I’m flattered—really flattered—when bloggers and students and friends refer to me as literary or even literate. I mean it. It’s struck me in the last few days, as it seems to do seasonally, how I don’t belong to a community of poets, novelists or even critics, at least as these things might be conventionally recognised. I have no stellar contacts nor networks to my name; I am not of the scene, as I perceive it.
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There is plenty to read on my blogroll, and I find new gems—no stone unmined—every week. Stef and Deborah represent themselves and their experience with lucidity and clarity multiple times a week, and are collaborating with others on The Hand Mirror, whose premise shows what many of us know: that the second wave has not yet dissipated.
My online recherches for material on Murakami, whose Norwegian Wood I am working on (in translation) with my literary studies students, brought me in passing to the selfdivider, which is well-turned indeed. Reading this new writing has led me to think about the kind of writing I am doing here, and how it has changed in the four years since I began writing, in this mode, online.
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In many ways, writing fiction is easier than academic writing or even the kind of fragmentary autobiography I keep here: few references to chase, once research is done, and the pleasure of making things up, as opposed to introspectively examining one’s mind. These points of difference, however, belie what is the greatest risk for me in generating fictive prose, which is that I may write over the top of my plot and characters rather than revealing them from within their own mise-en-scène. This is sometimes described as telling, not showing, but a more reliable indicator for me is how easy it feels: if I’m thinking “I can do this! Yeah!” instead of something closer to “urrrggghh”, then I’m likely doing it wrong.
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I have hit 100 000 words on my manuscript, which is encouraging. When the first complete draft is finished it should leave me with 4-5000 words to excise, a comfortable amount with which to play. Later excisions may be more substantial.
If I have no work-related disasters in the next fortnight, and don’t get completely overwhelmed by marking, I should finish the first complete draft by Easter. That will have taken me around three years of discontinuous work; not too shabby.
Most of the first three sections are edited to within an inch of their taut lives, so apart from the editing this most recently-composed section, I hope there will be nothing more serious to do than check for continuity and repetition. After that, I have to decide what to do next. I have some ideas but I will leave their disclosure for a different entry.
Tomorrow is the last teaching day for the year, and I am hoping for fourteen or so restful days of eating, drinking, walking and writing, before returning to the scholarly fold. Since the dogs number five and their walking harnesses are identical, I have resorted to this natty eponymity (courtesy of these fine people) to speed getting everyone harnessed up for walking:
It’s not quite as bad as the many tiny t-shirts and bejewelled collars one can buy for one’s dogs (or use to decorate one’s cats), but this may be a slippery slope.
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28 April, 2008
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,meta-diarist,O internet,writing & research
I’m flattered—really flattered—when bloggers and students and friends refer to me as literary or even literate. I mean it. It’s struck me in the last few days, as it seems to do seasonally, how I don’t belong to a community of poets, novelists or even critics, at least as these things might be conventionally recognised. I have no stellar contacts nor networks to my name; I am not of the scene, as I perceive it.
[click to continue…]
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