|┌ru┌h abou┌ f|c┌|on|||
...good morning...i read the literary debate of our friend kyla (only the second person who visits my blog sometimes) puts forward in her blog about her re-evaluation of self against fiction...and how not to impose your being on your writing and questions and dialogues and reactions...it started off as a brief comment on the subject...going forward to elaborate my point of view and ended up being caught up with my own demons in writing by the end...anyway to cut it short i'm just posting my thoughts and how a comment can become an essay as a critical assessment of one's own writing and hence himself while the shadows of my ego chase me endlessly...but a wise man once said and i quote "..we only learn from eachother..." .so....
my comment as it started:
Hi Kyla (and other writer friends)...I understand what you're going through...or I think I "can" understand what you're going through...(or maybe I shouldn't use can in the last sentence but anyway adding is better than taking out)...should fiction be too fictitious...or where do we draw the line of truth...how do we say or can we say “no, no its pure fiction it never happened to me?”…and why do we want to escape from it...though its all the more better for writing…we are just voicing our own lives with what could have been worse or what could have been better? (if the mode is realism)...YES...or if you’re being a surrealist why did Rilke wrote about the Lion in his Living Room…or Zen designed a tree growing and coming out of a cup of tea…because to establish surrealism (or fiction) we have to rely on real facts, we have to live those lives…hence ourselves…and there's no harm i think even if you purely write abuot yourself...and I also think that no matter what you write prose poems even historical events or travelogs you can't possibly entirely escape yourself...I would have a different experience of the Nanga Parbat than how Tarar joyously reveals it…in fact the contrast of everyday life the joy, the hatred, the rush of blood, the sickness, the grief, everything: strengthens your words or any other form of expression…why do you think van Gogh painted as he did…or Dostoyevsky wrote what he wrote not because these guys were highly thoughtful and creative fabricators…but they did what they did because they strived through their own special lives and...they were stopped…and I repeat yes all we have to do in creating a genius is to stop the right man at the right time…like the apple stopped Newton…or Einstein, Neruda, Nabokov…or I’d say it goes back to Adam who was stopped from eating off that tree…and as mariam says "you write what you know"...I'd agree and I’d positively add "you write what you are" as well... or let me put it in another way “we pen down more of what we are than what we actually are, because then we create ourselves of situations that could have been or of places we cannot be and all the ideas of reciprocal maybes of what we appear to be ”…
...I'll state my example…I know that I can write (that’s another attribute one should have and has to believe in it)...easiest way to check this is to read your own stuff after 3 months and if you like it more than you first did and you tend to think that it has been written by someone else and it can’t be you (as in its too good to be yours) then you can positively write...
…I used to write prose poems and short stories…because maybe my own character is like that…I appear to be very calm and at rest and I am as a person and I like things unfinished...jobs undone...half sketches...and inside and on paper I get too restless…I feel like saying or doing the most unusual things, out of context, all of a sudden…highly surreal in itself…juxtaposition of unimaginable contexts...that’s what I love to write…if you think what’s the relationship between one line to the other…I’d immediately say either ink or the handwriting…and no more and no less… I write unknown and absurd things that only make sense to me and sometimes not even to myself…and I love to confuse the reader and make him/her doubt my abilities in the process…basically I don’t care where or how is it coming out... and how it would effect someone as a reader really...I do it for myself...I think everyone does it for that...or at least starts as that...
…therefore short stories…poems…prose…itches and glitches…here n there kinda writer…this also helped me stay unfamiliar with the term called “writer’s block”…
…I decided on starting a novel once…decided to tie up the prose that I already had and to make some connections through me and add…so the structure of the book would be me…starting my full length work I realized how I sucked in forming a structure to the book…the most important ingredient…how do I structure myself to support the book…until I got this idea...and now I’m letting out the concept of my book here…
…I made this situation of irrelevance of context…the non linear connectivity…chain of events becoming and losing their meaning…and losing and losing…into vague memories quickly re-lived like the present and acted out like a fool…this oh-so-erasable absurdity…and the nonsense if you may call it…all this is the subject itself…basically having no structure is the structure on which the book is based…no cliché story-line…no central idea, no genre, no context…sometimes it feels like I’m playing safe but only from a distance but once I’m into it…NO…trust me its worse…because then I cannot edit…conceptually I should not…but I do…so what makes me edit: my own partial re-directional events that tend to lead somewhere and lose track again...there is a structure somewhere and that my friend is me, myself…I become my own guard, my own judge, my own pages, my own opposition and a close ally…like America to Pakistan…or locally MMA to my dear Pervez…but I haven’t stopped myself from doing so…I like it…I love it and live it...maybe something would stop me too and I become a genius!
until then...take good care people...m.
Ps…I have been a big fan of the surrealists specially their characters than their works…and talking of geniuses please allow me to mention a few more names like Marcel Duchamp and the nude descending the staircase…brilliant work…and Luis Bunuel and Sica and Satyajit Ray (for their films) and definitely a lot of urdu writers as well, like Shahab, Ashfaq Saheb (big surrealist himself), Bano Qudsia, Jon Alia, Faraz, Kazmi, Faiz...the list goes on and on and on...though I have read few of them properly but i will...
Ps.2...and I hate to announce it...but the working title for the book is "perforations"...that is the first time ever I've declared it...even to myself...I had it stuck in my mind somewhere and...
NOTE: postcripts were added later in the day...after coming back from the sites in a 48degree sun...
my comment as it started:
Hi Kyla (and other writer friends)...I understand what you're going through...or I think I "can" understand what you're going through...(or maybe I shouldn't use can in the last sentence but anyway adding is better than taking out)...should fiction be too fictitious...or where do we draw the line of truth...how do we say or can we say “no, no its pure fiction it never happened to me?”…and why do we want to escape from it...though its all the more better for writing…we are just voicing our own lives with what could have been worse or what could have been better? (if the mode is realism)...YES...or if you’re being a surrealist why did Rilke wrote about the Lion in his Living Room…or Zen designed a tree growing and coming out of a cup of tea…because to establish surrealism (or fiction) we have to rely on real facts, we have to live those lives…hence ourselves…and there's no harm i think even if you purely write abuot yourself...and I also think that no matter what you write prose poems even historical events or travelogs you can't possibly entirely escape yourself...I would have a different experience of the Nanga Parbat than how Tarar joyously reveals it…in fact the contrast of everyday life the joy, the hatred, the rush of blood, the sickness, the grief, everything: strengthens your words or any other form of expression…why do you think van Gogh painted as he did…or Dostoyevsky wrote what he wrote not because these guys were highly thoughtful and creative fabricators…but they did what they did because they strived through their own special lives and...they were stopped…and I repeat yes all we have to do in creating a genius is to stop the right man at the right time…like the apple stopped Newton…or Einstein, Neruda, Nabokov…or I’d say it goes back to Adam who was stopped from eating off that tree…and as mariam says "you write what you know"...I'd agree and I’d positively add "you write what you are" as well... or let me put it in another way “we pen down more of what we are than what we actually are, because then we create ourselves of situations that could have been or of places we cannot be and all the ideas of reciprocal maybes of what we appear to be ”…
...I'll state my example…I know that I can write (that’s another attribute one should have and has to believe in it)...easiest way to check this is to read your own stuff after 3 months and if you like it more than you first did and you tend to think that it has been written by someone else and it can’t be you (as in its too good to be yours) then you can positively write...
…I used to write prose poems and short stories…because maybe my own character is like that…I appear to be very calm and at rest and I am as a person and I like things unfinished...jobs undone...half sketches...and inside and on paper I get too restless…I feel like saying or doing the most unusual things, out of context, all of a sudden…highly surreal in itself…juxtaposition of unimaginable contexts...that’s what I love to write…if you think what’s the relationship between one line to the other…I’d immediately say either ink or the handwriting…and no more and no less… I write unknown and absurd things that only make sense to me and sometimes not even to myself…and I love to confuse the reader and make him/her doubt my abilities in the process…basically I don’t care where or how is it coming out... and how it would effect someone as a reader really...I do it for myself...I think everyone does it for that...or at least starts as that...
…therefore short stories…poems…prose…itches and glitches…here n there kinda writer…this also helped me stay unfamiliar with the term called “writer’s block”…
…I decided on starting a novel once…decided to tie up the prose that I already had and to make some connections through me and add…so the structure of the book would be me…starting my full length work I realized how I sucked in forming a structure to the book…the most important ingredient…how do I structure myself to support the book…until I got this idea...and now I’m letting out the concept of my book here…
…I made this situation of irrelevance of context…the non linear connectivity…chain of events becoming and losing their meaning…and losing and losing…into vague memories quickly re-lived like the present and acted out like a fool…this oh-so-erasable absurdity…and the nonsense if you may call it…all this is the subject itself…basically having no structure is the structure on which the book is based…no cliché story-line…no central idea, no genre, no context…sometimes it feels like I’m playing safe but only from a distance but once I’m into it…NO…trust me its worse…because then I cannot edit…conceptually I should not…but I do…so what makes me edit: my own partial re-directional events that tend to lead somewhere and lose track again...there is a structure somewhere and that my friend is me, myself…I become my own guard, my own judge, my own pages, my own opposition and a close ally…like America to Pakistan…or locally MMA to my dear Pervez…but I haven’t stopped myself from doing so…I like it…I love it and live it...maybe something would stop me too and I become a genius!
until then...take good care people...m.
Ps…I have been a big fan of the surrealists specially their characters than their works…and talking of geniuses please allow me to mention a few more names like Marcel Duchamp and the nude descending the staircase…brilliant work…and Luis Bunuel and Sica and Satyajit Ray (for their films) and definitely a lot of urdu writers as well, like Shahab, Ashfaq Saheb (big surrealist himself), Bano Qudsia, Jon Alia, Faraz, Kazmi, Faiz...the list goes on and on and on...though I have read few of them properly but i will...
Ps.2...and I hate to announce it...but the working title for the book is "perforations"...that is the first time ever I've declared it...even to myself...I had it stuck in my mind somewhere and...
NOTE: postcripts were added later in the day...after coming back from the sites in a 48degree sun...
posted by leaves turning pale at 12:27 PM
1 Comments:
I really liked your thoughts on author involvement in the story and how much of yourself goes into your writings. I really really liked the idea of the structure of the novel being you yourself - although I thought of structuring it according to the physical self, the body. I don't know if this was your thought or not, but now my imagination is all fired up! So thanks!
Also, about contextless novels - I was thinking about it and, for that, it seems like you'd have to make the reader the context. I mean, for the reader, who needs a context, the reader itself becomes the context. Tell me if that makes any sense to you.
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