So short story long, here goes:
-Ever heard of Raymond Queneau or his book "Exercises de Style"? Probably not, unless your taking French 3910 with me. But if you speak or read French halfway proficiently, I would really encourage you to take a look at it. It's really cool. It's the same mundane story writting in 99 different styles. Some are kind of weird, but a lot of them are hilarious. There's even one written phonetically with a British/American accent titled "Por lay Zanglays." I could talk and talk and talk about it. But want I want to talk about is the awesome fragmented/collage style he uses. This book isn't a linear book. It's like a collective awesome.
-WHOA! Hold the phone. Just out of curiosity, I looked it up on Amazon.com and there is a TRANSLATED version! For under 7 dollars. This changes a lot of things. For all you English speakers, do me a favor and go buy it. There are some things that just don't quite translate, but it's still totally worth your read. I learned something looking it up too. This book was originally written in 1958! I didn't realize it was that old. Perhaps you could look at it as a modern text then. It's certainly not postmodern in my humble opinion. Buy it. It's worth your read.
-Anyway, this book is really inspirational to my specific reading/writing style because I've been experimenting a lot over the past couple years with collaging, fragmentaions, and writing in abnormal media. Like the unapologetic note taped to a windshield, and the unapologetic poem, and the following unapologetic response keyed on the car.
-So I had this idea brewing for awhile of writing an ENTIRE adolescent novel in abnormal/modern media (instant messaging, facebook/myspace, maybe e-mail, texting, phone conversations, dialogue, story telling, diary entries, to-do lists, homework, etc) me and Lauren (my awesome roommate) filled up our entire whiteboard with ideas for different forms. Basically, I'm doing everything EXCEPT formal narrative, though I have a friend telling how they met and I have a diary entry from Sara's side and those sometimes are ALMOST narrative.
-An aside: If you are a writer and don't have a whiteboard (or chalkboard, but those are dusty and messy), get one now. Lauren has two, and we use them ALL THE TIME when working on writing projects. It's a great way to map out your plot in a more visual way and a great liason/organizer for getting ideas from their tangled version in your head (or maybe that's just me) into a smoother form on paper.
-So I've created a few different pieces, and I feel like this project is really taking off. I'm really excited about where it's going from here. I've kind of put Paul's story on the back burner for now simply because I have a few scenes I COULD write, but seeing as I have NO IDEA where it goes after his emotional breakdown, it feels slightly pointless.
-What I'm trying to decide now is how accessible I want this text to be. How much should I let the reader know? I guess first off I don't want to make it too convoluted because my audience is teenagers and when I was a teenager, I hated reading novels that didn't make much sense or required a lot of further explanation. I also need to decide if I want the plot to actually make sense or contradict itself. Right now, I feel like I have some really good sections, but if I want to make the timeline work, I need to change one of them. Also, I need to decide whether I want to put the fragments in chronological order so the reader sees how the plot plays out, or put them in completely out of order so they have to piece it together themselves. This decision is hard because I feel like this novel has a lot of potential to be good, but the more good I make it, the more I limit my audience. That might not make sense, but let's put it this way: J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer are not extremely good writers. Sorry if I just broke your heart. Get over it. They are popular writers who write something that was an easy read (ok, I hear that Harry Potter is good whateve) and it appealed to a lot of people. Anyway, I'll just have to figure out exactly what I want to do there.
-Well this ended up being long, but like I said, short story long. I don't know if anyone who reads this finds my writing/creative process interesting, but I always like hearing where writers get their ideas, so if you're anything like me, there you go. And by the way, I get most of inspiration from real life. I think it's extremely difficult for writers to NOT write semiautobiographically. Some are just a little more overt about it. (Grapes of Wrath, Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, etc.)
-In addition (switching gears now), I haven't been keeping up with the poetry portion of this blog. We're required to turn one poem in for workshop every week in my poetry writing class, but as you may have assumed, I am more of a fiction writer than poet. And let's be honest, some of my poems suck. Let's leave it at that. So I don't put all the sucky ones one here, just some. But after workshopping my last poem and receiving a pretty positive response, I decided to throw it up on here. Do and do not be offended by it. I think really religious people MAY be offended.
-My inspiration was a long car chat with Lili (one of my fellow youth leaders) about social injustice, racism, and poverty. One of the biggest issues that has been on my heart lately is the HLMs in Paris. Paris is the city of love, beauty, art, style and...terrible poverty. Surprised? Go on Wikepedia (in English, if you search French Wikepedia, you might even learn more, but let's be honest, none of my readers speak French) and search HLMs. It's kind of like the projects in Chicago or Compton. Terrible. Surprised still? I was. Paris isn't quite as glamorous as I expected.
-Anyway, this poem is also inspired by the unimaginable poverty and war-scarring in places like Haiti, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Rwanda, I could go on forever. So enjoy it, or cry, or be inspired to make a change. Let me know how it affects you. I would be interested to hear. It's titled "Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy name," and it's full of Biblical references.
-Well thank you for listening to/reading this impossibly long post. Hope you learned something new or somehow became a more richly charactered individual (read "A Lovely Love Story" by Edward Monkton for that :).
Bon Weekend.
Peace.
