Tonight is orientation. It just so happens that my boyfriend scored tickets for a recording for SNL of comedian John Mulvaney tonight. When I was a freshman in undergrad I slept through half my orientation. I sorely regretted waking up for the other half. The only important thing, really, was the part where they showed you how to hook your computer up to the campus internet. Everything else was just embarrassing. I already knew that I wasn't going to be dating anyone, hated team sports, community, and talking to strangers. I put myself and those team leaders through equal parts misery by showing up to....did they REALLY make us alternate boy-girl seating in the dining hall and force us to talk about our food? Memory overwrite.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm going tonight. I met with a professor a couple days ago and mentioned the orientation. He mumbled something about it not being important. Off the hook! John Mulvaney, here I come!
It was a good meeting, though I think we were missing each other's points at certain parts of the conversation. I'll start from the beginning.
When I was in undergrad I thrived off writing experimental fiction. "Chronological" was not something I did or did well.* Time and space were divided and placed wherever I felt like it. It was liberating to work with such an "I'll do whatever the hell I want" attitude. It gave me a lot of confidence and I had a lot of fun messing with the convention that stories must be told sequentially. And, I did it fairly well, so I got away with a lot. However, I think that because this style was so easy for me, I could slide into these edgy structures and alienate the reader in the process. I think ambiguity, stylized structure, and pretty much all unconventional stylistic choices can be justified if there is a deeper underlying meaning behind them. If you're being ambiguous just to be ambiguous,* however, than that's stupid. You have to have control of the craft; you have to know what's up with what. Obviously sometimes a writer is taken over by the muse, and may write deep, complex, highly ambiguous passages. That's a different situation, in which genius meets high inspiration. Obviously, a beginning writer can rarely lay stake to that scenario. So until then, I think it very important, more important than usual, in my case, for me to learn more conventional standards of writing, and then go back to fucking with the structure.
So when I was meeting with my professor, we started talking about the writing process. I explained that I had a basic chronological plot structure laid out. However, I work on different parts each day. One day I'll work on the third chapter, when she is ten and in the hospital. The next day, being in a different mood or frame of mind, I'll write the penultimate chapter, which takes place when she's twenty. He started talking to me about how things didn't have to be chronological, and that I should trust the organic process.
I think he was under the impression that I was afraid of experimentation, or I had taken hook and bait the artist's maxim that you need to learn the rules before you break them. That just is not, was not the case for me at all. I allowed my flair for non-chronological writing to become an excuse for not focusing on the crux of the story: character development, the raison-d'etre for certain actions, etc.
In the end I think we both saw the other's point of view. He brought up a good, refreshing point: who really says, in the end, I ever have to write chronologically, at all? Creative advice is, in the end, just that: advice. If you take it to be the end all be all of truth then you're probably going to stunt your artistic growth.
So this morning I woke up thinking about a specific scene when she's about sixteen. She's sitting on a bed with a friend, and they're doing drugs while discussing their lives prior to this moment (or rather,the friend is: the narrator is just kind of high and listening).
It's a long scene, which takes place at a pivotal point, about two-thirds the way through the novel. I was thinking of introducing the novel with that scene, then going back and forth between that scene and the narrator's experiences leading up to it. We will see. It could be wasted time, but fortunately I don't have work today. And it's raining. And I'm going to a comedy show tonight! This post is very long.
* My thesis director put it most poignantly: "I don't know if you're incapable of writing a structured thesis, or if you just refuse." The sad truth is that it's kind of both. I try writing normal papers to no avail. And, I'm obnoxiously stubborn in my ineptitude.
**You think it's cool, or use the excuse "it's an existential work,'" "I'm a nihilist," "negative capability," or "I'm only Humean."
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