Amazing Minds

I think that Cameron’s vision of creating literary works is inspiring. It calls us to truly listen to ourselves, which can be a rather daring adventure. I know that many times I fear delving into the depths of my own psyche because I simply do not wish to see all the dirt that is longing to gain my attention. I guess in this way I feel like Eileen Myles in her essay on her novel of poetry. She writes, “My dirty secret has always been that it’s of course about me. But I have been educated to believe I’m no one so there’s a different self operating and I’m desperate to unburden my self of my self so I’m coming from nowhere and returning.” When she writes her novel she feels as though she is displaying all of her shameful details in a world that is dominated by an understanding that those details should be avoided. Somehow when you write you can throw your true self out into the world and you do not need to be afraid of judgment. The fact is that your true self is display in great writing, but it is disguised. We are in the open and vulnerable yet we wear a mask. It would call it an invisible mask because I feel like everybody should know that great writing comes from the heart, but that is not always the case.  I feel like I can relate to Myles in her feeling that she is splattering her undignified self upon page after page of her novel.

So back to Cameron.

One quote that I loved from Cameron’s writing on “sketching” was, “writing is a solitary act.” I read this and I said, “YES!” That statement is so true and as I think about my own journey as a writer it is a statement that I wish I understood years ago. When I was younger I longed for someone to give the key to good writing. I felt like I was just missing something when I wrote. Everything I attempted to write seemed robotic and void of feeling. I wanted more from my writing. I feel as though I have grown much since my early days as a writer. I realize now that there is no magic key that unlocks writing like a treasure chest. Writing does not happen in a moment. It is not a finish line. Writing is the race. The fact that writing is a solitary act implies that everyone truly has their own style. I can never hope to write in the same manner as Rowling or Tolkien without sounding like a simple regurgitation of the two. I am not them. I love how Cameron talks about some different styles in her writing. The guy who had to go to the places he wrote about was interesting to me. He needed experience to become inspired. I loved Cameron’s style the most. Faith-based writing is such an awesome way of looking at it. To believe that your mind is intelligent enough to bring a story together without a guide is difficult, but our minds are amazing. That is what they do on a daily basis. For example, if you smell eggs while you are walking down the street you may think of breakfast or a specific breakfast you had with your boyfriend on the day he asked you to marry him. Or you might think back to your chemistry class and realize that eggs provide protein to your body, which get turned into amino acids. We connect all of our own experiences every second of every day. Why should it be so hard to construct a story based on this model? It is our nature.

I really enjoy Cameron as a writer because she is down to earth and she explains her ideas in an understandable and attainable way. She makes writing common. By that I mean that she makes it feel like anyone can write. Cameron doesn’t just say it either. She proves it.

Banana Walker

            Stacy drew up a sketch with the audacity of a Viking setting sail on an adventure to find uncharted territory. Only a few moments crawled by before she disdainfully crumpled her paper into an unfortunate lump and whipped it across the room. How could she ever hope to finish this drawing by tomorrow? Her dreams were dangling by a tread. She felt like she was a tightrope walker- who was expected to preform, but who had lost her most important tool, the balancing pole. At least a pole was a concrete item. Stacy didn’t even know what the heck she was missing nor did she know where to look for it. She thought about bananas. Their yellow color made them a bubbly fruit and their sweet taste coincided with that personality. Stop Stacey! Now this was disdainful, she was personifying fruit. Maybe she was crazy or maybe she was just hungry. A banana did seem like a good idea and a bubbly distraction. Haha, she thought,  “…bubbly distraction, that’s funny…a bubbly banana.” Bananas’ should be bubbly because they have the audacity to be that disdainful, cheery yellow color. Yellow was not one of Stacey’s favorite colors because of that one time when she was the victim of a prank that involved a rather large bucket of yellow paint, banana yellow paint. However, that prank was beside the point. It meant nothing to her. She just did not understand why bananas had to be yellow. Perhaps bananas should be red. Perhaps she should pull a prank on her own mind and trick it into functioning. It was not like she was actually walking a tightrope, she just needed some creative bubbliness.

            Stacey pounded down the carpeted staircase. She swung herself around the disdainful banister that almost broke every time she performed the trick as if she were on a tightrope. She still had the audacity to do it every time she descended even though that disdainfully broken down banister was precariously close to pulling a prank on her. One day she would fall flat on her face. However, today was not that day. This is what she told herself every day.

In the light blue fridge, that creaked every time she opened the slightly rusted door, she found her disdainfully, yellow banana. She sat down to eat as she continued to ponder her quest that she audaciously set out on about nine months ago.

            When Stacey was in ninth grade she stood up in front of the class and told everyone she wanted to be a tightrope walker. At her proclamation her classmates began to sputter and spitter like a bunch of pots boiling over as they pretended, unsuccessfully, to hide their laughter. The bubbly teacher hushed them then as Stacey walked to her seat in disdain, but she could not protect her from the pranks that would come. It did not help that Stacey’s part-time job at the Quicky Mart Gas Station required her to dressed up as a disdainfully bubbly banana. Most of the time she hid from the world where she did not belong. She had to give herself some credit for having the audacity to show herself in school each day. It was no easy task dodging the plethora of pranks that were showered in her each day. One time she actually broke her leg because of a prank. She slipped on a banana peel down two flights of stairs. Despite the fact that bananas had a strong, disdainful connotation in her life, they still remained Stacey’s favorite fruit. She was just weird like that. Maybe it was proof that she had more audacity than she thought she did. Maybe it meant that she was a masochist. Either way she ate many disdainful, bubbly bananas. And they made her brain bubbly which made it cascade creativity on space after space of blank canvas.

            Her talent was her ticket because like being a tightrope walker, being a real honest-to-God great artist could change Stacey’s life. When Stacey’s bubbly teacher presented her with the application for an art school in New York she couldn’t resist. Here her audacity truly began to show. No longer would she hide in disdainful shadows, but her bubbliness would creep out into the sunshine and magnify her beauty. Maybe she would never be a tightrope walker, but she could be an artist nonetheless. She was a triumphant goddess of paint and canvas, as she walked the tightrope of color choice and shading. She mustered all of her audacity and began the journey to freedom. She took the application.

            Now nine months later Stacey sat at her kitchen table tracing the scratches that were scrawled across the surface while she ate her disdainful banana. There was nothing bubbly going on in her disdainful head. She needed this project to be amazing. Amazing like her favorite tightrope walker, “The Audacious Adrienne.” Her banana was almost gone. She stared down at the last little bit cramped between the thick yellow peel. She imagined Adrienne on a banana peel tightrope, elegant and audacious, getting ready to impress her crowd. And then the gears began to turn in Stacey’s head. Maybe bananas really were bubbly because her brain was now bubbly too. She would escaped the pranks and the stress of her world and audaciously leap into a whole new place.

            Stroke by stroke Stacey painted her heart onto the canvas creating beauty in the midst of nothingness. Interpreting blankness into color and line. She danced on her tightrope of paint and audaciously leapt into a new genre. She painted “The Audacious Adrienne” in all her fierce beauty atop the tip of a banana, a bubbly banana with a disdainful yellow color. Adrienne conquered the banana as Stacey would conquer her life riddled with pranks. Her heart emanated from the canvas in a radiance of disdainful yellow.          

Mud-shot eyes...

Peter Markos writes in an interesting fashion. I think that his writing style is refreshing because it is different than anything I have seen before. I like how Markos' style communicates effectively even though it is not part of the norm. There are so many creative ways to interpret language and regurgitate it through the written word. In reading, "The Singing Fish", I felt like I plunged into Markos' mind. It is interesting to see how he sees the world. His writing style brings up questions like : Why did he choose to write that way? Does he think that way? What point is he trying to make through writing the way he does? I like writing that makes me think. Writing that asks my mind to open up a little more and to take on a new perspective that expands and broadens me as a thinker.
I like the description that Markos uses and the way that he is kind of jumpy as he writes his stories. For example, he writes, "At night, when we look up from the mud with our mud-shot eyes, we see that the sky, it has floating up in it not one, but two, moons. These moons, they are what Girl uses to look at the world through. When Girl looks down to see the mud that she is made from, us brothers, we look up into Girl's eyes to see that each moon, it is a mirror. Inside each mirror, we see a girl, other than Girl, gazing back at us." (p. 6) Here Markos jumps around from "mud-shot eyes" to the two moons. Then all of a sudden the moons are mirrors as well as eyes. The description is all over the place and I feel like I am seeing a bunch of different images at once. I think that this is okay, however, because everything still ties together and I can still follow Markos' story. I still don't quite understand what the point of his story is, but I love the theme of mud throughout the story and the way that he manipulates the word mud and uses it in many creative ways. Like when he says, "mud-shot eyes" or, "our hands mittened with mud."
I also love how Markos compares the stars to fire fish. I don't know what stars and fire and fish have in common, but it interesting how he pulls these things together. I love the lines, "

What GREAT imagery here! I love it! I can see them pulling the fire from inside the fish-stars. And then Markos says, "until our hands explode in our face." That is a cool line. I can see their hands set afire and I can see the fire becoming too much for them to control. I love this part.

I thought that "The Falling Girl" by Dino Buzzati was also an intriguing story. Buzzati shows a girl who jumps off a skyscraper to her eminent death, but everything is in slow motion. She passes the rich people and then she goes by the working people and finally we see her interacting with old people. This is an interesting story because it slows down the girl's fall. You would think that she would just fall to her death in a matter of seconds, but this girl has plenty of time to talk and interact along the way. She talks with the rich people at first and then, later on, she spends an amount of time contemplating whether or not she will make it to a ball. I was especially interested in the part where the girl is joined by many others who had also jumped to their deaths. Everyone was doing it I guess. What was really interesting was that the most important thing to the girl in that moment was her dress. She was concerned with the fact that see was not as fancy as the other girls falling beside her. I believe that this story is a picture of life. By time the girl gets to the ground she is an old woman. In the beginning she was young and by the end she was old and she finally died. I think this story makes an excellent point: we are all going to die. I don't think that death is a bad thing it is simply inevitable. These girls falling from the sky were going to die just as much as I am eventually going to die. 

I like the vivid imagery that Buzzati uses. Buzzati writes, "And since the veils of night were advancing from the east, the city became a sweet abyss burning with pulsating lights." (p. 29) I love Buzzati's writing because the imagery is so elegant. The words, "veils", "sweet abyss", and "advancing" are all elegant words that make me think of Shakespeare; Romeo and Juliet. It is also good imagery because it paints a vivid image. I can the city below in my mind's eye. Buzzati writes with beautiful words and it makes her whole piece feel like a fairy tale!

Blue Girls and Love Story's

"Wreckage of Reason" was a thoughtful compilation of "XXperimental Prose" and it pushed me to think deeper about what writing is about. When I go to read a story I expect a beginning, middle,  and end. In these writings of prose oftentimes the writers jump right into stories or they jump all over the place as far as the time line goes. Sometimes I found this confusing and I wondered about what each writer was trying to say. I think most of these writing "XXperiments" are just that; experiments. They showcase emotion and feeling. The goal is not to be practical, but to explore internally. I can see how these writers used their writing to dive deeper into themselves and to learn about themselves in that process.
"The Blue Girl" by Laurie Foos intrigued me because the blue girl was incredibly creepy. I wanted to know: What was the point of the blue girl? There were so many mysteries in this story and so many unanswered questions.  For instance, why did the women feed the blue girl moon pies and what secrets were they seeking to hide? This story has some great detail in it. Foos writes, It is then that we hear the blue girl's breath. Her breath sounds like the water shooting up that day at the lake, the water that Audrey pounded out of her lungs. The sloshing breath grows louder, sucking in and then nothing." (p. 41) The whole tone of this story is dark and I constantly got the feeling that the blue girl was evil. She seemed to have everyone in the town under her spell. In this quote there is a description of the blue girl's wheezy breath. It includes vivid images that speak of guilt like when Foos talks about the day at the lake when she speaks of the blue girl's breath. Blue girl is vividly decribed also when Foos writes, "Slowly Audrey turned the blue girl on her side, the swirls of veins and blood pooling in her bare arms and back..." (p.37). When I read stories I get so caught up the worlds they create that I don't realize that the writer's description is actually simple. It is like an impressionist painting. When you look up close all you see is a bunch of dots or possibly lines and nothing seems that eloquent. However, when you take a couple steps back you realize that you are actually looking at a masterpiece of a painting. If you take each detail that Foos writes and look at it on its own her details may seem insignificant, but if you read the whole story together you realize how the details work beautifully together.
Masha Tupitsyn wrote a short story called "Cottage Life" that contained bunches of vivid imagery. In one line Tupitsyn writes, "I stood in the dark and held onto my age like a ballerina handle bar." (p. 167) I honestly don't even know what a "ballerina handle bar" is, but I love that image. It reminds me of an antique. Something that is extremely beautiful yet extremely fragile. I feel like ballerina's hold their beauty even in the midst of old age because of their grace and self-discipline. This small line of imagery inspired so much emotion in me. I also loved the imagery in the part where Tupitsyn writes, "You chose a ridiculous sized house. Like a little cottage for elves. Meanwhile, I'm almost six feet tall. I was slanted against its slanted edges, a world on my face." (p. 167) I love that this writer uses short simple sentences. I like to write long sentences full of words, but she writes these short remarks almost. It gives me the sense that she is simply talking and that that is okay. I think it is great how she compares her size to the cottage. The cottage is tiny and she is suffocated. We never see her write that she is suffocated, but we know that she felt that way because of the details that she includes. I love when she says, "a world on my face", because I get a picture of her face being pressed to the ceiling of the cottage. It is a wonderfully vivid image.
Summer Brenner writes a sad story called, YOU A Love WAR Story. This story was significant for me  because I have dealt with my own bouts of depression and it can definitely be a crippling disease. It is interesting for me to see a description of an outsiders point of view. I can feel the hopelessness in her writing. I can see how her partner's depression had created a general wearing down; of her, of her partner, and of their relationship. I could see this when she wrote, "These days I'm not good at pleasing you. I don't feel it's required, but but sometimes it's part of the compromise we've agreed to." (p. 258) I also think the lines, "I still love you, but you're not the same man so it's logical I don't love you in the same way. It makes you feel bad. Worse, it makes you feel small,"  show the weariness the depression caused (p. 259). Brenner doesn't use a lot of descriptive language in this story. She is describing a relationship that is foreign to anybody who it not a part of it so I believe she doesn't need to dress it up with fancy adjectives. I think that the simple story speaks for itself. It is here that I get back to picking out the correct details. It is ever important in fiction to choose the right details to lead your audience in the direction you want them to go. The fact that Brenner writes, Worse, it makes you feel small" is important. In depression, feeling small is a big part of the negative feelings. Depression cripples your mind and makes you feel small so you stop trying. In the end you accumulate reasons as to why you should not try and you become unmotivated. I think this was a perfect choice of description for Brenner to use. It showed what she wanted to tell in a very simple and short way.
Description is necessary to create a beautiful story.

How to figure out the details?

Burroway has a lot of valuable information about details used in fiction writing. There is such an emphasis on the use of detail. I like Burroway’s thoughts because she goes deeper than average into the “whys” and “hows” of writing with good detail. I like how she says,

“And this is a more difficult task, because written words are symbols representing

sounds, and the sounds themselves are symbols representing things, actions, quali- ties, spatial relationships, and so on. Written words are thus at two removes from experience.” (p. 78)

These helped me to gain a different perspective as far as my approach to writing goes. The number one priority in writing is to create a believable circumstance. The most important word in that last sentence is “believable” because you can write hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing, but if it’s not believable your audience won’t engage. Burroway talks about the importance of using concrete details, which are details that your audience can “taste”, “smell”, and “hear”, etc. She also writes that choosing the “right” details is extremely important. This is where I get lost because I just don’t feel like I know what the right details are. The other day I was trying to describe my living room for one of my fiction exercises. As I was looking around the cluttered room I knew so well nothing stood out. There was no beacon of light shining in the darkness that called to me, “Put me in your description!” No I had no moment of epiphany. I ended up scribbling down details about the curtains and the stains on the carpets. What is an important detail? What kinds of details are the ones that grab hearts and call minds to attention?

When I read through the works of fiction for class the details stood out to me. They are things that are so seemingly unimportant; the details in life that are almost taken for granted. When I am cooking eggs I know that there is a smell that exudes from the grease, pepper, salt, and the eggs themselves. I know that the pan makes a crisp, crackling sound when the eggs make first contact. I also know that egg whites change color rapidly from a clear, gooey yellow to a pristine, solid white. I know all these details, but they don’t occur to me in a true sense. It is almost as if they only bombard my subconscious.

Sometimes I feel like there are too many details and in that moment choosing the one that gets the most priority seems intimidating. After reading Burroway I realized that you can change the feel of your story drastically simply by changing your details. Burroway gives two different descriptions of “Debbie” that each exudes the same characteristics, but in distinctive ways. In the first description Burroway writes,

         “Debbie would wear a tank top to a tea party if she pleased, with fluorescent

         earrings and ankle-strap sandals.

         ‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Mrs. Chiddister would stand in the doorway wringing her hands.

         ‘It's not nice.’

           ‘Not who?’ Debbie would say, and add a fringed belt.” (p. 80)

In this description Debbie seems rebellious and spoiled. Later Burroway gives us a different description,

         “One day Debbie brought home a copy of Ulysses. Mrs. Strum called it "filth" and

         threw it across the sunporch. Debbie knelt on the parquet and retrieved her

         bookmark, which she replaced. ‘No, it's not,’ she said.

         ‘You're not so old I can't take a strap to you!’ Mr. Strum reminded her.” (p. 81)

Debbie seems much more quiet and less offensive. She seems small while her father lords over her. However, she still retains the defiance that the previous Debbie displays. We see this in her statement, “No, it’s not.” Both versions of Debbie display defiance, but they do it in distinct ways.  That is why I want to get a handle on my details. Right now I feel like my details are wild animals that are all running about in chaos. I wish to find the means to build a corral and herd them into what I want to say.

         Speaking of “corrals” reminds me of the story “Close Range” by Annie Proulx. Let me start off by saying that this story disturbed me. The ending was sad and creepy. Proulx told an interesting tale and at first I had no idea what was going on. It was only in the last few paragraphs that all the details came together for me. And Proulx used great details. In first paragraph I loved when she wrote about the scenery saying, “The wild country- indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky- provokes a spiritual shudder.” (p. 99) This is just beautiful language that paints a picture, not only of the physical aspects of the landscape, but also the feeling the landscape evokes. The details in this sentence also speak of the whole story. The word “jag” reminds me of a knife and “everlasting” reminds of how Ras would be maimed, in more than one way, for his life. His scars were “everlasting”. And when Proulx says, “provokes a spiritual shudder”, I think about the shudder that went through me at the end of the story. This one sentence is like a mini foreshadowing of all the following events. Good details are a great way to tie the whole story together.

         “Point and Line” by Thalia Field also had some great details in her story. I like Field’s story because she takes an extremely boring event and pumps it full of life. Throughout the whole story she is sitting in what seems to be a therapist’s office and nobody is talking. This goes on for a whole hour, but I was not bored. There is so much activity going on in the character’s mind that it doesn’t even matter that nothing actually happens in the story. One of my favorite parts of this story is when Field writes,

         “A moth saw a flame and thought what it saw was its heart and it said, ‘What is my

         heart doing over there, away from me?’ And believing that it could not be whole

         without an organ it never even used, the moth dove toward it, hoping to reabsorb it

         in open surgery, but instead there was a sound as empty as a lit match extinguished

         on water, and in an instant the heart that had stood away from the moth became the

         central unimagined ecstasy the moth couldn’t live without.”

When I read this I felt like it was a prefect example of a random thought that occurs in the mind when you let your mind wander. I was reminded of myself when I read this because I have weird thoughts like this all the time. I don’t know what connection this small story has to the whole, but I think it is a great little story in and of itself. I love how the moth is being personified and how it is questioning and longing for more. Maybe it is true that moths think that the light is the their heart. I mean the light must be a powerful object in their perception. I love how Field makes some important points through this small story. When she writes, “And believing that it could not be whole without an organ it never even used,” I got to thinking about how we humans think that way often. We think we need something to be complete, but it truly is unnecessary. Why fix something that is not broken? I love the line; “there was a sound as empty as a lit match extinguished on water.” This line is almost anticlimactic. The moth goes in for the light with hope and expectation and he just dies. There is no ceremony. He just dies.  I love that I can hear the sizzle of the match and that it directly connects, in my mind, to a vivid picture of the zapped moth. It is a great use of imagery.