I talked about list poems last week, but I'm really into hybrid forms right now. A work doesn't have to be 'hybrid' in order to use hybridization to its advantage.
At key moments, evoking fragments of the external but unwritten world can be instrumental in anchoring a character or scene. In Mann's Doktor Faustus, a novel about a composer who sells his soul, music, not magic, is the medium in which the composer works. Mann's narrator, a childhood friend of the main character, is a writer. Yet through his point-of-view, we come to see how music can be expressed through words. Ekphrasis, the art of describing artistic works in words, plays a role in Mann's character revelations, his novel's theme, and the plot device of introducing the infernal into an otherwise sober work of German realism. E.B. White's book the Trumpet of the Swan, one of my childhood favorites, describes a mute swan learning to play the trumpet to compensate for his disability. Like Doktor Faustus, music is the protagonist's mode of expression, and plays a key role in communicating his feelings. White uses songs that Sam, the main human character, knows from camp, and famous songs with which everyone--even today's children--should be familiar in much the same way Mann uses Beethoven and Schoenberg's works to illuminate the plot for his audience. The issue for writers is how much to use. It could be argued that Mann's dazzling intellectual asides detract from his books, turning them into works of criticism as much as they are works of literature. Many struggling writers, myself included, deal routinely with the problem of spending too much time in a character's head. That time issue goes doubly when referencing other works, no matter how seminal or well-known. Hybrid writers are finding ways to balance the novelty of their form with the touchstones readers need to traverse the narrative. Reading these new works and these new ways will help give traditional forms tools to troubleshoot some of the most difficult writing quandaries. The latest issue of the Writer's Chronicle features an article on forms. But it also features Jennifer Egan's Goon Squad, which is describes as more than a novel, more than a collection of short stories. Egan also toys with ekphrastic description and PowerPoint slides in her novel. It's a wonderful starting point for anyone who wants to see what cross-pollination of the creative variety can do.
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I said the other day that I hate writing from prompts and that I never produce quality work from it or even snippets of work that I could salvage and use later. The closest I came at Goddard was in Reiko Rizzuto's wonderful workshops on troubleshooting one's writing, in which she urged us to channel our characters, freewrite about their wants and needs, and to manipulate scenes to unblock ourselves.
The best writing I do is spontaneous or, more likely, germinates in my subconscious until I decide to put it on the page, and then it goes through a lot of editing. So, I came up with an idea to challenge myself. I took an old prompt piece that I didn't hate but thought was meh, and I'm going to revise it into a publishable flash story. Success=published, and not in some vanity magazine either. Since I'm putting this out there, let's call failure "the inability to become published within eight months." Why eight? First because it might need a couple rounds of revision, even if it is a flash story. Second because lit mags take a long time to respond, so even targeting faster markets, I'm going to have to be aggressive about sending it out. If I can get it into a form I like, I'll pick another prompt piece; I have a bunch, but this one, a flash fiction from 1920s Rome, seems a likely candidate. If you want to do the same, I've love to hear about it. This is 'competing against yourself' at its finest, so we all win if we're writing, revising, and submitting. Happy writing! It's not enough. It's not good enough. There isn't enough. I'm not good enough. Not fast enough. Enough people didn't see it. I've had enough.
I've been going through my submission deadline database with dread, looking at the files that have not yet been published by any lit mag, of all sorts--poetry, high-resolution jpegs, prose, photographs of my paintings. It seems like a tiny, amateurish body of work...because the negativity muse has come. She's the antithesis of your creative muse. Her voice grates on you and she does nothing but complain, but whenever she comes around again, your reasons for not dropping her as a friend seem feeble and unprincipled, so you make polite sounds in between her monologues of bitchery. That's how I feel, sitting here with that annoying harpy, who wants me to trash my work and retire from having any creative impulses. But I know I don't want that, so I'm trying to stay positive. Today I plan on retiring some of my work that hasn't been successful in the submission rounds, beginning the long process of putting art on DeviantArt in my portfolio or putting writing in my proverbial scrap folder (but not the trash). The fact that I've outgrown or stopped advocating for certain work should be a sign that I've learned, progressed, and developed, not that I suck. Take that, negativity muse! |
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