%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |    Not for the faint of art. |
PROMPT January 21st How much of your own life or the lives of people you know do you put into your writing? Do you mine your past for inspiration, or do you create wholly new places and characters? I mean, I write science fiction and fantasy. Still, it's inevitable that some souvenir of my past, some moment of doubt or pain, of joy or satisfaction, whether mine or someone else's, will make its appearance in my fiction. And it should go without saying that blog entries are as honest as I can make them, within the boundaries of an imperfect memory as well as a desire to avoid identifying specific other people in less-than-ideal situations. Well... and also allowing for the occasional hyperbole or other truth-stretching for comedic effect. Never let the facts get in the way of a good joke, I say. Or a bad one. Especially a bad one. It's inevitable, really, that the past should creep in to any writing, as that is all that is real. The future is unknown outside of a few constraining assumptions, and the present is a geometric point on the timeline, without dimension, an illusion, the limit of the recent past and the immediate future. Yes, only the past is real, but, like the grammatical tense, memory of it is imperfect - I was running somewhere, they were singing some song, she was on her way to the prom when... The minutiae of the past are sometimes sketchy and unreliable, so I use some memory that seems sturdy as a scaffolding, a framework on which to build the specifics. Like the skeleton of a building, this defines the general shape, and while some details are clear on the blueprints, others I have to make up, or pull from other memories. Some other situations - like someone in free-fall in a spaceship - I obviously have no personal experience with, but even there I rely on memory: memory of scientific descriptions, of books, movies, and TV shows that I thought got it right (most don't). Or if it's a fantasy world, maybe something from a dream will pop in there: terrifying monsters, shifting landscapes, rivers of metal, forests of feathery hair. Again, all part of my past, even if not a part of consensus reality. Point is, and this goes back to what I've been saying for some time, there's nothing useless when you're a writer. You never know when something you or someone you know has witnessed, or learned, or dreamed or watched or endured, can be useful in writing, perhaps just as a metaphor or simile, much as sometimes, that spice that's been languishing on the rack might be just the thing to transform a meal from merely good to delicious. Maybe that's why I tend to keep things around: for spice. A picture postcard A folded stub A program of the play File away your photographs Of your holiday And your mementos Will turn to dust But that's the price you pay For every year's a souvenir That slowly fades away Every year's a souvenir That slowly fades away |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
