Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise...
Live
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWakav29dBs
(c) 2010 The Avett Brothers and AR LLC
2/25/11
2/24/11
Writing: Fact and Fiction
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.
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.
2/23/11
2/22/11
2/21/11
2/19/11
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.
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