October 17, 2009, 1:37 am
Filed under: Uncategorized
Alright, so I’ve already forgotten how to upload a file to a post, but I’m trying.
This is the story I sent to Dennis Hamely. He sent me his comments a while ago, but I was too scared to take a look at them. Yes, I was. Especially because I didn’t want to read the embarrassing things I wrote last year. But I did read my story again and I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t THAT bad.
This happens to be the only “love” story I’ve written.
“Your heart is my pinata” Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
Have you seen that one really good movie called The Fight Club? Or have you heard that little asian talking non-stop about him? No wait, I’ve heard she is Mexican. Oh well.
I’ll give you some reasons to read his works:
1) Chuck Palahniuk’s writing has a very sarcastic, dark humorous voice. It’s original and no matter how many books I read or try to read, I’ve never ever read something a bit similar to his works.
2) Chuck Palahniuk’s plots are original and unexpected, you never know what is going to happen. You even won’t be able to think what could happen while reading his books.
3) Chuck Palahniuk is dead honest, he will describe things as they are without making them a bit charming. His books have been called very disturbing, I just think he is honest.
4) Chuck Palahniuk’s books are an intelligent read. They are the kind of books that will make you think and wonder about certain topics you probably haven’t even thought of.
5) Chuck Palahniuk’s characters are original, unique and realistic.
6) This is pretty much a good reason to read this book or watch this movie. I mean, Brad Pitt? YES!
1. Write write write write and write.
Like Josefin wrote, just start writing, even without thinking. Write as much as you can until you get bored. Write no matter if it’s good or bad. JUST WRITE, ok? Just write …
2. Revise, revise, revise and OH revise.
After you’ve written a lot of useless stuff you get to read everything. This is when you will get rid of those corny or just plain bad parts of your story. This is when you will have a chance to change every single sentence if you want to, or change the entire story if you feel like it. You are allowed to take the time you want and also show it to people you want to show it to and that you think they might help you.
3. DO NOT WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT.
If you want to write about the imortality of the crab, but you don’t know anything about it, please, make your research first. There is nothing worse than reading wrong facts about something you know about. This is not supposed to mean that you need to know everything to be a writer, but please make sure you know what you are writing about … or no one else will.
Anyway, Patrick started driving really fast, and just before we got to the tunnel, Sam stood up, and the wind turned her dress into ocean waves. When we hit the tunnel, all the sound got scooped up into a vacuum, and it was replaced by a song on the tape player. A beautiful song called “Landslide.” When we got out of the tunnel, Sam screamed this really fun sream, and there it was. Downtown. Lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder. Sam sat down and started laughing. Patrick started laughing. I started laughing.
And in that moment, I swear we were inifinite.
Ok, so what I just typed is a piece of the most recent book I’ve read called The Perks of Being a Wallflower byStephen Chbosky. If you’ve read it, congratulations, you are living your life right. If you haven’t then GO GET IT! I sadly still have the copy from the library and I’m planning to keep it for a while, so good luck finding a copy. But seriously, read it, it’s one of those books that will really change your life at least a little bit.
So here is the prompt: What you just read was Charlie’s infinite moment and I hope you know what it’s meant with inifinite. Have you had an inifinite moment? What makes you feel infinite? Please share some memories with us and don’t ignore this because it did take me a while to type all of this.
Every time I walk through the narrow, crowded, head-ache-giving hallways I always try to keep eye contact with everybody. But the tired, zombie like, annoyed faces of the students never give me the expected, possitive, bright answer I need. Sometimes I feel like an obnoxious, strange, insane creeper, but this is not enough to make me stop.
Sometimes I walk into quadratical, big, white classrooms and sit waiting for someone to make my gloomy, awful, disappointing day. I sit there for fifty long, anxious, killing minutes looking at the poster covered, solid, cold walls, listening to the monotone, raspy, boring voice of my teacher. Putting my little, asian, brown eyes on different, unknown, random things to entretain my bored, weird, restless self. And out of nowhere I detect a radiant, luminous, colgate smile aiming to me. Silly, awkward, little geek, I knew it would be you.
Imagine being stuck in a little hut with a crazy, old woman who suddenly tells you a story about a bride who kills one of her bridesmaid in that exact place. Would you stay there overnight? Well, Jennifer and Maureen did as their car got stuck in the snow on their way to a nice weekend with their half sister Helen who was about to marry.
The Miniaturist by Heidi Julavits was probably my favourite story of McSweeney’s collection not only because of the plot, but the way Julavits made the little, usless facts through the story, the most important at the end. I liked the attitude of the characters and the places they were in, and I read the story like if it had actually happened, because Julavits managed to put me in the middle of the happenings.
The story has a very unexpected ending, which recalls all the little details you ignored before, making you go “Ahhhhhhh!!!”. That is a feeling I enjoy a lot.
I never thought of writing suspense. To be honest, before writing Vision Through Sound I wasn’t aware I could do such thing. But now that I have started it, I’ve realized it’s probably better than writing any other kind of stories. While reading McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories I started noticing how “cool” suspense is. I’m not even kidding, I feel cooler than before.
There are many nice things about writing suspense, horror, mystery, science fiction, whatever you want to call the genre of the collection (if you are confused because of this, please read the review first). The aspect I liked the most is that there is no prohibitions while writing a story of this genre, no matter how disturbing it is. 7C by Jason Roberts had a butchery scene while Minnow by Ayelet Waldman had a very odd sex scene, yet those scenes didn’t ruin the story. My story might not be disturbing at all, but this aspect did encourage me a little bit to make my simple, bad tempered, mysterious pianist a murderer. I am allowed to anyway, right?
There was a story with a really interesting structure, The Child by Roddy Doyle. The story was written mostly with short sentences, most of them started with he. I noticed how this made the story seem faster, giving it a frustrating mood.
“He didn’t dream. He never remembered dreams. He lay on the bed. He listened to the rain and the fridge. He slept. He woke. He looked at the clock. Half-five. He was tired but pleased. He’d slept”
I didn’t use this technique for my short story, not that I’m aware of. But it did catch my attention and now I feel like writing something like that (I’m not that original, as you can see).
One thing I already knew, and that I think I managed to do in my own story, is the hiding of details to make the reader want to know more about the situation or the characters. Most of the stories I read don’t tell you exactly what is happening and this makes the reader want to read more until they are satisfied. On the first scene of my story, I use a lot of this and that, words which don’t really tell what it’s meant. I also didn’t let Laurence play until the end. My intention for it was to make the reader want to get to the point he plays, which I hope it worked.
What I learned in short story genre overall, is that every single word counts. The characters, the conflict and the resolution have to be written well and as clear as possible. What You Do Not Know You Want by David Mitchell was one of the stories I skipped after reading 10 pages of it. It seemed endless to me and no matter how much I read I didn’t get to know any of the characters or the conflict. I think Mitchell wrote a lot and couldn’t be bothered in cutting the story a little bit to leave only the important facts of it. I think writing more than the necessary is a big no-no.
So basically, this is what I’ve learned from my reading: Writers are allowed to write about whatever they want, as long as they can characterize well, use strategies to make their reading interesting and know what is necessary in the story and what is not.
I think I was aware of it while revising Vision Through Sound and hope the final result is not a mess.
The word genre is a French word which is used to categorise books into different shelves of the library. But what Michael Chabon, editor of McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, is trying to emphasize with the introduction to this collection, is that there is always a little bit of horror in the romance, fiction in the biographies, mystery in the historical, etc. This introduction couldn’t be better for this particular collection of short stories, since it has a variety of stories written by well known horror writers, such as Stephen King and newcomers, like Jason Roberts. The combination of mystery, horror, the supernatural among others makes McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories a fresh read without going through the trouble of selecting one genre.
The collection starts with a dark, gothic, science fiction story by Margaret Atwood. Lusus Naturae is a story about a “freak of nature” trying to hide from the town it lives in. This is followed by Ayelet Waldman’s Minnow, a magnificent story with disturbing imagery about an abortion and a supposed-mother-to-be, who can’t stop hearing a baby cry through her baby monitor.
Among these stories, there is King’s action entry, Lisey and The Madman, which won’t let you put the book down until you know what happens to Lisey’s husband, the pale student and Lisey’s annoying underwear.
7C by Jason Roberts is the winner of the August Van Zorn Prize for the Weird Short Story because of its disturbing yet romantic mood. Think of suddenly having a scar which instead of healing, it “unheals”. Roberts’ story is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting and creative entries of this collection.
A fingernail-biting story with an unexpected ending would be The Miniaturist by Heidi Julavits. This is the story of two sisters stuck in a little wood house in the middle of a snow storm, the same house where a man murdered his entire family.
These are only five of the fifteen different fiction stories, which can’t be ordered in any special genre. Some might seem boring for the reader, as some of them were for me, but there was always a new, fresh, different story on the other side of the page in which I could sink for the next thirty minutes. I recommend this collection to science fiction fans, who enjoy staying up all night reading in bed and jumping to every suspicious sound they hear.
She talked the most when she wasn’t with him. The first time and maybe only time she heard him talk was on their first date, he said “It smells like cucumber, is that your perfume?” before he ran out the door. It’s obvious you try to avoid meeting people like that. But she didn’t mind meeting him on an internet site. He is a writer, a very good writer looking for someone to give him inspiration. What is going to be wrong with him?
And now she was sitting in their little apartment which was more silent than one of her expositions. The sofa crunched every time someone tried to sit on it because of the broken pencils or the sad notebook that had suffered from the weight of the couple. They could have been called the tree murderers because of the amount of paper they used everywhere. Every single trash can was filled with paper, every single table had its own scribbled notebook and the walls had forgotten their colour because of the post-its that had taken over them. She never bothered cleaning the mess, it was pointless, then there was more to come. She just wished it would stop.
Meet me at the soccer field; we could give it another try. Sure, she thought, she wasn’t going to be cold-hearted. She found his hay hair and cow eyes lying down in the middle of the soccer field. He looked up at her, smiling, probably smelling the cucumbers again. Maybe he doesn’t like crowded places, she thought. But he, instead of starting a conversation, took his notebook and wrote I’m too shy to talk. Entertained by this, she took the notebook and replied: Me too.
What she thought it would be temporal turned into something she got used to. He never talked, he just wrote. She didn’t know how his voice sounded like; sometimes she almost had forgotten how hers sounded. Every time she was alone in that paper-covered living room, she wondered herself why. Why she was totally fine with it, why she didn’t complain. She wondered why even after three and half months they had never shared a word. She wondered if it was worth it.
The door opened and the sound of his heavy boots broke the silence. The sofa crunched once again. Hello, he wrote, lighting the biggest smile on her face.
This is probably the coolest blogprompt so far! I watched Watchmen recently and I was really mad at the fact that one guy was like “Hey I’m blue and I can do whatever I want because I have all the superpowers you can think of”. Someone was a huge fan of Eifel 65 right there. Remember I’m blue dabadee dabadah?
I wouldn’t be blue or would shine. I would be able to jump really high. In my dreams I can’t run, but I can jump pretty high and long distances too. How is that a superpower? Well, it would be mixed with the amazing ninja skills that I already have. So basically, I would jump to the crime and throw ninjastars at the bad kids. I just think it’s cool, imagine not having to buy plane tickets because you could jump to whatever country you want to.
My weakness would be mud because I would stick to the ground without being able to jump. It would kill the cells that make me jump high for a week and it would give me 1 week of bad hair days.
