Fiction and school: the excellent Sunday
March 6th, 2006 by Bill
I am clearly not a rabble rouser. I am not a party animal. My pleasures seem to be of a quieter sort. Such as today (which, as I write, is actually tomorrow, Mountain time - it’s already Monday).
The first part of my day was enthusiatically taken up with an online course I’m taking through NewsU. I can’t promise to maintain the enthusiasm, but in these initial stages I found it quite engaging.
More interesting to me was the story I began as part of JJ’s Flash Fiction Friday #27. I actually like this story although it’s stuck in an “in progress” stage. It’s called:
I love writing like this because I have no idea what the story is, all I have is an idea of the final scene - which is not yet written but is almost complete in my head.
The story overall (in my head, at least) is a kind of mix of noir, farce and slapstick.
When I write this way (and it’s the way I truly love to write), I have no idea who any of the characters are or what the story is, I just put down whatever comes into my head. Of course, while that can be a mildly entertaining read, it doesn’t make for a good story. It becomes a good story (hopefully) when you “finish” it and finally know who the characters are and the story is and you can go back and rewrite.
All writing is about rewriting, whether it is fiction or business or marketing or journalism. Whatever. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez put it (and I apologize to him for paraphasing), great writers are not great for what they’ve published but for what they have not published.
By that, I took it he meant that good writers toss out the crap and sometimes the crap isn’t crap - it’s your best writing but, if it doesn’t hep the story, you toss it. Good writers know when to cut that stuff loose, even though it breaks their hearts.
By the way, as boring as this post is, it’s a good, if partial, indication of who I really am. I love writing. I am obsessed with it. Which is probably why I pay the rent doing it.
Tags: Writing
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