Susan's Writings

Creating Fiction 

 Thinking About fiction

Creative Adventures: The Fiction Writer’s Apprenticeship by Charles Johnson. 

 I finished reading the last section of Chapter 1, Thinking About Fiction in Creating Writing, -Creative Adventures: The Fiction Writer’s Apprenticeship by Charles Johnson.  As I mentioned before, I consider my reading slow in the sense that reading, for me, is not only a matter of going from one page to the other but a way of finding paragraphs, sentences, even words able to trigger thoughts. I have always appreciated a thought-provoking read and reading this section of the chapter activated many thoughts in different areas, from writing to Philosophy, from creativity to my own life’s perspective and goals and many other things. I was lured by this section from the very beginning when I learned that Charles Johnson started his writing career when the idea for a philosophical novel came to him when he was a philosophy student.

 Johnson’s first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, was published in 1974 when the author was studying for this Ph.D. in phenomenology and literary aesthetics at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.

That was enough to keep my attention. Then I read about his fascination by the dilemma of Descartes when reading a book by Bertrand Russel. I felt a connection with Charles Johnson that can be due to the fact that for some time now I have been trying to find out if it would be possible to combine my philosophy studies –in progress- with my writing and other knowledge about the countless subjects that interest me. I felt the answers to some of my questions were written in this section. Therefore, I felt motivated and even more determined to make this Short Story MFA program work for me. My latest interest for screenwriting also had an answer here. Intrigued by Charles Johnson’s works I Goggled him to find out that he wrote screenplays too. Now imagine the speed of my thoughts at that moment. 

 If you want to know more about Charles Johnson: www.oxherdingtale.com/index.htm 

www.charlesjohnson.wlu.edu/ 

Johnson says that if a writer is not writing fresh material or revising, he is reading  -literature, philosophy, mythology, the science- everything that employs the word or researching and if he is not doing any of the above he is relaxing over a meal or with a book or a film, but only truly with a portion of his mind – the rest of his thoughts are mindful of how the film or book is constructed, and even at the dinner table as he sips a glass of wine he is focusing on the particular taste, smell, and feel of things so he won’t draw a blank when writing.

And that cannot be truer, when I am watching a film I am thinking of the plot, the characters, the dialogue, I wonder about the script and the scriptwriter. Sometimes when recommending a film to a friend I say “You have to see this film, it’s a very good story or the characters are great.” The other day I was getting ready to watch “Don’t forget you’re going to die,” an independent French film, and when sipping a glass of French red wine I wondered how many adjectives could it be possible to use to describe ‘wine.’ I started some research after that in case one day one of my characters is drinking wine and I need to add a good description to the scene.  

One of my all times worries has been about what to write that has not been written before and here I could start and write pages and pages about what I think about the human thoughts and the collective conscious previously described by C. Jung.  Charles Johnson says that good writing teachers would tell you to research a literary form not used for a major work in the last hundred years – some dinosaur once popular, then pushed aside by the course of evolution- then have you plot a new story updating it for the current century’s audience.

That makes me think it is a good idea but in a second thought it reminds me what once I said about not finding anything new in this world in the past centuries. Everything has already been said, invented, discovered, you name it. That concept I have applies to literature, science, music, fashion, art, film, inventions, everything. Everything is a ‘remake’ of something that has existed before.

That is my main challenge when thinking of ideas for writing.

 Creating Fiction 

Thinking About Fiction

My thoughts on the first two sections of Thinking About Fiction: The sections are full of good advice. I enjoyed both sections but I liked The Trigger best. There are many, many lines I could quote, lines that kept me thinking and wondering and thinking again that writing about anything is possible if we can find the right touch, the right words and the right way to do it. 

 Experience and invention is a part of the section that I liked and motivated me in a way. The fact that sometimes I’m not sure if it’s better to base the fiction story on experience or to let the imagination flow and invent a complete story. “What if . . .” I think that’s something worth to try. 

 Writing about the strongest reactions we have had, using guided imaginary or just imaginary elements if we can’t have them guided. Basically anything can trigger a story.

The ashtray. That part was surprising. If I try to do the same and I start a story with the red candle in front of the window on a winter day -that is the first thing I can see when looking up, what would it happen? Would I come up with a story? A story about what? Maybe the important thing is to think of what’s next, the next sentence and the next one and at some point I would have a paragraph and finally a story.

  And finally, not all works well or the same for all the writers. That’s quite logical as there are different learning styles.

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.”