the experimenter's consciousness has no place. It doesn't depend on the scientist having the right intentions, or being pure of heart, or concentrating hard enough, which are very common aspects of magic. And one of the criteria of a scientific result is reproducibility, that it should work no matter who does it, whereas magic is almost exactly the opposite. Magic is highly dependent on the practitioner. Now, in "Seventy-Two Letters" and "Tower of Babylon," the universe behaves in mechanistic manner, so the consciousness of the practitioner -- of the scientist -- is not involved. No one's moral worth has any effect."

-Ted Chiang, author of Story of Your Life And Others

"You don't get a glossary in the beginning of your book unless your first name starts with 'J.R.R.'" -Matt

"Polyamory is not pokemon! It's not a contest to see how many people you can collect."
-LL