Monday again? WTH.

[lydamorehouse]

Image: Willow (a black cat draped morosely over the radiator) wants you to know that Mondays are hard.

Since Rhubarb has joined our crew, Willow makes many more "tired of your crap" faces than I swear she ever used to. Either that, or she's turning into Garfield, the cat (in)famous for his hatred of Mondays.

I just finished up reading and critiquing the student submission for tonight's class and now I need to sit down and seriously consider what I want to talk about. TECHNICALLY, I have a syllabus, but I very intentionally made it vague when I proposed it so that I could change my mind about what I want to teach, session to session. According to the syllabus, I'm supposed to talk further about plot. I could do this, since we only scratched the surface of the idea of plot last session, but I am contemplating whether or not I have ENOUGH I want to say about it. I have not yet drawn this set of students my inverted version of the rising tension arc, so there's that.  We've also not really discussed the various ways in which story structure can be decolonized, something I have a lot less experience with writing, but which I should probably mention?  I dunno. I may spend part of the afternoon reviewing some sources and decide if I have anything I actually want to say about any of it or if I just want to throw together a resource list and have the students do their own reading on the subject. 

Think. Think. Think, as Pooh Bear is wont to say. 

Anyway, that's me? I spent much of the weekend working on a sea-themed (mostly sharks!) quilt for a friend out in California. 

How's you? How was your weekend.

Comments

[oracne]

My weekend was pretty good. I made progress on editing a Kalikoi story, and also went to a very excellent early music concert where I heard Charpentier and some stuff from the New Orleans Ursuline manuscripts.

[lydamorehouse]

Nice! It's always great to make writing progress.

[pameladean]

That sure is that kind of expression.

I had a great weekend celebrating the 21st anniversary of our relationship with the partner I don't live with. Neither one of us really goes anywhere we don't have to, because pandemic, but we ordered from a restaurant we often went to for anniversaries (Namaste) and did a lot of reminiscing; and my partner Cam put up a congratulatory and hilarious post about us on Mastodon. Also, because it's very icy and I am becoming an Old Person (TM), Cam gave me a ride over to Eric's and David came and collected me the next day. I feel extremely, undeservedly lucky.

Now it's back to the salt mines of doing taxes and trying to wrangle my goddamned Zeno's Novel, but I do feel refreshed.

I am actually very much interested in methods for decolonizing story structure. Structure is my weak point, often feeling like a gaping chasm with a dangerous river at the bottom, and a single strand of a rope bridge dangling dramatically over it. So I tend to resort to the formulaic and then try to undermine it with things I'm good at. But this is very makeshift, overall.

Good luck with the class. I always find your musings on how to proceed with them to be very interesting and informative.

P.

[lydamorehouse]

I have only scratched the surface of reading about non-Western story structures, but I feel like you might be relieved to know that there is currently a lot of pushback against having to have the kinds of structures that stress a lot of us writers out, with rising tension being just so, etc. etc. The model I've read the most about is kishōtenketsu, where the rising tension isn't considered nearly as important as some kind of "twist" ending. The twist, however, can be more "huh," than "Ah HA!" (O. Henry style)--that is, if I'm understanding it correctly. The general vibe, if you will, seems to Kiki's Delivery Service? Like, the story is just mostly about interesting people doing things? One of the books that often gets cited as a Western version of this tradition is A LONG WAY TO A SMALL ANGRY PLANET, which I loved, but which I remember complaining about because it read more like fan fic, in that the sakes felt low and the tension was almost non-existent.

Anyway, interesting stuff.

And, yay for 21 years of feeling lucky. That's an awesome thing, indeed. How wonderful to someone(s) in your life to make you feel that way.

[pameladean]

THANK YOU for this information about other ideas of story structure. I mean, I have some myself, because the standard ones just don't work for me except to provide a very bad draft that I have to fix somehow. I love Kiki's Delivery Service, so that is very hopeful.

Your remarks about The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet were very interesting to me. I finally read it just a few weeks ago. From various remarks dropped about it, I'd figured it was very fluffy comfort reading. I can see how it would serve as the latter, but it was not nearly as fluffy as I expected, and in fact, having been in search of fluff, I found it somewhat more full of the real world than I was expecting. It won me over, of course, because it's amazing. I found many of the people low-key, but the stakes were enough for me, as was the tension. It all depends on where you're standing, I suppose.

In any case, it's good to be reminded of both those quite successful works that do not follow the rules I personally got hit over the head with when I was trying to learn to write fiction.

And as for my luck, indeed, thank you.

P.

[sabotabby]

Poor Willow. Give her many scritches for her ennui.

I had a good weekend but alas it is back to the normal hell that is the week.

[lydamorehouse]

Today? I managed to sit on her head, so Tuesday is not starting out great for Willow either. :-(

But, I did give her scritchs both from you and as an apology from me.