Susan's Writings

The Art of the Short Story

The Garden of Forking Paths, by Jorge Luis Borges

 This story is one of the best we had to read this week. I feel an understanding of the story as a reader and as a writer as well.

As a reader, it is a cautivating story. The elements of Quantum Physics gives the story a touch that triggers to think of some Metaphysical questions present in ‘What the Bleep? Down the Rabbit Hole’. 

“Almost instantly, I understood: ‘the garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘the various futures (not to all)’ suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. “

Although here, Borges talks about ‘fictional works’ when it is a daily fact happening  in every situation that we are confronted with several alternatives and depending on the choice we make the way we are going to be building up our future will be. In our personal and individual reality, we can chose only one alternative, and that alternative chosen will lead in a consequence.

In the fiction of Borges, Ts’ui Pên chooses all the alternatives simultaneously creating several alternate futures –parallel lives– in Time that will also fork.

“In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses– simultaneously–all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which they also proliferate and fork.”

Time is present in Borges writing. Time and the eternal problem of understanding the way it works. In a discussion the two characters have almost at the end of the story, the reader cannot do anything else but to stop and think about the meaning of time. In my particular case, I had to stop the reading, go and lie down on the floor, close my eyes and think and meditate for a short while. That, because I am an eternal obsessed with time, its meaning and the way it works. Even though so much has been said since the discovery of time, many questions are still unanswered.

“The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.”

With the elements of Meta-fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths is an excellent and thought-provoking story that shows much about the kind of mind Borges was.

 The Art of the Short Story

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This story is a beautiful illustration of human cruelty, ignorance, abuse and lack of sensitivity toward other beings who are seen as different and are not understood by society in one way or another.

Garcia Marquez gives the Angel the virtue of patience. Elisenda and Pelayo show how cruel people can be when following their instincts of greed.

This story is a good example of Magical Realism. I enjoyed reading it, especially since I haven’t read anything by Garcia Marquez since I read “A Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”.

Creating Fiction

“Other Bodies, Ourselves: The Mask of Fiction by John Gregory Brown

Reading “Other Bodies, Ourselves: The Mask of Fiction”  was extremely interesting. First, what does Brown say about writers being liars? Well, I have a problem here and it comes to the word ‘lie’. In addition, I wonder if I would consider writing fiction as telling lies or if I would consider writing fiction as expressing imagination and creativity. I think the later goes more with my way of perceiving a writer’s work or any artist’s work. Indeed, creating fiction is showing a capacity of pure imagination. A fiction writer creates characters and situations out of his/her sense of creativity. I would not say a result of a creation in a lie. If we consider a lie as something that is not true, we could say that if someone says the sky is orange that is a lie. Unless that is the color a fiction writer gives to the sky of the imaginary world he/she is creating. Would that be a lie? A lie would be something like a kid telling his mom he did his homework before starting to play a video game. There is no creation there. I don’t know if I’m getting my point across here. I just want to say that I wouldn’t consider a fiction story as a lie.

 ”It is both a great privilege and a terrible struggle for fiction writers to offer so much in their work, to concoct stories that attempt to inch their way toward an answer to that difficult question of why we do what we do, what it is exactly that we hope to offer the world. What is the meaning of fiction?”

Here, Brown presents two good and smart questions. Two questions we, as writers, should give some thought and try to get our own answers from our individual point of view. Without following the crowd. Daring to jump out of the box. As writers, we are born with a capacity of observation. That observation makes us wonder about the realities around us and about our own reality as well. We search for answers. We have creative ideas of how things would be. We start creating characters, setting, stories, a whole world of fiction and imagination that is vivid in our minds, crying to come out. We listen and translate those voices in our heads into words. A new story is born. Through our creative work, we hope to offer the world a chance to dream. We hope to offer magic moments in which the reader can escape from the daily routine to swim in the sea of our stories, our creations. We hope to have something meaningful to offer to whoever is ready and wants to hear. The meaning of fiction is translated as pure creativity and imagination. Fiction is the place where writer and reader become one. Where the only limits are the limits we put to our minds. At least, in my world.

Brown concludes, and here, I agree with him:

“The best I can offer is this humble reply. The meaning of fiction is, I believe, the grand and glorious leap we make, both as we speak and as we listen, from our own lives to those of others. The meaning of fiction is our empathy, our ability to recognize ourselves in others, others in ourselves. The teller of stories, the writer of fiction, wears a mask that possesses, if the writer has done his job well, the remarkable power to reveal the writer’s true face, the writer’s truest features. And the listener, the reader of fiction, wears his own mask, a mask that the story strips away to reveal what is nothing less than a startling and miraculous transformation: for the face beneath that mask has become the face of human tragedy and struggle and triumph and grace. It is a face, lo and behold, much like that of fiction’s characters, a face precisely like that of the writer’s. It is the face of empathy, a face always ready to be reshaped, reconfigured, and ultimately transformed.”

About the Writer

A journey into Susan’s world of Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing. -

Susan Fourtane is a freelancee journalist and short fiction story writer trying her hand at screenwriting. She is working to create that great masterpiece that will tell the world something meaningful that will touch the sensitivity in every individual’s soul. . .

. . . And if one soul has become nourished by her thoughts, by her words, then she has accomplished one of her most cherished dreams.

In the meantime, she dreams. What to do if not to dream, if dreams are the place where the illusions come from. The place where we create what we want to become true. Nothing happens unless first a dream.

Susan is currently a member of Writer’s Village University, where she has taken Creative Fiction and Non-Fiction writing courses as well as Screenwriting.
She has been Moderator of The Literary Gang in a Short Story MFA program.
Susan is also a member of the American Screenwriters Association and The Poets and Writers Registry.

As a citizen of the world, Susan began her search for her place in the world in Buenos Aires, Argentina; back in the beginning of the year 2000. After many travels looking for her dream place, having lived in Argentina, Mexico, the United States, England,The Czech Republic, and Estonia, her soul found that dream place in Finland in September 2006.

Susan has been living in Helsinki, Finland, ever since, where she combines journalism and writing with Philosophy studies, teaching, her passion for the Arts and the closeness to nature.