Where the Telling Resides
08/12/06 6:30 AM – 6:55 AM
Open your eyes. Wake up and open your eyes to delight. Follow where it leads. The images of the character. The proclivities of the story. What’s funny? What’s amusing? What entertains? Pick up and start again. Drink your coffee. Yes, later you will need to do your laundry and clean the bathroom. But be here now.
Hard-boiled is the gentle cynic. Don’t ask where it’s all going or what it all means, just copy down what comes next. There is this and that is the thing that is worth doing right now. So. So what do you do for the next fifteen minutes? Disgorge words. Right then. The color of the walls is white with blue permeating. The door out is closed. The closet door is open. What is in the closet? The same thing that’s always in the closet, Pinky. Monsters. Are they the friendly ones? No. The friendly ones only teach you letters and numbers. They’d be eaten in a second by the things in the closet. But amnesia is still a fascinating story device.
Forgetting those things which hover like bees in the past, we press on toward the things that flicker in the foreground. The color of the sidewalk is beige smothered in gray. And Grey is the name of the day. What happens next? Won’t know until we write it, will we? Hee, hee! And there we are, me harties. Nothing here but old salts for new wounds. That’s like three in one. Pick it up and start again. Nothing here but words and hints and allegations of a whole. When we walked down the street, we assumed it would be for the day. The adventure of seven months was not in our minds. But the possibility was. The nature of the spaceship is its limited imitation of earth. We try to comprehend the thing, but that is the way to stop writing. Only words poured fourth in the service of characters in situation. So. So what comes first, the characters or the situation? Essense or action? Faster now. Pick up speed and loose the day in these odd squiggles. Not quite absolutely true is it? Everything they told you about writing fiction was fiction. You make it up as you go along. Except that you don’t, exactly. When I was sixteen and still believed in love, I mowed the lawn without a shirt on, clipping the Walkman to the back of my shorts. The wire of the headphones tickled the skin between my shoulders. The smell of fresh cut grass. The reluctance to act submerged by the necessity of action. Finding yourself there, you find the will to forgetting and finding.
Open your eyes. Wake up and open your eyes to delight. Follow where it leads. The images of the character. The proclivities of the story. What’s funny? What’s amusing? What entertains? Pick up and start again. Drink your coffee. Yes, later you will need to do your laundry and clean the bathroom. But be here now.
Hard-boiled is the gentle cynic. Don’t ask where it’s all going or what it all means, just copy down what comes next. There is this and that is the thing that is worth doing right now. So. So what do you do for the next fifteen minutes? Disgorge words. Right then. The color of the walls is white with blue permeating. The door out is closed. The closet door is open. What is in the closet? The same thing that’s always in the closet, Pinky. Monsters. Are they the friendly ones? No. The friendly ones only teach you letters and numbers. They’d be eaten in a second by the things in the closet. But amnesia is still a fascinating story device.
Forgetting those things which hover like bees in the past, we press on toward the things that flicker in the foreground. The color of the sidewalk is beige smothered in gray. And Grey is the name of the day. What happens next? Won’t know until we write it, will we? Hee, hee! And there we are, me harties. Nothing here but old salts for new wounds. That’s like three in one. Pick it up and start again. Nothing here but words and hints and allegations of a whole. When we walked down the street, we assumed it would be for the day. The adventure of seven months was not in our minds. But the possibility was. The nature of the spaceship is its limited imitation of earth. We try to comprehend the thing, but that is the way to stop writing. Only words poured fourth in the service of characters in situation. So. So what comes first, the characters or the situation? Essense or action? Faster now. Pick up speed and loose the day in these odd squiggles. Not quite absolutely true is it? Everything they told you about writing fiction was fiction. You make it up as you go along. Except that you don’t, exactly. When I was sixteen and still believed in love, I mowed the lawn without a shirt on, clipping the Walkman to the back of my shorts. The wire of the headphones tickled the skin between my shoulders. The smell of fresh cut grass. The reluctance to act submerged by the necessity of action. Finding yourself there, you find the will to forgetting and finding.
posted by Spike at 4:08 AM
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