If you click on this cover you will open a brief essay regarding fiction, presently. I find it interesting, challenging, and compact. If you have an interest in writing as discovery, as research, as emergence, as investigation and creativity, I encourage you to read it…
Tag: Writers Resources
Aspects of Writing: The Beginnings – Conception. Inception.
The Beginnings: Conception, Inception
To be thinking about thinking about thinking the origins, the inception, where/when/how the movement-act, a specific verbal urge – that is, to write – conceives.
“To form or develop in the mind.” “To become pregnant (with child); to grasp seed.” No when, no how. No description. What? – it is a verb, it is verbal. Con– implying, for inference, a with-ness. Form requires relation in order to. Something grasped, taking shape, coming to be. Wombed – a gathering and a nurturing growth. Where? – the mind, the gut – of imagination and body.
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Inception, then, a beginning, a change, necessarily requiring an other, an outside – entity or energy, movement/matter, to be taken, grasped, to form and develop. WITH.
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Lodged “under the skin,” catching “in the throat,” sticking “in the mind.” Festers and swells. Obstructs and impedes. Reminds and welcomes or avoids. Alters, morphs, catalyzing change in and with the host.
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Conception: to take with, grasp with, grow and develop with. To begin is to become.
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Alter your position, feel what meets your body, even if only air. Step forward or back, turn – ceiling, sky. Nuzzle your nose inside of your neckline – inhale. Be with all that you are with. Take it in, work to grasp it, and let it grow and develop, in and with you. Change. Begin. Become.
Conceive.
Otherwise inception, impossible.
other Aspects of Writing
Aspects of Writing: Writing the Impetus. The Self-Reflexive.
The Self-Reflexive. Impetus.
The urgency, that is, the urging I feel in setting forth to compose, is dismantling.
In other words, the forcings that encroach, impinge and unleash within me when I’m ‘of a mind’ (experiencing the intention of) ‘to create’ is one of destruction, a defensive attack.
I am thus synonymed by sculptor, woodcarver, archaeologist.
One wants to undo the stories before they reach the page.
In order to find, discover, the figure of them, a more lasting (perhaps) form or shape.
To strip them of their ‘qualities’ or ‘style.’ Their manipulations. Creation as a straining of the weak, the falsifiable…a process in survival of the fittest, the more “true”(?) or apt.
Chiseling personal explanations and perspectival descriptions down to possibilities. Unraveling myths toward oracles. Discounting proofs into theories.
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The impetus of writing evokes the motivation of doubt, the landscape is struggle.
“To be inspired” might mean to be activated by an experience accurately called “perfink” (David Krech), or, “perceiving, feeling and thinking at once” (Jerome Bruner).
Regurgitant feeling: investigation, analysis, interpretation – meanings attacking meanings, in hopes. In hopes that a perfink of “meaning” (a satiation of anxiety, terror, doubt) might prove indestructible – as a possibility.
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The narrative, then (the verbal expression of a perfink), is a traffic jam of conventions, presuppositions, reality-views and solipsistic Gnosticism forged within the forging self; writing – as apparatus, activity, function – reflexes: brings self-world to bear on self-worlds in attempts to deconstruct automatic (as it were) constructions of perceiving/feeling/thinking – fighting, clawing, tearing against it with the information and energy of shared resources: language, “knowledge,” the usable past.
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Clashings of systems, perfinking perfinks, violent internal skirmishes and acts of terror(ism) – a doing that attempts the undoings of doings – an otherwise endlessly insular, of unverifiable and infinite traces, activity known as self-reflexive –
– producing stalemates of exhaustion, individual paucities of supply and reinforcement, ourobourosian –
offering only extrinsic chances for momentary cease-fires – the artifact, figure, form of the battlefield, photographed in process and thus submitted – to critics, to readers, to colleagues, to shadows (i.e. to genuine Others) that it might become real (exist in relation, to be directly experienced), corroborated or dismissed by equally limited and idiosyncratic perfinking, outside – both in the world, and of it.
“the contest any artist has with his or her art: working toward a perception that is his or her mind’s peace.”
-Louis Zukofsky-
“the mind carries an austere
inwardness that will not put out its eyes”
-Laurie Sheck-
“Writing is a lonely business’ is both a dull myth and a material fact of the profession, one I happen to be temperamentally suited to endure but which doesn’t gratify my sense of what it’s for.”
-Jonathan Lethem-
-Robert Creeley-
Aspect of Architecture
“A well-crafted sentence overturns the notion that thought is distinct from thinking. A well-crafted sentence enacts the sense it makes rather than representing it. The result of writing well-crafted sentences is that your reader will have the most vivid sense that something is happening to him or her and with the irresistible urgency of their own dreams.”
“Dedicate yourselves to reading most energetically that which you don’t immediately understand. Read with a special attention to the prospect that what doesn’t appear to make sense matters most because of the possibilities of sense-making that are portended in it.”
taken from:
ELSE – Erasure : Beginning
Erasure
It will have to be something new, you think to yourself, beginning. What’s been done before is already present. All the brief and poignant things gathered. Already processed and past-eurized.
Heroes are made, families described. Every aberration. Otherwise we wouldn’t know, would we? So much sex and images, and the inner lives of children. Histories and sciences, and the nothing that affords, beyond.
New probably just means different, you say, using old words already. If it’s a word it’s definitely been done. Or an action. Dreams and thinking too. Which leaves you with little, if not naught.
You once composed a text of tinntinnabuli – it was fascinating to you. Also a fugue of sorts, even a classical symphony, all in words, one in the twelve-tone scale. Little matter with a missing orchestra. Fit snugly into your drawers.
The series of anthropomorphic fruit. What they felt and how they perceived, from rind to seed. Even the veins in their fleshes, bruises, and each distinct and delicious juice. Cycles of life, inevitability of change, sprout to rot.
Who cares?
Yet it’s what you do. Identify moments and make them stories to exist. Wrapped in the tangles of problems, sentence-wriggle-thread your way elsewhere. A place that looks like knowledge. And sometimes feels.
Like mathematicians with their unknown variables – it’s the ocean you swim, an amoeba almost.
You sought after mastery but found it banal. Meaning didn’t make any sense. You turned to hypotheses, but not the wilder the better. You had to squeeze through gaps, hoping for openings. A friend called it spelunking, and it did seem dank and cold and blind. Often.
Restatement is not what you’re after. Nor refining. If thinking is digestion, you order an autopsy and strange foreign parts. Intake as transplant.
Distinctive takes a while, but quickly regurgitates style, and you’re back to remarking, remembering…remorse.
Today you’re dissecting an Else. Not again, or if\then, or more, but the Else. What else? you say. You don’t know. But it lies here dismembered, deconstructed on your desk. It’s pretty messy. The pieces aren’t going to fit, even though you’ve studied jigsaws and puzzles. Inventing new ones feels like metaphor or code, a twiddling thumb to decipher, something no one has time for even if they wish they did.
It will have to be something new to count as satisfaction, you consider. And you take up the large eraser.
Excerpt from the Book of Living Words
Another Fragment…
Pieces from the Book of the Dead
Roughing (ralphing) a Draft
Bare Bones and Synapses : Oscillating (a Story)
Feel like I’ve been out of the game…aside from Friday Fictioneers I haven’t had time for concocting, playing and revising original texts for awhile…feeling this time opening up a little bit I’ll be trying to finish up some long-term projects, while also working out some ideas that have been swaying to and fro in me cranium…here’s a gutturally wrenched structure that I barfed up today…we’ll see what becomes of it…
#1 perks up, signaling “it’s about time something truly great were written…at least what we’re capable of writing…the best we can do, right now.”
#2, energized by this, by the vibe that the entire gang might be on board, the whole shebang ready to summon resources and operate, sync up, as it were, breathlessly quivers, smiling shyly, eager
#3 promptly curls over and balks, doubts, folds under, clenches. Mostly afraid of failure, or of not having what it takes to see this thing through – concoct something “great” – shimmies and blocks out, switches off the snaps and veils the crackling lights in nearest hallways
#4 is feeling good, having been freed to excesses in the night, sensing the throbbing in the basement and burning like a reptile in the sun, pleased and exotic, inspiring
#7 with pleasurable visions of fantasies and victory. Floodlights on, matched to #4’s bask, but also pulling in air, rolling back shoulders and drawing up the chest while sucking in the tummy
#5 babbling away nondescript utterances, filterlessly spilling data, codes and equations of plots, prose and characters grabbed here and there from the crooks and crannies, gutterways and mushy sewage-scapes like pebbles stuck in gluey glia.
#1 now boisterous and bellowing, carried away in surges, blurting out hurrahs and coach-cliches, beckoning a kind of connective huddle
If #4 could think alone, he’d claim erotic inception for the will of #1, having woken aroused by images spun from #7 throughout their “sleeping” 8Hz
But #1 is wanting more and #3 isn’t giving or opening up
#6 and #7 providing soundtracks and scenarios, pressuring #4 to kick up the heartbeat, #2 to activate arms and hands
Four of the seven are joined, yawping and dipping, rippling a recursive wave – this group is on the move
#4 sends chills down the surface and tingles spine and loins
#2 adjusts all openings, focusing on bright lights and sparkly things, deep greens and muted blues
#4 pounds “approach” and “happy” buttons like timpani
#6 starts sweat and shuffles memory volts of breezes
#3 begins to forget as #5 yammers and badgers and #4 jacuzzies the mass in hot syrups
#1 commands #2 to to focus, clip and edit #5, while #6 and #7 distract with many-colored bouncing balls
Optimally they’ll link up and ride this wave in balance – each informing the other – shocking, supporting and inspiring the murky mass trapped in 22 inches of bone.
All my Words are Silent 