essay on directions for short stories
What the hell is going on with my stories? Why have they become more and more comedic and absurd, after years of writing closer to the day to day and trying to develop something of an American Realist* approach? I hope that I am moving toward something interesting. We'll see. Today I am going to explain the geneses of my sub-text, and provide a road map for the next few stories I write, at least...
To follow what I am going to write about requires me to make sure you know a few literary movements (all interpretations are of course influenced by my subjective education).
The modernist movement sought to find symbols and meanings that artists from any culture could use to explain the world... kind of like a secret language, a subtext, that all the critics and writers and prof.'s could all agree upon. The idea was one of unity through art, etc. Like a universal belief system that encompassed us all would come into being and everyone would act all white (which was the popular way of being at the time, before Snoop Dog led us out of the desert). Of course, no one could agree on which symbols were going to be used. The imposition of imperial ideas on indigenous cultures that is inherent in this equation is part of why it fell out of fashion, I imagine.
So after the modern, they slapped the word 'post' on the word, and now everyone is supposed to know that the major intellectual stream running through our culture has shifted. Instead of searching for the universal meanings, they began deconstructing them. The time of Post-Meaning, Post-truth, Post-god... had arrived.
We call our present epoch post-modern because now we no longer believe that there is a universal truth. We think truth has fractured into the psychic sensations of 'belief' that lead so many astray (belief, as I like to write as much as possible, is a purely psychic sensation that may or may not be tied to some of what we think of as empirically proven truths).
I love all the theory behind literature. I don't read it like I once did, but when I do, I fall right back into being mesmerized by all the complex levels of meaning that can be conveyed by crafting how ones words strike others. The words we speak reverberate on all sorts of levels. There is usually truth layers one, two, and three...
This is why DECONSTRUCTION became so important to the post-modern movement. Deconstruction strips off all the beliefs that are laid on a word or phrase or event or ... and tries to examine them all. A time period, for instance, is usually written up by ancient historians as a testament of the lives of the rich and powerful. Deconstructionlists would take this as one component of what was happening, and then examine peasant lives, the environment, the ramifications of laws and doctrines. This Deconstruction of the period obviously leads to a more through, enlightening view.
The very meaning of words come into question when deconstructed; some will strip the human down to a purely sociobiologically explained entity acting out the dictates of the ape and filling up libraries with lies about why we do so (lies is harsh -- they are just more or less the myths we live by to shield ourselves from the awfulness of death and loss). Others will accept whatever the psychic sensation of 'belief' seems to confirm in their guts is true.
Writers and artists are traditionally known to be the bridges between the minds of obtuse science and the average myth laden man. Whether this is true or not is open to debate; I think it is truer than ever, in a time when the natural ability of man the writer is being taken seriously again with the age of blogging, etc. Everyone should keep journals and write their stories, etc. Art should not be for only the wildly talented. I truly think if everyone developed this part of their mind more, we would be much better critical thinkers (an opinion I have glommed off brighter bulbs than mine).
How all of this relates specifically to me is important. Knowledge dead of all ties to the now is nothing more than an intellectual knick-knack, and quite frankly I want to keep room on my drug weakened shelves for the pertinent (this belief comes from a history prof. who I loved, and who rescued me from the dry shit in high school and ignited me with a true love of seeing mankind in the larger context of time). I am trying to develop a new style of writing -- well, not so much trying as organically moving there; I want to use the humor skills I have been developing in here, while still keeping my work relevant on a deeper context.
There is a debate and a conversation going on between writers and critics and readers, and it takes place beneath the surface of the slap stick kills and blood raging hamsters.
Sometimes I think that just having my philosophy and kind of extolling it in all my work is enough of a subtext.
Lately, I see this style as moving toward pointing out the absurdity of narration. By this I mean people have slots for narration. They respond to drama and comedy of a certain sort, and Hollywood writers know all this. Newscasters do to. And so do liars of all stripes. Ministers know that putting a story a certain way, speaking in cadences that evoke in the chimp a sensation of 'belief,' will get all the apes in us up clapping and jumping around.
I want to deconstruct the narrative in ways that make people question facts placed in stories like they are true. Assumptive writing wants the reader to agree with the writer about all kinds of subjects before they can even have a dialog; usually this entails god. Read a Christian book with a head like mine and all you see is a banal, over-done myth masquerading as a subtext, when in reality the subtext is much deeper, and involves EO Wilson's theories of why humans act as they do (biological imperatives exist for everything from killing yourself for the tribe to adopting kittens, and exploring them helps us to understand ourselves, which may or not be the first step out of the jungles of our cultural birth... once more ON HUMAN NATURE is a college education onto itself, and will bring anyone up to date on a major scientific and philosophical component of our present and future culture ).
This new style I am seeing come out is what I am writing about here, despite all the digressions....
digression after digression
limping along in transcendence
Basically, I am going to try to use all the techniques of narrative, but turn them on their heads a bit. I mean, I need a new structure for the components of the story to do this. Meaning I deconstruct the plot, characters, prose style, etc... And then use these components in jarring ways. Just by having a readers mind begin to question the conventions of a narrative as the arbitrator of truth is not enough; I have to make the stories somehow fit into their daily life, too.
I have been re-reading Infinite Dreams, a book by Joseph Haldeman... excellent sci-fi guy; master of prose and plot whose work so blew me away when I was eighteen that I went out and read everything he had written, and have been reading and re-reading his work ever since. He uses very traditional realist prose as a way of grounding the fantastic. He also uses a lot of different prose styles, and little 'tricks,' if you will. Like a story about two brothers who never meet, told in a split screen manner. Most writers pretty much stick to a few formulas. Not sci-fi writers necessarily.
Haldeman is not writing the kind of comedic stuff that would really lead me down a particular road, just a good lesson in giving the reader an interesting plot and satisfying prose. I know that writing truly weird plots about wino ghosts is not going to satisfy unless there are certain elements in the story, ways for the reader to enter the fictional dream... I tend to rely on voice for this. Like the Johnny Pain voice, or Gilford Tuttle. Holden Caulfield is one of the best examples of a how a narrative voice can hold together a lot of disparate plot elements. This narrator is the key to a book. Channeling other people, in a play sense, is easy for me.
So, I guess I need to design some stories... rather than just writing and writing and writing and pulling out the few good words. Our God Ralph turned out like that. I never meant it to become anything, and it didn't. Why? The plot was weak as hell. There is a book in something like that. Why not? But I didn't lay out what was going to happen, just kind of kept writing whatever popped into my head. Maybe I'll read it over and be re-inspired some day... more than likely, I will slap some silly end on it and call it a long short story. And tell myself that the next few stories need to be mulled over and then written. I don't find a serious difference between the end product of the story whether it was a writing assignment or something I produced organically, anways...
Well, for such as it is, this has been a glimpse behind the curtain at the guy in the housecoat with the disheveled hair. Any suggestions for reading on post-modern plotting techniques would be welcome, though I doubt anyone will actually get this far into this essay...
Eat an Elf!!!!