Fiction? Bah.
I am struggling with the Fiction Section of the A215 creative writing course. The chapters describe the different ways in which you can 'write good fiction' including character development, point of view, setting and so on. The difficulty I think I am having with it is that we have gone from writing from our experience (based on freewriting) to having exercises to do which are very much directed towards using a particular device. This 'device' removes it from my experience somehow so that I find myself 'inventing' something rather plastic. I wonder how to get back to using my concrete experience whilst also doing the exercises? I would say I haven't got enough time to do the amount of writing required, but frankly as I have spent this morning avoiding writing, I don't think time is the problem.
Maybe I'm just not cut out to do fiction writing.
posted by Carole @ 1:51 pm
4 Comments:
I'm right with you there.
It's dismaying just how low spirits are across the student population. There is something wrong with this course.
I am also in to avoidance mode. Big Time.
I just re-read some of my previous exercises (which I thought were crap at the time) and they weren't so bad after all. This gave me the impetus to attempt some of Ch7 exercises. I've made a complete pig's ear of them and they are all too short, but I've done them. Now I can write something else if I want to. I'm just worried that there is a story to have written by the end of all this, and my plastacine characters from the exercises with their contrived situations and dilemmas are not going to get me through that! :)
Now then - what is going to get you writing again?
Carole,
Lie, lie and lie that is how you write fiction.
It's called "creativity."
I recently read a piece written by a friend. It was about her family life and growing up in our small town. Actually, she re-wrote history. It was a dream of how she would have preferred it to be.
I was scared of fiction, too, but now that I am in it knee deep, I find it easier.
Do you remember when Helen Whitehead said, "Sometimes I feel guilty because I tell so many lies when I write?"
I didn't mean to rant.
Connie
Hi Connie
Gosh, I've not thought of it as telling lies! But now you come to mention it, I remember Helen saying something like that. Maybe that is why I like writing stuff that becomes almost fantasy. It's not trying to be real life anymore :)
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