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The Flatland Chronicles for Friday, June 30
JOURNAL. Finally, finally I have finished reconstructing my website. It's now linked on the left as The Flatland Oracles Virtual Scrapbook. I LOVE making web pages in the same way I used to love coloring. I try to invent content so that I can make more pages. As I remark elsewhere, as a kid I always wanted to use every crayon in the box of 64 in every picture I made.
In the interim I've done almost nothing else. I signed up (and paid $50) for a fiction-writing class because I thought I wanted to write fiction. I am not sure anymore that this is the case. I don't think it's lack of discipline because (obviously) I like writing other things; but when I try to write about anything I've imagined, the words just dry up. I feel that this is a left brain/right brain short circuit, since my characters, the setting, and even a lot of the events are all things I can imagine quite clearly, and yet when I sit down to try to write about them, the words just dry up. It's been happening for 20 years, so perhaps it isn't going to stop.
I was embarrassed tonight that I didn't have any work product to read, particularly since the fragment I read last time was almost meaningless. The problem I have with the concept behind the class is this: some work simply is NOT designed to be read aloud. I am not saying that it can't be, but that the writer simply hasn't written something that works very well when it's presented that way. I think I have a feel for words---indeed, I feel sure that I do---but the voice in my head that reads them is just so different from my normal hick accent that I fall to pieces when I try to read my own work.
But Nick is a fabulous reader. Our teacher, a fascinating Hungarian man who publishes under another name, has praised him for his theatrical reading. To quote Dickens (or rather a Dickens character in Our Mutual Friend), "he do the police in different voices." The only other person in the class who reads as well is a lovely young aspiring actress. She has a very beautiful voice and really makes her writing come alive.
I think most of the rest of the class are like me; they think of their writing as something for someone else to read. Even some of the most talented are as awkward as I am.
Next week, I shall have to make an effort to have some sort of finished product. I thought about using the fangirl stuff, but [A] I don't take it seriously; it's something I dash off when the mood hits; and [B] it REALLY is not adaptable to reading aloud. How could I convey the snippets from other 'postings' that she has pasted into her posts? There is really no way to do that.
Speaking of the fangirl, that's the ONLY thing I've worked on recently. I let her get up on stage to dance with "Jay Bracken," a la Springsteen's 'Dancing in the Dark' video (and though I like him for his politics and outspokenness, I don't care much about his music). Naturally she was in ecstasies and I have a feeling is going to start feeling an even more personal 'connection' to this particular made-by-TV 'star.' In the meantime, what goes up must come down. You can't fall in love with a TV star at 43 without becoming an object of pity and disdain. I see her as a sort of sitcom Mme. Bovary in one sense, though without Emma's resources. She does have an equal amount of ruthlessness, though she doesn't realize it.
Digest for June 29, 2006
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JAYDREAMING BELIEVER: "Every time something wonderful happens to me, something awful happens to balance it off." She got to dance with Jay, but when she got home she couldn't talk to anyone about it; and then her office manager made her take her photograph of Jay off her desk. Why can't a woman of 43 pick her own priorities? In The Church of the Over-Invested Fangirl.
Images © 2006 Jupiterimages Corporation. Used pursuant to license from Animation Factory.com.
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