about writing.

Wed, March 31, 2010 7:46:26 AM check yes or no; 10:49:41 PM a day.



we are working on driving our stories with description over action in the blue group. they are incredible writers, very playful. i pour over their words, stealing notebooks to photocopy, reading sentences aloud with wonder. children are lyrical. all this vigor and severity. the inside of their brain is just right there, spilled out and flashing bluntly. complete and incomplete. i ask them to explain it, but they don’t understand the question. everything is there.

that is the thing. this push to develop, to facilitate, guide, mold, indoctrinate, coerce. the lines are thin. i just want to enjoy them, but it is naive.

writing is a lot about control. but it can also be about release, or maybe i'm reframing. i have been called more comfortable with ideas than people, and writing feels like evidence of this. i have had to force myself into different kinds of interactions over the years.

i wrote a chapter book in middle school about freezing time. the main character had found this stop watch that could pause linear time and manipulate events. i realized at one point that i didn't understand the central conflict or how to end the story, so i plunged all the characters off the side of a bridge in a white fifteen-passenger van. it was the end of the school year so it seemed right.
i was also interested in parallel universes, and thought "the beginning of the end" was an incredible title for a novel on this subject. for some reason. a year later, the tv series 'sliders' appeared, and i swore i was robbed.
to this day no one believes me.



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