Dreams.

Taking into account all advice that I have received so far, and based, more importantly, on my own intuition, I think I have come to the best compromise to getting a publishable piece.  It involves taking a few key scenes from Side: B of Outside the Garage and strategically placing them in Side: A, to give it a frame narrative.  I guess, since, when I first started, in addition to The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye, I was also quite heavily influenced by Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk, so, it makes sense, then, that it would turn out this way.

Last week, when I was bored, I experimented with the manuscript and made a third person, present tense version.

This gave me a basic to work from, since I was already working on it, and felt good about it, but felt like something was missing.  Coincidentally, around this same time, my friend gave me her feedback from reading a version, and it meshed up with other advice I have received, and that made me decide to take steps to get it to where it needs to be in order to be publishable--even if it means rewriting it.  So I read some YA Lit books and started taking notes, and did some writing activities to get my mind refreshed.  Then, I took everything so far into consideration and thought about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do, and I decided that, if a non-linear plot is what it takes to get it to that point, then so be it.

Then I went back to books I had been reading and studying over the course of this past semester, and it occurred how I already had a frame, and I could easily make it more cohesive from beginning to end.  So I take the moment where Evie/Edie is shot, which is a climatic moment about 2/3 of the way through the third person, present tense version, and made it the opening scene, thus giving myself a firm external piece of framework for the beginning, and then I sparsely interspersed into Side: A scenes of him coming back into cognizance, dreams that he was having during that time frame, and him having a mental breakdown, so that there is a sort of natural progression between the internal story and the external frame.

This all gives it a natural sort of progression from the beginning to the end, which was always there, but it was as evident without the external framework.  This also makes some of the more outlandish narrative stuff I have put in there make sense within the context of the story since it all makes sense as a part of his mental state.

Then there is a moment, about 3/4 of the way through, where he comes back into full cognizance, and the last bit of it is kind of like the coda.

That's why I made the design make it look like it is two halves of a rock opera, with liner notes and stuff in the beginning to complete the effect.  As I believe it has a sort of musical quality to it, I feel like it is fitting and natural, for me, to do something like that, since I was, of course, the one making rock operas through my twenties--I don't know that they were any good since I am not a very good singer--but I enjoyed making them, and so this is kind of a tribute to that, when I was also beginning to start writing fiction.

While I wouldn't say that I am successful (I am not that delusional), I have been doing it long enough that I either need to put the pieces together and really try and make it work, while I find a job to pay the bills, and continue reaching for my dreams, or just fully devoting myself to a career, and giving it all up.

I am not willing to do that, though.  It is a dream, but it is also a hobby, and that's what they are for, right?  Ways for us to pursue our childhood fantasies?  I can do both, and just do it.  The best material comes from life, and I have a lot of great ideas for future projects, that have come out of living.  If I have to work somewhere else while I am doing it, that is okay.  I keep telling myself that, anyways.

If there is one thing I have learned, as a writer, it's that you have to keep attempting to grow, experimenting and seeing what happens.  At least my writing will be honest.  That's all I can hope for anyways.  That is my dream.

Bring Chaos to Order

As a writer and a student of English Literature, I have a diverse range of influences, which can be exemplified in the two final papers I am writing this semester: one on John Updike's "Pigeon Feathers" and "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car" from Updike's collection, also called Pigeon Feathers; and the other on Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.  While stylistically the authors are very different, the more I look at these texts I am studying, the more I realize that, while they are stylistically very different, in some ways they are similar.

Both Updike stories are about the character David Kern, in his teenage years and as an adult, one from a third person perspective, the other from a first person--although the third person is closely focused on Kern's perspective and thoughts, so in many ways it matches closely with the first person, later in his life.  It actually makes a lot of sense that Updike would make this change from Kern's teenage story to his adult story, since adults are much more cognizant than teenagers.  Probably more significantly, Kern becomes a writer, and the latter story represents his writerly musings--he is taking ownership over his thoughts.

Like all of Updike's work (at least of it that I have read), in both stories a significant part of understanding what is happening in the story involves seeing the character's inner-lives realized in the descriptions--as a certain professor of mine would say, Kern is "reading the world like a book."  He is looking for signs of God in the material world, seeking faith in a way that makes sense to him.  However, in "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car", Kern is not merely reading the world like a book, he is forcing the audience to do the same--he is creating elaborate metaphors to signify the ideas he is attempting to get across to his audience.  While, clearly, Updike is doing this in both stories, as the author of the stories, his changing from the third person to the first person illustrates how he as a writer does this.  In effect, he is illustrating how he as a realist sees the world and then uses it as a part of his writing to as a way of creating meaning.  While there might not be that sort of meaning, in the real world, in the things that he describes, it is interesting to see how as a writer he does this.  It is definitely something that I am keeping in mind.

Conversely, rather than mimicking the real world in an attempt to convey his ideas, Vonnegut creates his own universe of characters, which are not intended to be realistic, and, as is the case of Breakfast of Champions, they are, by the admission of the author, characters in a book.  Vonnegut is drawing attention to the writing process and showing how we understand the "real" through language, and thus, anytime we use language we are giving our own subjective viewpoint, no matter how objective we are attempting to be, we can't help but be subjective, since language is our only way of making sense of everything.  

To Vonnegut, and other post-modern/metafiction writers, there is no such thing as realism.  No writer is actually being any more realistic than any other, since it is impossible to be anything other than subjective.  The styles might be different, one might focus on the setting and the scenery and describing what how he perceives through his senses the world around him, it is still his subjective point of view, and thus no more "real" than any other writer.  True, it might be easier to picture what he is describing, but each person will picture it in his own way.  In other words, not only is Vonnegut calling attention to fictional writing, but he is calling attention to the real world, as well.  While there might be an objective reality, there is no way for any one to get more in touch with it than any one else.

Vonnegut's view, therefore, allows you, if you are so inclined, to question the narratives that you have come to believe as fact, since every narrative, be it history, or science, is someone else's subjective viewpoint on whatever it happens to be.  What Vonnegut is questioning is our we all seemed trapped in some sort of materialistic mindset where we are all programmed like robots to spend our whole lives desiring and working towards owning stuff--but the irony of it is, no matter how much stuff we have, we only continue to want more stuff.  There is no end to it.  We go to school, get jobs, go into debt, all just to have this stuff, which is never as fulfilling and wonderful as it seems like it will be before we get it.  We all go about our lives like characters in a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and everything turns out alright--there is some sort of resolution in the end, if you live your life the right way.  And that is the danger of "realism" and writing that purports to be "real" or "nonfiction", because it gives people a false perception that reality is shaped by external forces.

But that isn't the case.  We each shape reality in our own subjective way, through the language that comes naturally to us, through experience.  This is what Vonnegut is getting in Breakfast of Champions at when he says,

"Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling.  I would write about life.  Every person would be exactly as important as any other.  All facts would also be given equal weightiness.  Nothing would be left out.  Let others bring order to chaos.  I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead." (215).

And this is what I intend to do as a writer.  Maybe it will never bring me fame and fortune and everything, but I feel like it is the right thing to do.  This is how I choose my priorities.  While maybe their is no universal moral code, I do follow one of my own.  Maybe it's not religiously based, but I know when something feels right--because it feels right.  It is really just that simply.  It might not work universally, but, as a writer, it works for me.