Procrastination now equals blogging! Yay!
I'm taking Fiction Writing this semester, which is 100% not counting for anything at all and is for my enjoyment. It's an upper division class though, so so far it's been rather intense. My teacher is wonderful and also terrifying.
Besides writing (I'm on drafts of my first short story right now, which is another thing I'm procrastinating on), we have different readings of short stories, which we analyze, like good English students. But instead of a literary analysis, we have to look at things from an author perspective - structure, word choice, backstory, flashbacks, all that good stuff. That's where it gets tricky.
Today's stories were written by Joyce Carol Oates, including Zombie, which was later turned into a novel. If you don't know what it is, please don't read it. It's disturbing at the very least, and it made me feel sick, make weird noises, throw it across the room, and resulted in enough distress to keep me from retaining much of the next story, which was a nice simple piece about remains found in a landfill.
But!
Today was one of the best discussions we've had. My group tends to butt heads a little bit - we had a full-on shouting match last week, but I was totally right - and it helped that I stopped interrupting people. I think because it's not a story you're supposed to like, we didn't get caught up in discussing the elements of the story from a thematic perspective. We were too busy asking 'why' and trying to get an answer and bouncing ideas off of one another, even if they weren't always good ideas. ("They're both dead, that's the connection!") I ended up catching myself saying the words 'I love this story' (referring to Landfill), not because of its miserable characters and vividly gross descriptions, or even the moral or lack of it, but because the whole thing is written backwards and that's just really cool writing.
Zombie I still haven't forgiven. I ended up in a confused mush. (This happened after this, but this is the present, so this is the past and this is the future past...)
We have a mean teacher.
That's my two cents for the day.
A hui hou!
If you want a good read to clear you mind, I can highly recommend the series by Megan Whalen Turner, the first book of which is called "The Thief". I've been re-reading them this week, and they really are excellently well-written. (It helps that, having started my blog since the first time I read them, I pay a bit more conscious attention to the actual writing style.)
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