Discussion → Spontaneous Prose
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I agree thorougly on the importance of training and the influence of the unciousness, that without these the 'spontenaity' might not be possible. Those things don't, though, rule out that you can approach a given story without premeditation, that is, without a concious planning of what the story will entail. You can leave it up to the moment to decide what will go into the story, even if you have all your tools lined up to use. The analogy of spontaneous roofing is nice, humorous, but not entirely apt. The aim of roofing is pretty simple: keep the people inside dry. So, you plan. The aim of writing a story is nowhere near so important, and it's not so fixed. A story can turn out in any shape, or mishape, you wish, and no one will get wet.
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Interesting take, Joseph, but I disagree. Poorly constructed stories leak like crazy. Some stories collapse if you run up the stairs too fast. I think the of aim of writing a story is to produce something in which the reader can live comfortably without fear of the roof caving in on their head. The freedom and creativity will always exist, but so will the framework.
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ooh, a metaphor match! like it.
anyway, here i go again referring to a few of the bartheleme tongue firmly planted in cheek "39 steps" --
26) Don't be enamored of the idea you start with, or the idea that comes to you after you've been working on a piece for a time. If you're lucky the idea will keep changing as you write the story.
27) Don't reject interesting stuff (things for characters to say and do, things to see, places to be, etc.) because the stuff doesn't conform to your idea. Change your idea to wrap it around the stuff.
28) If you have a story in mind to start with, leave it there. Ditto a "character."
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This thread has been very insightful. I'm with Gary here especially with #26 and also argue that even if you don't consciously have an "idea" or "character," that doesn't mean that you are a blank slate. You come to the page with your life experience - your gender, sexuality, race, class position, education etc. (a side note: we're starting a series in Luna Park on these issues and so I'm rather invested right now). As such, spontaneity - To jump off a bridge, to run naked in the street, to grab the first person you see and plant one on the cheek, to write - are complicated acts. They require some thought, some analysis to begin. Whether Edward's initial question about if the result is Art is also bound up in this political discourse.
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teaching angle: something i've observed: the very worst writing -- i mean, the kind of stuff that would make a good percentage of other writers wince -- comes from apprentice-stage writers, not novices. novices throw messes out there, but they're also liable to write stuff that is, in places, startlingly good/fresh..... because they're just writing? don't know... but at the apprentice stage: that's when people are learning, thinking in a very forthright way about the what should be included and what qualities might be on display.... it's the writer's 'adolescence' in a way.... and sometimes it's as far as they'll ever get from good.....
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Too many flashes I read feel to me as if the driving force behind them is that the writer wanted to write a flash. Spontaneity for me is about wanting to discover something (in the world, a character, my self, someone I know, wanted to know, those kind of things) and writing toward that thing but being unsure of how to get there or what I'll discover. All that writing that I've done before allows me (perhaps) to think less about craft/the writing itself (what I know) and more about something revelatory (what I don't know).
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Sorry, not very spontaneous in my response. More and more, I am very interested in the first word best word idea. The father of the muses was Zeus and the mother was Memory. So art is this combination of fore-brained ordering of unconscious spontaneous utterence. For me now, I am a momma's boy. mm
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i hope so.
& i agree with roxane: seems like most of the 'good ones' i write are written as quickly as they are accepted and i don't really think about what they are or what they are doing or how best to get them out - it just happens and then i polish them up a little.
when i think about it too much it seems like something is missing or really they don't make as much sense when they're done. unfortunately it also seems that unless i force myself to write even when i don't always feel like it i won't be in the habit of doing it and so i won't write anything.
also seems like some of the best things i've written have been after i woke up from a nap and had some little kernel left over from dream time.
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Because of this thread, I wrote a piece early the other morning called Eden, Suburbs, that I otherwise likely would not have written. Busy working on a novel, and so the germ of the idea is something that I likely would have ignored, but instead thought I'd try it spontaneously.
After writing it, I wrote down the circumstances of its genesis:
Woke up at 4 this morning. No idea what kind of dreams I might have had. Started to put laundry in the washer but decided to start the coffee pot first. Went back to the laundry room and put in the dark stuff. Read the TLS—a re-review of Leonard Cohen novels—while eating oatmeal with raspberries (black and red), blueberries and bits of white and yellow peaches. Drank coffee. The idea of a boy talking to a tree came into my head, asking about why the tree threw away so many leaves. Why do you do it? It’s what I do, were the words—there were images as well—that floated in my head when I opened the door to my office (it was raining; there were wet leaves on the wooden ramp that leads to the door).
By the time I sat down, there was a girl in the image, and the line “They were playing a game they called doctor but which had very little to do with actual medicine,” came into my head.
It took about as long to write as it did to type. The only thing that got any sort of revision was the title.
From my own perspective, all of this was “spontaneous,” although I can see lots of subconscious stuff that might have played a role. I did not think, consciously, “There needs to be a girl, and they need to be doing something other than just talking to the tree.” But I can look at it in retrospect and say that I probably suspected subconsciously that I needed some kind of other action that created a parallel where the threads could eventually collide.
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Rather presumptuous of me as a new member here, I suppose, but David suggested that I put up my short-short "Sisters" as another example of spontaneous story. More like a written in fifteen minutes after opening a bag of m&m's that was supposed to be for the Halloween trick or treaters.
Spotting the first red m&m just set off the memory of how my older sister used to divvy up the package and while the brown and orange were common, the red were rare and prized. Still sucking on a candy I sat down with the laptop and wrote the story into an email to myself--which is for me the fastest way to get the words down and saved.
I've got to reread the rest of this thread but I'm fascinated by the different methods of narrative finding its way out of our minds and into an arrangement of words we call a story.
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Excellent, Susan, glad you posted it. Your story blew me up today. Loved it.
I've been meaning to post something here. Most of the stuff I write comes out of "nowhere" but then latches onto something that's been driving me nuts and the story sort of develops.
So my answer to the question is yes.
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um, er, i guess my answer is no if there is no premeditation at any point in the process. the word premeditation reminds me of criminal law - unlike demi, i was not absent the day they taught law at law school.
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