writing practice
Two innovations lately. No longer doing one thing, but inventing a whole new game to play.
The first innovation then is no more inline commentary on what I'm writing, be it discussion of the best phrase, overall speculation about the piece, or just related rambling. Not even journal-type interjections. If it's meant to be a poem then irrespective of whether anything gets used every word should be meant at the time of writing to be part of the poem. Focus. All the blether can go on in my head in a nebulous way, instead of stomping on the page and getting underfoot.
The second innovation is to pick a word at random from a text and use it as the starting point and centre of a new piece of writing. Of course it's not wholly random, a word like 'is', or a name may not inspire any thought, but you try not to reject too many. The 'Mouth must' section of Green was written this way.
The other thing lately is abandoning the script Creeping Man for the foreseeable future. The story's great, but for some reason it's not interesting anymore. Whenever I want to work it slips out of focus and whole new ideas present themselves. At first it seemed like the problem was there were new ideas to push it aside. But then that thought turned itself around: the ideas are a way to escape from the script. I have to get away from the script to spend time with adults.
The main protagonist is an 11 year old child. She allows shifting perspectives and shifting levels of maturity in her speech. It's a way of exploring the adult world from the perspective of someone looking in from the outside. But although articulacy includes silences, stumbles and struggling toward things that remain beyond articulation, the inarticulacy of a child is more limiting than the inarticulacy of an adult.
It's not just Creeping Man. A short story, The Garden, also featured an 11 year old protagonist. In the course of writing that it occurred to me that I wanted to write for adults. Not in the sense of not writing for children, but in the sense of writing things that only people with a certain degree of experience could understand. At the same time it seemed perfectly reasonable, as already explained, to use a child to explore these ideas. And it is. Except after a while it becomes limited. However advanced a vocabulary you use the experience of a child is always limited.
The first innovation then is no more inline commentary on what I'm writing, be it discussion of the best phrase, overall speculation about the piece, or just related rambling. Not even journal-type interjections. If it's meant to be a poem then irrespective of whether anything gets used every word should be meant at the time of writing to be part of the poem. Focus. All the blether can go on in my head in a nebulous way, instead of stomping on the page and getting underfoot.
The second innovation is to pick a word at random from a text and use it as the starting point and centre of a new piece of writing. Of course it's not wholly random, a word like 'is', or a name may not inspire any thought, but you try not to reject too many. The 'Mouth must' section of Green was written this way.
The other thing lately is abandoning the script Creeping Man for the foreseeable future. The story's great, but for some reason it's not interesting anymore. Whenever I want to work it slips out of focus and whole new ideas present themselves. At first it seemed like the problem was there were new ideas to push it aside. But then that thought turned itself around: the ideas are a way to escape from the script. I have to get away from the script to spend time with adults.
The main protagonist is an 11 year old child. She allows shifting perspectives and shifting levels of maturity in her speech. It's a way of exploring the adult world from the perspective of someone looking in from the outside. But although articulacy includes silences, stumbles and struggling toward things that remain beyond articulation, the inarticulacy of a child is more limiting than the inarticulacy of an adult.
It's not just Creeping Man. A short story, The Garden, also featured an 11 year old protagonist. In the course of writing that it occurred to me that I wanted to write for adults. Not in the sense of not writing for children, but in the sense of writing things that only people with a certain degree of experience could understand. At the same time it seemed perfectly reasonable, as already explained, to use a child to explore these ideas. And it is. Except after a while it becomes limited. However advanced a vocabulary you use the experience of a child is always limited.
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