Category Archives: Writing

Shadow and Neil Daiman

At the moment I’m reading Neil Daiman’s novel American God’s. I also clicked to The Reading Experience and found this by Dan Green on the subject of character. He writes

In my opinion, asking for a “vivid, memorable character” amounts to requesting that a work of fiction provide us with a friend, a “person” with whom we will have what is called “sympathy.” Demanding “psychological plausibility” in fictional characters means the author should give us the opportunity to “gossip about them and cheaply psychoanalyse them.” And in the same way Heti suggests that good writers don’t think about what makes for “memorable characters ” when they’re creating them, it’s likely they don’t think much about what makes a story “engaging” or dialogue “superb” or a sense of time or place “transporting,” either. (Although maybe they do think about good titles and grammatical correctness.) Telling writers they ought to produce such things means nothing.

You should read the entire post for context.

I’m not very far into Daiman’s novel. The central character is Shadow, caught up now with Mr. Wednesday. Slowly I’m learning what Shadow is getting himself into. Shadow has been in prison for a few years. His wife is recently passed, and he’s learned of her affair. She visits him, trailing mud from the grave.

On Tragedy

Well placed and well put by Susan Gibb.

American Shaolin

Matthew Polly’s American Shaolin is thus far filled with wonderful conversation. Polly has spoken with a Beijing cabdriver and a Zheng Zhou key girl named Moon. The talk is very similar which, in many ways, diversifies and develops the narrative. The dialogue is planted with irony.

“What country are you from?”

“America.”

“America is a great country. Very powerful. Not like China.”

“But China has advanced rapidly,” I said.

“No, it is inadequate. It will take seventy years before it is acceptible.”

“I have heard it will only take fifty years.”

“Who told you that?”

“A cab driver in Beijing.”

Writing and Science

Chris Mooney on the potential of English majors.

Storytron

I’ve been watching the Storytron development for some time now. But Susan Gibb is actually doing brainwork in the building environment, SWAT. She’s developing some fine ideas for approaching the Crawford vision of interactive storytelling. Following her into this and playing with Storytron, I imagine, will be an electric process. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with and look forward to working with the environment, as well.

The questions I have are all conceptual, such as what happens when story doesn’t develop.

Tuned stay.

This snip from the website is of particular interest

You also want these choices to amount to a satisfying story, with a beginning, middle and end, albeit which specific beginning, middle and end those will be depends on the player’s decisions. You have several tools that let you do just that – making sure, for example, that the pace stays right, that the story doesn’t end before all the threads are resolved or continue after they are, that certain key events happen at designated times and so forth.

Otto and Passion

Susan Gibb has a passion for Otto

Lord knows I stand in my shop at the worktable for long periods of time
so it shouldn’t have bothered me, but this afternoon working at a paper
cutter for two hours I was near crying with the pain. I even tried to
stand (as I do while washing dishes) in the crane position which
usually helps (I am swaybacked) but it was impossible since the
repetitive back and forth movement of the picking up, sliding in,
slicing, sticking together and boxing undid my knotted stance within
the first moments, and I almost fell on my ass.

Hypertext and Space

Here’s an issue. In trying to understand a perceived weakness in a sectional story arc in Sandoval, as he’s working the hypertext to generate story and illustration of certain pet ideas of his, I keep wondering when certain dramatic issues should declair themselves. The answer should come from the creative drive of the writing, but often I have to break out of Sandoval and think “out” of him.

In some ways it’s a spatial question. 5 or 10 text spaces: is that the arc span? Sandoval dealt with the night lab issue by thinking about “what happened” and somehow a relationship between two other characters came from it in the illusion of creative performance, a relation that only became known because this and that actually happened in the story. (But I could be speaking still as Sandoval, or as Ejay Mariposa).

Space and pulse (time and rhythm) are thus concurrences. In other words, 10 text spaces could form the width of a poem in hypertext or the width of a necessary event in a character’s life.

Hypertext and Time

The context is time for Sandoval in The Life. And environment. In session today, which was hard to get out of, Sandoval was trying to fix a POV problem, a POV problem that had to do with verbs.

I’m still trying to fix a pulse problem with the plot of the novel in a certain area and a lot of the fix as it’s developing has to do with Sandoval referring to links, as if he’s going to time the pace of the action against various references to hypertextuality itself–these are time references, since each text space in the hypertext could very easily connect to out-of-sequence instances which could vary or play with the theme of time. Hypothetically, I could drum up a scene:

Let’s say we have a first person POV and he’s describing how as a boy he leaves one house and ventures through the woods to another house to play with midnight labs (this sentence is a revision). When did this happen? “One time I . . .” Or “A few weeks into winter I . . .” Rather than think of this as a flashback, the POV treats it as a necessary step toward a culmination, and since the link has yet to be woven into context, “flashback” is premature. One reading of the novel would be flashback, while another reading of the novel would resort the event as an outcome of cause and effect. (The fact that he’s at the kennel at the moment and I don’t know what happens there is POV at its most bothersome–although, now that I think of it, only moments ago rewriting sentence 1 of this paragraph, a solution has presented itself: midnight labs.)

Writers on the Screen

It was a wonderful Saturday. Dinner with Susan, John and Maggie, then a trip Bushnell-way to visit with Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jennifer Weiner at The Connecticut Forum (link to CivilTango). What a crowd, number one. The Bushnell is a massive theater space and every seat I could see was occupied. Yet, a huge screen on stage was good enough to bring the images of the writers on stage up to us in the mezzanine. This was an odd, new media experience, in that the writers shared the room with us, yet watching them was like watching a movie or TV. I took to leaning through the shoulder gap in front of me to watch the actual bodies.

Oates spoke a little about “Where are you going, where have you been.” It’s her most anthologized story and I really don’t mind this, given my fondness for it, which goes beyond what can ne “said” about the story or much of Oates’ and Vonnegut’s fiction. We have relationships with the “content” of books that is hard to explain. Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, evokes more than its story in the public square. Most of our young will recognize the name and not Billy Pilgrim.

But there is a lesson: these writers are excellent novelists and story writers, and that’s what they apparently do with bells on. They may be wise through their characters. Colin McEnroe’s questions did not probe far enough into potential.

What a fantastic time, though. Thanks John and Maggie.

Writers on the Screen

Oates spoke for some time about “Where are you going, where have you been.” It’s her most anthologized story and I really don’t mind this, given my fondness for it.

What a fantastic time, though. Thanks John and Maggie.