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.