Scars that inhibit the Muse

[Handley_Page]

My ghosts have ghosts.

Amen to that.
Same here.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Nobody's pure. We've all got ghosts. Here are two of mine.

1. Family mythology. You know, the kind where all the kids are assigned attributes and talents. My sister was "artistic"; my brother was "smart." I was supposed to be musical. I wasted so fucking many of my young years trying to be musical! It never occurred to me that I might be able to tell a story; now I feel like I wasted 3/4 of my life not telling stories.

2. Grammar Nazi mother. You know--copy of Fowler always at her elbow, little shrine to Strunk & White in a corner of the bedroom. She corrected us constantly, with the result that I ended up talking like an academic monograph. I had to unlearn all that shit. The way I did it was to fall in love with talk, and really listen--to taxi drivers, baristas, hotel maids, store clerks. My mom's been dead for almost twenty-five years, and I'm still trying to get her voice out of my head.

BTW, there's a whole pseudo-academic cottage industry built around the idea that a (sort of) middle-class burgher like Will Shakespeare couldn't possibly have written those sublime plays. There are lots of arguments, all crap, but they all originate with class prejudice.

The best evidence favoring the crap are Hillarys 7 autobiographies and all of Bill O'Reillys killing books. They and Shakespeare stay busy.

The middle class is a dork hatchery. When the middle class produces a star its because the stars ma fucked a cop or a bill collector.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Boo. I must really scare you, James. Of course I posted no such thing. You'll do anything to get my attention, won't you, big boy?

But I'll be all atwitter all day at the revelation that you write one paragraph at a time. Who knew?

You stay on my iggy list almost all the time, I'm so scared. Youre like the nutjob in the TRUNK MONKEY commercial with his face pressed against the car window, slobbering,


HERE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6WB5YJia8

 

[NOIRTRASH]

My scar is a life long curse.

IRL I come across as a simple simon like Rainman or Gomer Pyle. I invented odd. But stick a test in front of me and I fuck up the grade curve for all. I get the 100 and the brainiacs get the 70s. I'm always at odds with those who know more. I naturally find the test questions with multiple answers no one saw ahead of time. But I look so stupid as I correct the perfesser or boss or PILOT.

 

[legerdemer]

Those inhibitions might be a side effect of writing for a hobby rather than for a living. Were we doing it for a living we might write first and worry about it later.

I do write for my supper in RL - I'm a master by the 20th draft...

 

[loquere]

I have two scars that intimidate my Muse. The first came from a flippant comment my Mom once made. She was an avid reader. I don't know who or what book she was reading that prompted this comment, but she said, "I don't understand why so many authors go so deeply into flashbacks. If there's something we need to know about a character, start the story when that happens and flash forward."

My Mom wasn't a writer and she wasn't trying to instruct me how to be a writer. She was complaining about something that inhibited her enjoyment of a story. Still, that flippant comment haunts my writing and makes me question every flashback I ever consider.

#2: An English Lit professor in college that I otherwise respected. She once said, "Only the extremely rich or extremely poor are capable of writing the Great American Novel." She supported the comment with examples of authors in history that fit those extremes. She continued with suggesting, "Only the rich have enough leisure time to fully examine the human condition and only the exceptionally poor know enough strife to write about it authentically." According to her, middle-class people are not capable of creating writing of value or substance. They are either too busy earning a living to write or too well off to know real pain.

Fucking bitch.

Wow, #2 is flawed logic, but I bought into it for a second. I have many scars, I'm starting to overcome them now. I need to be in an ideal place mentally to write. Authoring is a delicate venture for me.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Wow, #2 is flawed logic, but I bought into it for a second. I have many scars, I'm starting to overcome them now. I need to be in an ideal place mentally to write. Authoring is a delicate venture for me.

#2 is dead on right.

Paul Fussell defined class in America. Its based on how you make your money NOT how much money you make. The middle classes are the self employed, and the self employed would rather die than risk an opinion or idea or cause. Creativity is alien to them. Getting along and going along is their creed.

 

[loquere]

#2 is dead on right.

Paul Fussell defined class in America. Its based on how you make your money NOT how much money you make. The middle classes are the self employed, and the self employed would rather die than risk an opinion or idea or cause. Creativity is alien to them. Getting along and going along is their creed.

Other than death, there are no other absolutes in life.

 

[sr71plt]

You stay on my iggy list almost all the time, I'm so scared. Youre like the nutjob in the TRUNK MONKEY commercial with his face pressed against the car window, slobbering,


HERE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6WB5YJia8

And yet you are so obsessed with me that you invoke me out of the blue in half of your posts to get my attention.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

And yet you are so obsessed with me that you invoke me out of the blue in half of your posts to get my attention.

Youre a pathetic chubby chaser.

 

[sr71plt]

And yet the chasing was started on this thread by you (#9). You're obsessed with getting my attention.

 

[Hypoxia]

Other than death, there are no other absolutes in life.

And bad grammar and grooming. And damn fools everywhere.

EDIT: And getting lost. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike..." Hey, that's life.

 

[PervOtaku]

I have two scars that intimidate my Muse. The first came from a flippant comment my Mom once made. She was an avid reader. I don't know who or what book she was reading that prompted this comment, but she said, "I don't understand why so many authors go so deeply into flashbacks. If there's something we need to know about a character, start the story when that happens and flash forward."

My Mom wasn't a writer and she wasn't trying to instruct me how to be a writer. She was complaining about something that inhibited her enjoyment of a story. Still, that flippant comment haunts my writing and makes me question every flashback I ever consider.

There's a certain narrative order that things have. The flashback is relevant to the place in the story it's given. If it's done as a prologue instead but nothing about it makes sense until halfway through the story, that's a problem.

I have a certain pet peeve about useless in media res, like a TV episode that opens with the main characters in some dire trouble, then jumps to "24 hours earlier" and you don't get back to that dire trouble until the climax of the episode five minutes before the end. The purpose of it is to hook the viewer, make them stick around to find out what's going on, but the problem is that most of the time 1) these people get into dire trouble nearly every episode, so there's nothing really unique about this time, and 2) you've been watching this show for years, you don't need a hook to make you want to watch.

Now, while laying the groundwork for a story I will eventually write, I was struggling with the placement of the hook. I consider the hook to be the real start of the story, and it's the thing that makes you sit up, take notice, and say "this is going to be interesting". However, there are some things that happen before the hook that are very important as to why everything else in the story is happening, and it became more and more clear I couldn't just cover it with a one or two paragraph narration exposition. Yet, these things before the hook are much less exciting. So I decided that I will actually go with in media res for this one, but 1) after jumping back, the story catches up with the hook shown in the open rather quickly, in fact it will be within the first chapter, and 2) it's a new protagonist who has never been in a story before, so grabbing hold of the readers as soon as possible is actually important.

All of which is to say, it's important to consider your story structure and why things are best told in a certain order.

The first erotica story I wrote has two flashbacks, and one of them is two chapters long. The female protagonist is the main viewpoint character, and the flashbacks are about the male protagonist, things he did before meeting her. The flashbacks are placed at the points where she learns about the events within them. It would spoil the narrative quite a bit if the story were rearranged into chronological order.

A story I just finished writing and will submit next year also has flashbacks a plenty. Very nearly the first thing that happens is the male protagonist helps the female protagonist out, and as soon as she realizes he's a nerdy virgin, she fucks him. He's the viewpoint character for the first two chapters, so it's significant that the reader doesn't know anything more about her than he does. I had actually intended on not giving her much background beyond that, but then I decided I wanted to know, and I had to write it. So chapters 3 and 4 are flashbacks just about her. I couldn't just put them first, because being familiar with her ruins the mystique of him losing his virginity to this girl he just met, and also he's pretty central to the story (and the title!) and it wouldn't track well if he didn't show up at all until the third chapter.

So there's very important, if convoluted, reasons for doing it that way with the flashbacks. And that doesn't even go into the second flashback, which also has a very important reason for things to be told out of sequence, and the third flashback, which is really a flashback-within-a-flashback, which sounds terribly strange and complicated but it makes sense in context, I swear. Things would be super ruined if those two were told in chronological order.

 

[loquere]

What makes good writing is being able to draw from experiences. Someone whose been on a battle field can spin a Great War story, someone whose been shot or stabbed can write with true accuracy.

 

[timmyid2]

Scars come from experiences, generally bad ones. Writing is inspired by experiences, often bad ones. You have to take one with the other.

In my case it is the offhand comments are the ones that scar the most. I'll forever remember a comment from my brother when I was 12 years old. I was proudly showing off a song I'd learned for a school play, and midway through he stopped me with "It's a nice song, too bad you can't do it right." I still don't sing in front of anyone.

The scars that discourage me from writing are the comments I got in high school from my teachers. I'd labor over an essay or research paper for days in order to get everything just right. Then I'd get a B or a C. The criticisms that justified the grade were almost always nit-picking, and virtually none of the comments were positive.

Scars can heal. I've written a few small stories that I posted here, and have seen pretty positive responses. That's a very satisfying feeling. The next story will be a bit more complicated, if I ever get it finished.

timmy

 

[Hypoxia]

There's a certain narrative order that things have. The flashback is relevant to the place in the story it's given. If it's done as a prologue instead but nothing about it makes sense until halfway through the story, that's a problem.

Yet obviously the action--> flashback--> resumption plot model works because it's so common. Length and complexity of the initial action (hook) and flashback factor into how comfortable the flashback feels. The resumption can end in a cliffhanger drawing readers to the next episode -- groovy. Or it can merely resolve the initial action's problem. Or not.

If plotting or avoiding flashbacks stifles the muse, it's time for some attitude adjustment. I recommend Irish coffee.

What makes good writing is being able to draw from experiences. Someone whose been on a battle field can spin a Great War story, someone whose been shot or stabbed can write with true accuracy.

One of the best fantasy-action battle scenes I've read was by an author with martial arts (karate & fencing) training. She *knew* how to describe those moves. I have no such skills. I wouldn't plagiarize to write something similar, but I'd sure study how she did it.

Okay, there's another muse-stifler: facing a scene about which we know nothing and must wing it, hopefully without humiliating ourselves.