Reading Assignment and Classwork

During class we went over a book titled “Fluorescence” a bunch short-stories/poems.  A lot of the poems took place in France, or at least inspired by it.  A poem that I read is called “Sage” though I’m not sure where the author was trying to go with it.  I can tell it’s about a lady and the poem is talking about what she looks like and the creepiness about her.  A line in the poem is “Juice ran dark dryness in a next room, shuffles her index, ring land of Aztec.”  Reading this blog you’re probably thinking, “hey he know what he’s talking about” but honestly I’m still lost reading this stuff.  A lot of the poems, aside from being inspired with the location of France also go with paintings.  A poem I read in class was about a man walking with a red rusty lantern, with skeletons and bodies.  I really liked the eerie feelings of the poems. 

For the reading assignment I read “Bird by Bird”.  The areas that really jumped out at me was about developing your character.  The author talks about how you can’t be over-protective.  “As soon as you start protecting your characters from the ramifications of their less-than-lofty behavior, your story will start to feel flat and pointless,…”  From my brief time writing fiction, I think this is a trait I need to work on.  Just letting my characters to their thing and let the chips fall into place.  Some characters I think about in books are Hannibal Lector, Frankenstein, and some others.  Overall I really like the author’s point of view on this.

Set Design was another chapter that the author went over.  Thinking about the characters as actors on a stage that you the author is setting up are pretty different.  “So you sit there at your desk trying to see what the set looks like that your characters will be entering in a moment.”  I think that Tolkien and other authors probably went through the same thinking.  If I were going to make a story about a character that mimicked myself, I wonder what type of stage I would set up.  

Class, Stories, and dialogue

As the class gets deeper into the fiction portion of the class, the assignments we get are geared to reading and writing a greater number of fiction short stories.  One of the books we are assigned to read is call “Wreckage of Reason”, a book I mentioned in a past blog.  During class, the class talked about the different stories we were assigned to read.  Divided into groups, the group I was a part of went into a discussion about a short story titled “The Blue Girl”.  The short story was about a group of teenagers and their mothers enjoying a day at the beach by a lake.  While they were at the beach, the family notices a girl drowning.  After saving the girl, the group takes the blue girl back to her house.  The author of the story does an amazing job at using descriptions, instead of just stating an emotion or sequences of events.  We talked about our theories on what the blue girl was and what the author was trying to convey to the reader.  At the end of the chapter, the author mentions about integrating fairy tales into her stories, so as a group we thought maybe the blue girl had something to do with fairies, which explains the “moon” pie the character likes so much.  One of my group members also talked about the ending of the story and how it didn’t have a clear resolution.  Overall the story was pretty confusing half the time, at least for me. 

For assignment about dialogues, I decided to remember a time when I was in the army.  In the army we had a lot of memorable talks and so choosing from the many number of dialogues was pretty easy.  I decided on writing about going to the NBC gas chamber because I thought of the dumbest things to get attention from my platoon mates.  I joked about some things others may consider offensive, but in basic training are considered appropriate.  Being in an all-male platoon also helped to develop colorful dialogue, that society would frown upon.  The short story I wrote was one of the milder dialogues I had with the other guys, so I thought it would be a good opportunity. 

Reading the book “Bird by Bird” kind of went along with my short story (dialogue) since the book talked about character and plot development.  Writing about a character is all about letting them do their own things and developing a personality.  Even though the short is about me, writing the story has to incorporate my “character’s” personality, in order to engage the reader.  The author of “Bird by Bird” goes into great detail in getting the reader to understand how to write a story.  Getting to know each character is important since they are the ones creating the plot.  For me, whose never written a book, this concept really help to allow me to focus on the important things, instead of how I normally though you write a short story. 

In class we also got to read fiction packets, which have several different types of short stories.  Though I initially didn’t understand the stories, as we talked about them during class, the discussions helped to open up my thinking process on fiction.  An interesting story was about an intern working at a mental health clinic.  The story starts off with the intern working with the patients, but as you read through the short story you begin to wonder whether the intern is a patient or will become one as his sanity goes down the drain.  The professor helped to show how the author had opposing concepts like scientific reasoning, but illogical train of thought.  For the assignment in the syllabus, we needed to finish off the 3^rd fiction packet and be ready to talk about the stories during class.  One of the short stories is called “The Falling Girl”, a girl at some fancy party that falls off the building, while people are asking “Where are you going? Why so fast? Who are you?” Reading the story, the author is probably wondering what people thinking about as they are falling off a skyscraper or even why they would in the first place.  

Wreckage of Reason

For class I needed to read a book titled “Wreckage of Reason”, a compilation of short fiction from female authors.  When I first read the title I thought how I wouldn’t be able to relate to any of the stories, but as I continued to read I got into some of them.  Some of the stories I had a “oh that’s nice” kind of response, while others I was thinking “this is amazing.”  The story that spoke the most to me was “New York/LA Whirlwind of Romance.”  The story is divided into two parts, the first being “Things you told me on the phone before I met you” and the second part was “Things you told me once I got to Los Angeles.”  Each part is composed of sentences you would hear from the other party, in relation to whether you were talking on the phone or meeting each other for the first time.  Some of the lines in the first part I thought were same for anyone was “I could talk to you all night.”  Each of these sentences could be taken verbatim from the reader’s own past experience with relationships.  Aside from being something you could easily hear in a relationship, each sentence also seemed to speak of attributes about the other person as being amazing, but in reality be really shallow.  An example of this is in the sentence “I love your voice”.  As you get closer to part 2, the sentences begin talking about how excited or about counting down the seconds like “Four days ‘til you get here.  Three more days.  Two more days. In twenty six hours.”  When you get to part 2 the sentence change since pedestals break and fantasies are ruined about the other person, “Yeah, I’ll talk to you sometime.  You need to build your upper body strength.  You’ve got a lot of baggage.”  I enjoyed reading this story because no matter what your personal experience was you’ll find a sentence you either said or heard.

A story that I found confusing but enjoyable was “The Blue Girl”, by Laurie Foos.  The story is about several mothers and daughters who help out a “blue girl” who was drowning and their experience.  At the end of the story, the author mentions how there was some fairy tale attributes incorporated into the story, after reading that a lot of the story began to make a little more sense.  When remembering about fairy tales and myths the one thing that came to mind is about children being stolen away, which appears a lot in this story as fears from the mother.  “I feared infection, a spreading of the girl’s odd blue skin into my daughter’s flesh, soaking it with poison.”  This sentence and throughout the story is used to incorporate fairy tale myths into the story while making it seem more realistic.  In the book, the “blue girl” also seems to enjoy moon pies, which I thought of as the relationship between fairies and the moon.  Overall the way the author seems to create a serious mood and gets the reader to wonder “what’s going to happen next” made the story even better.

“More Than Winter or Spring”, by Jessica treat, was a story that help to take me back to the days when I was a kid.  The way the two girls interact and play around in a realistic way is something I enjoyed reading about.  I felt that Jenny’s character was very dark because of the way she kept pushing issues, like “Jenny’s voice, icicle winter voice, sticks to my throat.  She leans against me, her face in mine.”  I remember as a kid having friends like that who made you say things and push you into scenarios that you didn’t feel comfortable doing.  The various things that the two girls talk about had a feeling of trying to cement the future, where they debate what would happen if their parents died or playing the game “Which would you rather”.  A part of me wondered, as I was reading the story, if one of their games was going to go too far and cross a line, mainly due to Jenny.