“What other reason might I have for writing this - ridiculous journal of an aging concierge - if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it?  The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.”

 ― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Labels: books, literary quotes, Muriel Barbery, playing plans on repeat, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, writing process

I'm working on poems again, but only have fragments and themes. Trying to decide if I could be satisfied with one or two stanza poems, but they just look unfinished to me. I'm so verbose though, poetry doesn't really come easy to me.

I have a few poems like this from that first year after college. They all relate to this general theme but they're not meant to make one poem. They're more like a series on the same theme, but none of them are named or finished. I think the first one is from my chapbook so it has a name, but I don't acknowledge it as the true title. When I think of all of them I think of the first line of the first poem and even though they're not one poem they all claim some connection to that first line, "I married my body to yours."

The poems are obviously not about marriage, but lovers and lost love. That phase after a long relationship when it feels like cheating to have feelings for anyone else. That hold that your first can have over you, whether they mean to or not. Actively or passively as the ghost of your failure.

They're not vulgar, or even really sexually charged at all. Maybe that's why they feel incomplete, because that sexual tension doesn't flow through them. Lord knows I'm not lacking in it. That's one of those crazy differences with being in a happy monogamous relationship and being single. Supply and demand. Somewhere that happiness becomes contentment and that contentment eradicates the sex drive, but whether you are happy being single or feel miserably alone, you are seized with this sexual charge that runs through you like a current.

That connection between feeling civilized and feeling the shock waves of sexual frustration reminds me of the book I'm reading, The Left Hand of Darkness. The book refers to this in it's alien world as somer - 22 days of being sexually inactive and having no sex drive and then for about four days they enter kemmer in which they cannot prevent the release of sexual energy. "On the one hand, the limitation of the sexual drive to a discontinuous time-segment...must prevent, to a large extent, the exploitation and frustration of the drive. There must be sexual frustration...but least it cannot build up; it is over when kemmer is over. Fine; this they are spared much waste and madness; but what is left in somer?" (Le Guin 95).

Labels: instigate, poetry, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin, We used to be friends., writing, writing process

I'm not a big fan of introductions or forwards in books.  I do love a good preface though.  Introductions seem so haughty and cryptic and like they're written to be critiqued thoroughly in paper after paper.

With that being said, there are several parts of the introduction in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin that I like so much I want to share here.

In reference to fiction writers:

"All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like--what's going on--what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen.  That is what the novelists say.  But they don't tell you what you will see and hear.  All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

"The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!"

 Then later:

"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.  Finally, when we're done with it, we may find --if it's a good novel--that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street that we never have crossed before.  But it's hard to say just what we learned, how we changed."

I don't agree with all her views on science fiction and I find her explanations on it quite bland, but I do love her view on fiction and fiction writers.

I tried to find a clever musical introduction to pair with this post, but I couldn't remember which artist I was originally thinking of so I went with the organ intro of The Ugly Organ by Cursive.

Labels: Cursive, fiction. novel, introductions, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin, writers, writing, writing process

My mind has wandered off.  It is somewhere between Orphan Black and The Magicians.

There are times, during my commute or at work, when I can steer my thoughts to my story. The imagery of the countryside, the fog rolling in thick clouds over the asphalt, a piano interlude.  No it's not a classic piano memory recall collage.  It's actually deep and heavy base, British accents, and the occasional gritty New York band.

It's paralyzing, not knowing character names.  Trying to build dialogue without dialect, without physical features, without a face. I've begun to wonder if it's because her story starts before she's born, before it's her story. When you look at a child and you think you have an idea of what they'll look like as an adult, but you can't actually.  I don't know why it's so important to see her as a child.  I'm building a whole different world in my head, a place all it's own.  You would think I should be focusing on putting that to paper.  Why is her face so important?  What is in a name?

I think tomorrow I'll read more quotes from the literary legends. I've seen so many about the writing process itself, hopefully there will be more specific quotes out there about what to do when you have other worlds forming inside your head. 

Labels: BBC America loves women, Orphan Black, The Magicians, writing, writing process