I find it very difficult to start writing. Erik and I can commiserate. I think he's interested in fiction for the challenge of it, maybe the beauty of it; so many people can become engrossed and connected to a story that is about something that didn't happen and people who don't exist. I love fiction. My professor for Recent Poetry of the United States (a poet himself) said fiction writers make all the money. This was a joke that came up recurrently in that class, one that all we liberal arts undergraduates would chortle good naturally about as if it was some natural fate we all understood about ourselves: Our degree is not appropriate for a lucrative career. This professor wrote really impressive poems, I'm sure. I never read them. I try to read poems and understand them or at least like them, but most of them are so entirely weird that they just make me feel stupid and like I should have studied marketing or something normal like that. Anyway, he had his collections published in books, but it is people who write fiction who have slim chances at making money from it. I am interested in writing fiction, but I wonder if I'd be very good at it at all.
Erik thinks the first line is very important, and we laugh about it, but I think he's right.
We arrived late to the campsite.
Was that the line you had in Tucson last month, Erik? The next lines are more difficult to come by, because the story is beginning, something needs to start happening, characters need to start being "developed." Are you supposed to map it out like in elementary school when we used to write stories with beginnings, middles, and ends?
It was ok, because the others were already there with the keg. Everyone knows how that story goes.
It's a fun exercise, at least, to think of how a reader might first be introduced into your fictional world. I'll try some first lines right now:
Genevieve was the first one who noticed something was different.
Good parents are not supposed to lie to their children.
My mother told me the thing I will never forget on my thirteenth birthday.
I ate the apple he was saving for his lunch; I ate it and I am not sorry.
I am just being ridiculous. Those were the first things that popped into my head; and that's the ridiculous part, how they popped. That's not authentic. I get wrapped up in the thought that I want to be a writer without putting much consideration into what kind of writer I really am. I guess I've expressed interest in it from a young age, and my mom has always told me to write things down before I forget about them.
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About Me
- Beth
- From "Letters to a Young Poet," Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Hi Beth, it's nice seeing a post on your blog again, I have this RSS program that pops up so I know if you posted one :)
ReplyDeleteYou reminded me of an essay by Raymond Carver 'On Writing', he says
"I once sat down to write what turned out to be a pretty good story, though only the first sentence of the story had offered itself to me when I began it. For several days I'd been going around with this sentence in my head: 'He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang.' I knew a story was there and that it wanted telling. I felt it in my bones, that a story belonged with that beginning, if I could just have the time to write it. I found the time, an entire day--twelve, fifteen hours even--if I wanted to make use of it. I did, and I sat down in the morning and wrote the first sentence, and other sentences promptly began to attach themselves. I made the story just as I'd make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I'd been wanting to write."
That's great, I like that. Mom said she is reading a terrible book, terribly written at least, that began with " 'Brrrrrrrrr-ing!' " and it's a telephone ringing. Hopefully we can both get something more substantial down soon and have a writer's workshop if I get to come visit at the end of April! (also Priscilla :D)
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