Make sure the sliver stays froze
Dec. 27th, 2006 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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wyrdsmiths for further discussion. Do genre habits and constraints allow the writer to maintain a distance from their work? Is that distance desirable? Does that distance prevent emotional exploration in work?
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cristalia: "...that the way genre's constructed insulates us from the blade-stepping." (Note: cristalia disagrees that the genre's constructed this way. I pulled the partial quote because it seemed the most succinct definition of the essential argument.)
Speaking as a writer who has on more than one occasion broken down at her keyboard, I think it boils down to process, what comes first in one's approach to story construction. Character has and always will come first with me, and that means I need to nab the buildings blocks from somewhere. Midnight requisitions from the depths of experience. It doesn't always have to be fraught, but there does need to be some solidity there. The straw to make the brick.
So, we're boiling, mixing, building, stealing. I think there are reasons that these words are the ones I use.
I constantly mine my experiences and what I know of the experiences of others. I'm really pretty cold-blooded about it. Cold-blooded even if I cry. Even if it hurts, I keep going. I can flip it, if I wish. Use it to lie or obscure. I don't have to tell my truth, just the truth as it relates to the story. Which allows for some protective distance while still revealing something.
Yet the stories are genre because the stakes are huge, the emotions are high. They don't call it "space opera" because of the singing and the costumes. I subscribe tomalkingrey's view of genre as Romance-with-a-capital-R, a place of larger than life characters and stakes and settings. I hope I haven't misinterpreted her views.
Closeness, but at the same time. distance. That damned Graham Greene quote again. Someday I will come down fully on one side of the argument or another, but my world is shades of grey. So the worlds I write are shades of grey. Blended with experience, not always mine. Some people who've known me might be upset if they knew. Or not.
Anything I wrote would be written the same way because it's how I work, so I don't even know if it's a point of discussion.
And I hope to hell that I haven't missed the point of all this.
UPDATE: I will add that once the channel is open, I lose control over what passes through. The scenes that wrenched the most were seldom the ones that I thought would do so.
The Stephen King (iirc) story about the surgeon stranded on the desert island, who removes pieces of himself and eats them while recording the process in clinical detail. THAT ONE.
wyrdsmiths for further discussion. Do genre habits and constraints allow the writer to maintain a distance from their work? Is that distance desirable? Does that distance prevent emotional exploration in work?Stolen from
cristalia: "...that the way genre's constructed insulates us from the blade-stepping." (Note: cristalia disagrees that the genre's constructed this way. I pulled the partial quote because it seemed the most succinct definition of the essential argument.)Speaking as a writer who has on more than one occasion broken down at her keyboard, I think it boils down to process, what comes first in one's approach to story construction. Character has and always will come first with me, and that means I need to nab the buildings blocks from somewhere. Midnight requisitions from the depths of experience. It doesn't always have to be fraught, but there does need to be some solidity there. The straw to make the brick.
So, we're boiling, mixing, building, stealing. I think there are reasons that these words are the ones I use.
I constantly mine my experiences and what I know of the experiences of others. I'm really pretty cold-blooded about it. Cold-blooded even if I cry. Even if it hurts, I keep going. I can flip it, if I wish. Use it to lie or obscure. I don't have to tell my truth, just the truth as it relates to the story. Which allows for some protective distance while still revealing something.
Yet the stories are genre because the stakes are huge, the emotions are high. They don't call it "space opera" because of the singing and the costumes. I subscribe to
malkingrey's view of genre as Romance-with-a-capital-R, a place of larger than life characters and stakes and settings. I hope I haven't misinterpreted her views.Closeness, but at the same time. distance. That damned Graham Greene quote again. Someday I will come down fully on one side of the argument or another, but my world is shades of grey. So the worlds I write are shades of grey. Blended with experience, not always mine. Some people who've known me might be upset if they knew. Or not.
Anything I wrote would be written the same way because it's how I work, so I don't even know if it's a point of discussion.
And I hope to hell that I haven't missed the point of all this.
UPDATE: I will add that once the channel is open, I lose control over what passes through. The scenes that wrenched the most were seldom the ones that I thought would do so.
The Stephen King (iirc) story about the surgeon stranded on the desert island, who removes pieces of himself and eats them while recording the process in clinical detail. THAT ONE.
