See Angela write.

I know, I know. I haven’t posted here in goodness knows how long, and that’s a shame–all on my end, of course. I haven’t blogged, and I haven’t written much over the latter part of the year, and that includes journal entries.

I hardly know what to write about anymore, although there’s still that urge within me to write. I suppose I will be writing forever, after a fashion. Sometimes, I think, parts of me are all terribly out of sync. At some point, I am courageous, and bold, and I will write without being afraid of my subjects, my prose, or my inner critic…but then those are the times that I don’t have anything to write about. And so I write about mundane things.

And then other times, it’s the other way around. Scratch that–it’s that way most of the time.

Sometimes I wonder, if people need a tragedy in their lives, in order to write. A good many writers have either gone through tragedy, or suffer depression, etc, before they started writing, or during the period of their writing career. Is that some sort of prerequisite? What is it that goads people to write? Is the tragedy in their lives the catalyst?

Why am I even asking–of course tragedy can be a catalyst. I’ve written copiously when I’m depressed, out of a need to relieve myself and let all that pent-up emotion out before I explode.

Does that mean that, right now, as I’m writing this “comeback” blog post, I’m depressed?

4 comments

  • Here’s another promising view – the first 35 pages free @ google books. Narrative Design, By Madison Smartt Bell http://books.google.ca/books?id=XSyUY-orMlQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#PPP1,M1

    take care.

  • I haven’t found a good online source for specifics, but there is a book “Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative” it’s on amazon for ~$15 USD, I’ll outline it here.

    First introduced is the concept of a “fabula” which is the essence of a story. Take the intersection of a novel, its movie incarnation, its made for TV special, its comic book remake and what’s returned are the elements of its narrative skeleton; the sequence of events involving actors and location which makes a story unique.

    The sequence need not be chronological, for example, Memento, where the scenes were arranged reversed.

    Next, the Narrator is exposed, How the point-of-view colors the story (layers of first, second, third person)

    Detail and Description of setting, and the motivation for including them. And then … in depth analysis of direct/indirect speech

    /* from the book…
    direct speech == Elizabeth said “I refuse to go on living like this”
    indirect speech == Elizabeth said that she refused to go on living like that.
    free indirect discourse == Elizabeth would not go on living like this.
    narrator’s text == Elizabeth had had it.
    */

    Chapter 2, Aspects: Story. Sequential Ordering, Rhythm, From Actors to Characters, Focalization (
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focalization ), Mechanics of transforming fabula to story, predictability, background.

    “Vision in language”: “I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know”

    3. Fabula: Elements. Events. Confrontation. Relationships. Narrative cycle, or cascading consequence. Selection of Actors. Power, Helper and Opponent. Time. (Spanning a couple days, Spanning a century). Interruption and Parallelism (think analogy in programming), gaps in chronology. more on location and sequence…


    I haven’t read the the whole book, But from what I gather, she elucidates the subtle distinction of style found in text, offers terminology and abstractions to grapple and reason about why writers write the way they do. It’s a deep read.

    Derek.

  • What exactly do you mean by Narratology? I’m intrigued, although not convinced it’s for me.

  • Have you looked into narratology at all? After searching for the structure of plot, and stumbling around clunky diagrams of my own design, I’ve found a muse hiding in the thicket of this quirky literary field.

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