Much of life is like fiction...
If there is anything I can say about my somewhat routine life, it is not boring, rather it's quite interesting most days. Not always in a way I care for but most of the time at least one interesting thing happens, I learn something new or a connect-the-dots moment occurs and mostly it's enriching. Sometimes all of that happens, when it does it's usually at my humble job, which I'm just fine with because it is the most likely place for an engaging event to happen. Almost always it involves the carousal of people that cross over the threshold. Not the predictable ones but those that dare to live in the pale of what many consider "irregular."
I do think it's in the way you approach and perceive your daily life. It is what you make of it. I notice things and have a keen perception of what many people, even seemingly unpredictable ones, are likely to do. It's a highly honed sense developed from a lifetime of people watching and interaction with a variety of souls from all walks of life. I think it's important to absorb that and turn it into something useful. For me it manifests itself in two ways, the first is I learn how to understand and interact with a cornucopia of human behaviors. That enriches me and as well as other people if they have something that I can help them figure out. A two-way interaction.
The second is I jot a lot of it down in bits and pieces. I would hardly call this note-taking a journal or a diary, merely a memory jogger. It's because in order for me to wrap my head around the still-cryptic-to-me world around me, having never really been regular enough to resolve the perplexities of life, I make sense of it by creatively expressing myself. Out of the second thing I do, jotting down ideas that come from experiencing life, I turn into writing. When I was younger I turned these notes and sliced them into fiction stories. In the past few decades I would use them as examples in the non-fiction I was writing. Nowadays I've rediscovered fiction writing and these memory joggers are spliced into parts of short stories.
There is truth that much of life is like fiction and that fiction is a lot like life; which is not so strange as we think.
Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts
2/24/11
2/18/11
Geography of the Mind
More on writing fiction...
I'm writing a short story. Actually it would be better to write that I am attempting to write a short story. It is a class assignment for the Fiction Writing class I'm taking and it's going to be "workshopped" next week by 14 people I barely know. I've already written some flash fiction for this class that's been workshopped and also read some short stories and written reviews for them. The more I write fiction, not only do I realize I have no idea what I'm doing, I also realize that I'm not such a great non-fiction writer either. Not as good a one as I thought anyway...fairly decent but not a great one.
Taking this college freshman class in writing fiction has been very humbling and very good for me. I'm not the only person in the class who already has a bachelors degree with writing experience, returning to school, to learn to write fiction for the "fun" of it. All of us realize now that we know very little about writing, in fact it probably would be better if we knew nothing about writing. The class members, a mixed group of all ages, who haven't yet gone through writing the long essays and papers of upper division undergraduate classes and dissertations of postgraduate classes are far better off. They've also never had to write nonfiction for a living, the world of white papers, curriculum, policies and procedures, legal briefs, correspondence templates, technical documentation.
They have much brighter, clearer, fresher eyes. I remember looking through my eyes that way once, a long time ago, and am learning a lot by looking into their eyes about seeing things anew. Inside I squeal a little bit of happiness when one of them asks something that would be considered naive amongst a group of so-called educated people. It's teaching me to not be so jaded, to look at things with an unprocessed and open mind, an opportunity for replenishment and regeneration.
I'm going to finish writing that short story and then write another and maybe even more.
I'm writing a short story. Actually it would be better to write that I am attempting to write a short story. It is a class assignment for the Fiction Writing class I'm taking and it's going to be "workshopped" next week by 14 people I barely know. I've already written some flash fiction for this class that's been workshopped and also read some short stories and written reviews for them. The more I write fiction, not only do I realize I have no idea what I'm doing, I also realize that I'm not such a great non-fiction writer either. Not as good a one as I thought anyway...fairly decent but not a great one.
Taking this college freshman class in writing fiction has been very humbling and very good for me. I'm not the only person in the class who already has a bachelors degree with writing experience, returning to school, to learn to write fiction for the "fun" of it. All of us realize now that we know very little about writing, in fact it probably would be better if we knew nothing about writing. The class members, a mixed group of all ages, who haven't yet gone through writing the long essays and papers of upper division undergraduate classes and dissertations of postgraduate classes are far better off. They've also never had to write nonfiction for a living, the world of white papers, curriculum, policies and procedures, legal briefs, correspondence templates, technical documentation.
They have much brighter, clearer, fresher eyes. I remember looking through my eyes that way once, a long time ago, and am learning a lot by looking into their eyes about seeing things anew. Inside I squeal a little bit of happiness when one of them asks something that would be considered naive amongst a group of so-called educated people. It's teaching me to not be so jaded, to look at things with an unprocessed and open mind, an opportunity for replenishment and regeneration.
I'm going to finish writing that short story and then write another and maybe even more.
1/12/11
Thinking Out Loud
Real Life is like fiction...
So why not write about it?
It is time, actually overdue, to recharge my creative batteries, set a new aspiration to challenge myself with. I do not remember a time that I was not writing something, even as a small child I scribbled in childish scrawl little stories and made notes my father proudly called his "five year olds diary." I was a very early voracious reader and to the chagrin of my siblings and later my classmates I had a vocabulary and ability to spell grades above the one I was currently in. My aunt would show me off to adult friends when I was a kindergartener and say to me "Spell Czechoslovakia!" to be followed by "Spell encyclopedia! hypothetical! observatory!" and her favorite: "Mississippi," which she had taught me as M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-in-your-I" to my mother's annoyance.
Naturally as a youngster I wrote fantastical stories where my mind wandered into far-fetched situations I imagined myself as the hero. Pure Fiction. My notes were observations of things I saw, thought about, lists of things I wanted to do, devised out of boredom when I was riding in the car with my parents or waiting for something or someone. All Non-fiction. As I grew older, around eight or nine, I started becoming more interested in history and started reading some good quality history books. Although I still read fiction, it was mostly historical and political things I was interested in reading.
As an overactive child, both in mind and physical activities, my parents had a lot to deal with in keeping me occupied. My father had the idea I start writing a history of where we lived, to keep me engaged during certain times, when my parents, sister, aunt and uncle and cousin, needed a break from me. He figured it accomplished two things, kept me quietly preoccupied and out of others hair, as well as develop my writing abilities. Due to my reading interests, the result in the long term was that by the time I was 13, my interest was focused solely on writing non-fiction.
It was a pattern set for life. Through undergraduate and post-graduate degrees and beyond I have taken classes in Journalism, Non-Fiction Writing, Technical Writing, Historical Writing, Policies and Procedures Writing and Legal Writing. I have also written and published, in their medium, in each of these categories. I'm not being modest when I state that a lot of it wasn't very good, since much of it wasn't. My first website in the late nineties was topically political, modeled after Andrew Sullivan's pioneering website blog, where I first got the idea to start blogging. It was far better in my imagination than I'm sure it was in actuality. The same could be said for my writing for a website in the early part of this past decade.
The upshot of it all is in spite of a lot of bad writing, I've learned to write non-fiction, particularly policies and procedures, history and political articles, essays and blogs fairly well. There is truth in the axiom "writers write every day" because it does hone your skills. In times when I wasn't writing anything in particular, I wrote long letters and later email to friends who mutually returned the favor with long well written replies.
In 2005 I became enamored with video and the following year YouTube. Since then I've played around with video blogging and learned some editing and have developed a moderate skill at it. I started this blog in 2007 and for over two years played around with it but have placed back in draft mode most of the work from that time period. In 2009 I decided to get more serious with it and by the end of the year pledged to myself I would work in 2010 at it every day and develop my own style with it, which I intend on continuing.
All that just written to say this: to grow more in my writing I have decided to tackle fiction and am going back to the very junior college, now a Community College, that I began my college career at decades ago. I'm taking a freshman level class, although not a beginning one, in structuring and writing fiction. I decided to take the classroom route for a variety of reasons, primarily discipline and mostly to be around other aspiring fiction writers. This particular school is known for "robbing" the universities of good professors because of the school atmosphere and pay. Therefore the instructor is not only your standard PhD but also a published author of recognizable books and an interesting character in his own right. It also opens the door for me to be less intimidated going to writer's workshops. My mission is to stimulate and stretch my imagination to keep the creative juices that sustain me flowing.
This blog will remain what it is, a work in progress of non-fiction blogging of my personal observations of real life and social commentary about it. My ultimate intention is to learn the new world of self distributing ePublishing and if I end up writing any worthwhile fiction, I will produce it in the form of e-books, as well as non-fiction work as electronic articles. To me being creative and especially writing is something I can't imagine not doing and will continue the rest of my life, just as some people do woodworking, quilting, photography, rebuilding cars, vlogging, gardening, playing music or whatever captures their verve.
So why not write about it?
It is time, actually overdue, to recharge my creative batteries, set a new aspiration to challenge myself with. I do not remember a time that I was not writing something, even as a small child I scribbled in childish scrawl little stories and made notes my father proudly called his "five year olds diary." I was a very early voracious reader and to the chagrin of my siblings and later my classmates I had a vocabulary and ability to spell grades above the one I was currently in. My aunt would show me off to adult friends when I was a kindergartener and say to me "Spell Czechoslovakia!" to be followed by "Spell encyclopedia! hypothetical! observatory!" and her favorite: "Mississippi," which she had taught me as M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-in-your-I" to my mother's annoyance.
Naturally as a youngster I wrote fantastical stories where my mind wandered into far-fetched situations I imagined myself as the hero. Pure Fiction. My notes were observations of things I saw, thought about, lists of things I wanted to do, devised out of boredom when I was riding in the car with my parents or waiting for something or someone. All Non-fiction. As I grew older, around eight or nine, I started becoming more interested in history and started reading some good quality history books. Although I still read fiction, it was mostly historical and political things I was interested in reading.
As an overactive child, both in mind and physical activities, my parents had a lot to deal with in keeping me occupied. My father had the idea I start writing a history of where we lived, to keep me engaged during certain times, when my parents, sister, aunt and uncle and cousin, needed a break from me. He figured it accomplished two things, kept me quietly preoccupied and out of others hair, as well as develop my writing abilities. Due to my reading interests, the result in the long term was that by the time I was 13, my interest was focused solely on writing non-fiction.
It was a pattern set for life. Through undergraduate and post-graduate degrees and beyond I have taken classes in Journalism, Non-Fiction Writing, Technical Writing, Historical Writing, Policies and Procedures Writing and Legal Writing. I have also written and published, in their medium, in each of these categories. I'm not being modest when I state that a lot of it wasn't very good, since much of it wasn't. My first website in the late nineties was topically political, modeled after Andrew Sullivan's pioneering website blog, where I first got the idea to start blogging. It was far better in my imagination than I'm sure it was in actuality. The same could be said for my writing for a website in the early part of this past decade.
The upshot of it all is in spite of a lot of bad writing, I've learned to write non-fiction, particularly policies and procedures, history and political articles, essays and blogs fairly well. There is truth in the axiom "writers write every day" because it does hone your skills. In times when I wasn't writing anything in particular, I wrote long letters and later email to friends who mutually returned the favor with long well written replies.
In 2005 I became enamored with video and the following year YouTube. Since then I've played around with video blogging and learned some editing and have developed a moderate skill at it. I started this blog in 2007 and for over two years played around with it but have placed back in draft mode most of the work from that time period. In 2009 I decided to get more serious with it and by the end of the year pledged to myself I would work in 2010 at it every day and develop my own style with it, which I intend on continuing.
All that just written to say this: to grow more in my writing I have decided to tackle fiction and am going back to the very junior college, now a Community College, that I began my college career at decades ago. I'm taking a freshman level class, although not a beginning one, in structuring and writing fiction. I decided to take the classroom route for a variety of reasons, primarily discipline and mostly to be around other aspiring fiction writers. This particular school is known for "robbing" the universities of good professors because of the school atmosphere and pay. Therefore the instructor is not only your standard PhD but also a published author of recognizable books and an interesting character in his own right. It also opens the door for me to be less intimidated going to writer's workshops. My mission is to stimulate and stretch my imagination to keep the creative juices that sustain me flowing.
This blog will remain what it is, a work in progress of non-fiction blogging of my personal observations of real life and social commentary about it. My ultimate intention is to learn the new world of self distributing ePublishing and if I end up writing any worthwhile fiction, I will produce it in the form of e-books, as well as non-fiction work as electronic articles. To me being creative and especially writing is something I can't imagine not doing and will continue the rest of my life, just as some people do woodworking, quilting, photography, rebuilding cars, vlogging, gardening, playing music or whatever captures their verve.
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