If you like it...

But if I had put a ring on her finger,
she would have told me the love was too small.

Such is love for people too big for this world,
the irony fantastically runs so deep.

Timeless songs never die, by their nature,
they fit no matter the circumstance.


10/04/2009

Words / Time

Herman Wouk used to keep “work journals” that he generated while warming up for the day, and they give me confidence in having to work through innumerable thoughts before getting them on paper. He wrote fiction, which arguably takes a more creative mindset than nonfiction, but most fiction writers recognize that the story often comes from real experiences. And, as John Irving mentioned at the National Book Festival last weekend, people become much less bashful about their own lives as they age.

But nonfiction also takes great creative skill, and good works have a grand thesis behind them that synthesizes many disparate aspects into one provocative idea. In addition to creating realistic characters, dialogue also makes fiction difficult; the nonfiction writer must be genuine and authoritative. Both writers, if his/her books sell, do the same. A fiction writer must create realistic parents and social interactions that affect, for example, an elementary-school adolescent who later takes his own life. The trouble is putting into words what real people act like, how the whole picture is formed from the micro-interactions that take place day to day. It takes an incredible amount of work to develop characters who talk and act like real people, but the fact is, all we need to do is look around us and be observant. In nonfiction, the people are real and the difficult part is keeping it as close to reality as possible. As we saw with the work of James Frey, though, the line is thin, and both scenarios make for something passable in either genre.

Perhaps for many of us this is the essence of the practice of blogkeeping: we’re glad to put words on the page and render them vocational by publishing them on the web. As a group, posts in the end may indeed amount to something useful, words that in combination depict a certain slice of reality. And the words can be rediscovered--or better yet, further cultivated--and turned into the fiction and nonfiction that later in life produce readable work.

"Start with the trunk of a tree, and then take up one branch after another so that the casual hearer can get a general idea of the whole subject, and then of its different branches, and just what relation they bear to each other." - John Altgelt

Conquering a song

When you hear a great song that used to remind you of someone and at last you think of another, you've come a long way. There are also those songs that make you give you a new jolt -- I woke up to "crazy" a few years ago as it blared on the alarm and knew that I had to begin once more. To think of someone during a song is a refreshing feeling, and sets up an invitation to enjoy more time with the person it reminds you of. A song can bring back the long lost, but it can also introduce something you to something new. Since I never hope to lose the song, I have to chalk it up to the continuity that we all witness in our daily affairs -- the "everything happens for a reason" mentality it is sometimes so difficult to accept. I'm happy to know that while it remains the same, my perspective can make the song change after all, and it will forever grow with me.

A monkey and fish

As a member of the “developed world” hoping to help those working in the development South, I find the following adage quite apt. To be effective, we have to question whether one system is better than the other, what we’re really hoping to change, and how we should help. Things that appear superior are not necessarily so, and thinking relatively seems the only path to “improving” the plight of others.

“A monkey and a fish were caught in a great flood. The monkey sprang to safety in a tree. Looking down, he saw the fish swimming hard, head on into the current. At considerable risk, he moved out onto a branch and swung down to scoop the fish out of the flood. Great was his disappointment when he found out that the fish was not pleased to receive this technical assistance.” – Don Adams

Identify

I will have to start anew. I keep trying to dig through old entries from my tireless journals, but the material there is old, and that is never what blog readers want to hear about. I’ll keep the writing pretty simple to keep on par with most of what is born digital. But, I have to establish some presence on the Internet, even if at this point it’s by pseudonym alone. Leave your comment, tell us what you think, what is your little piece of the world? My favorite thing about the digital age is the trend of the facebook page, so in vogue that many argue without it you hardly appear at all.

But what will I blog about? What might be called a memoirist wave in readership in the States, blogging and the great number of memoirs published in the last several years are signs that we crave an outlet for personal experience. One could argue, though, that it is simply a variant of fiction. Many of the most famous works have recounted an individual’s view on the world – could we not allege that Dickens, Alger, or even Orwell, did not write embellished memoirs? Today we must recount stories of our experience for fear of personality obsolescence. How can we see you if you’re not part of the cloud? As fiction was—and still is—an outlet to quench the thirst of the individual to see the collective, memoir is allowing individuals to be part of it. Sort of. Are we more fragmented because of all the time spent online, or are we more connected than ever?

Certainly, we have long lived by stories. As a quiet and introverted type, I sometimes wonder what people talk about all the time – I am sometimes mystified – but I suppose that’s it. I will try to do my share, and hopefully by finding a voice in ones and zeros I can find a stronger one in the real world. I can do my share, and post anecdotes about my day, a bit of trivia about archives and libraries, post a photo or two, and tell stories once in a while. Most of all, I can write about experiences and the people that grace my diurnal jaunt through the crowd.