Tropes & Clichés and other blocks of storytelling

I write this because I believe that English uses the word “trope” in a different way than in French. It’s a rare word here, and I had to check in dictionaries to understand it.

I hear that in the world of telling stories, a trope is like a “little structure”, linked to other words : conventions, stereotypes, clichés, but also “twists and turns”.

1. Big tropes, archetypes with capitals like : The Chosen One. The Artifact of Power. The Damsel in Distress. The Knight in Shining Armor.
2. Typical narrative structures like : enemies to lovers, tough guy secretly sensitive, forbidden love,
3. Situations or plot elements : “there’s only one bed”

 

It leads to many questions & paths :

• Tropes by categories (ex : Fantasy Tropes : quest, dark lord, hero, good vs evil, blah blah)
• Clichés are boring, aren’t tropes boring?
• New tropes?
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clich%C3%A9 Clichés are irritating, right?
• Platitudes. Stereotypes.
• Tropes are good because familiarity.
• When tropes are predictable to the point of boredom.
• Are predictable tropes clichés?
• Tropes as metaphors.

 

Well, it’s too big. Creativity and storytelling, finding the frontier between good tropes and boring ones, etc. I need a book. You have an idea?

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

 

 

Mrs Fahndrich & The Cliff House

I don’t even remember how I found this little picture of the Cliff House. First I saw this woman in a dress, meditating about the sea on the sand, and liked this big strange house in the background… I was sure it was a painting.

The same morning, watching portraits made by Hugo Erfurth, I met this young woman, a romantic dreamy face, like an old Virginia Woolf cousin.

Two haunting pictures the same day. Two ladies, watching in the same direction… Maybe thinking to each other?

 

 

Hugo Erfurth (1874-1948) was a German photographer known for his portraits of celebrities of early twentieth century. I never found who Mrs Fahndrich was, but this picture was taken around 1930 (I think).

The Cliff House was a hotel near San Francisco, who survived many incidents, including explosions (!) and the big Earthquake, but burned – in 1907 (I think).

 

Well, nothing else, sorry. I just wanted to share what I’d call two “romantic seeds”. You get two old photographs and your imagination begins to run. Mine did anyway. What’s the story behind? What caused the fire? Who are these women?

I want to read a book on each. I want to write a book with Mrs Fahndrich visiting the hotel. Maybe causing the fire. Because of a terrible love affair. With another woman. Or her mother. Also, I find the way the hotel was build was like…. calling for disaster. Too cliffy, right?

 

Have a nice day!

http://scribol.com/anthropology-and-history/history/the-night-san-franciscos-cliff-house-burnt-to-a-cinder/

https://mashable.com/2015/05/07/cliff-house/

 

 

The Juxtaposition Principle

ONE

I’m a bookseller, and this morning I talked with a lady who needed books and inspiration to write something for a funeral.

It’s easy to find this, but always in “squares”. Wells.

I mean, you’ll find things from Catholics, from Philosophy, in Spirituality books, in Literature, Buddhism, etc.

But I know a book from a woman who helps the reader to cope with ordeal, in one single book, from texts and quotes from : journalists, priests, masters, buddhists, writers from other centuries, from today, etc…

It’s a great book because “help” seems to come from everywhere, and also because you feel these things are universal, and because it’s interesting to find links between different states of mind. It’s not a well, it’s an ocean…

TWO

I call the Juxtaposition Principle a way to (maybe casually, at least with a certain freedom) to present an heterogeneity.

Serve yourself.

THREE

In the bookstore I do this constantly :

If, for example, there’s an offer for pocket books, I will present 25 different books in a single front display, with : self help, sociology, philosophy, art, anthropology, music and history. Juxtaposition. I do it on purpose, and so there.

Usually, managers don’t understand that.

They want “massive bestsellers front walls”, with one single book presented by the hundreds. This says to the customers : “I’m huge, obey, don’t think : BUY!!”.

My way says :

1. Let yourself be surprised
2. There are many levels on this knowledge ladder : choose your stair
3. It can be fun to find the links between the books
4. You can be curious if you want
5. I’m a bookseller and I present these to you, you can follow or not
6. Maybe theres’s a message here : do you find it?
7. What is the common trait here?
8. These are NOT new books, but classics, or different ones : explore
9. Disobey advertising, find your way into this tree!
10. Be smart
11. Etc

FOUR

I wrote an article about this Juxtaposition Principle about my Instagram. Because, evidently you see me coming : Constantly Random is an Instagram flaw

And I absolutely and willingly and by choice do this for my blog.

It’s not about fashion, or traveling, or IA. It’s about MANY things. Juxtaposition.

And of course, I know you know that there’s a little music hidden in this Juxtaposition here.

It doesn’t work that well, but I reached “real” 251 followers today, which gives me 430 followers in total. Not thousands, but I’m happy though. You my followers are curious explorers. And I love you.

Have a great day!!

Instagram : tashaenpapier

…and the “horror short stories” lost writer.

Yesterday in the bookstore I met an author, an unknown man who wrote and self-published a little book of “horror short stories”.

He asked for a book signing day.

I answered that we only do that, since a few years, for really published bigger authors, and also that he shouldn’t regret it : nobody probably would have come for him to our big store to have their book signed…

I know : not cool.

As he was talkative I suggested he asked to do this in smaller human-size bookstores, but also said that he’d probably see no line in front of the table.

We then talked about the writer’s disillusion of Level 2. The first is when he desperately want to be published. The other one is when he IS published, but nobody cares about his book.

We talked : sending his book to influencers & editors, about blogging, writing fan-fictions to get a name. We also talked about losing time – as he was – trying being a press secretary, an attaché.

I have no advice to tell to writers, but this man was a bit lost, obviously. Thus I asked him :

– What do you like?
– Writing.
– What don’t you write, then?

 

Is it the good path to get published with no audience, when you write horror short stories? What for? Hoping for money? Really?

Isn’t self editing a no-man’s land between putting the text online and having your book on tables in every store?

(Well, there’s this little pride when your brother-in-law buys you one to please you…)

Or is it better to just write, develop a talent and possibilities, find your music and determine something important : are you good, or not? Do you want to sell, or do you want to be read?

What happens when you work out of your skills, just besides, where you feel lost, untalented, and bored? Do you have to recenter, or do you learn things while you do it – thinking about the time you’ll be back to what you love and where you’re good?

 

Have a nice day!

 

 

One-Lined Ideas for Writers, Part II

The suites of transformations you need to express things, respecting the conditions your have to respect.

You write, you read what you just wrote, in a loop. A closed balanced between you and you. A pleasure can resonate.

Pull weapons out of other people’s work – to use you own resources.

Find the person you write for – even if this person does not really exist. Golem it.

Use what is made for use. Find a drawer : open it. Break what is fragile. Push what tilts.

Try what has never be done, but appears as possible.

Your work can always been gone back over. This is your job. Find your “until”.

Try a thousand ways to write an idea until you meet a favorable words figure.

Find a force. Find where to use it. Apply a force.

At one moment you are attracted by what is needed, by what goes forward to the goal.

You dream to write, you desire to write, you call. But it’s not to be confused with the state where you MAKE.

Our most precious states are unstable – the artist answers trying to stabilize them.

What you feel. What you do. What you want to make feel.

 

All these microseeds come from Paul Valéry‘s Poietis (Poïétique). They aren’t quotes, I kneaded them for your pleasure. Have fun.

One-Lined Ideas for Writers, Part I

Thanks for reading!

Stand up Blogging : “What begins commands” & Lost Branches

There are many ways to blog. You can write a novel chapter by chapter, or you can “react” to news in the world, or comment fashion, or new trends in food. You’re good.

My article talks about bloggers who needs ideas and inspiration. This is what I try to do, and I like this way, because it puts your brain in alert. You glean…

Gleaning in loop : the “Gathering Seashells” Type

Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”

Blogger’s Words Horniness & consequences

You read a magazine, you talk with a friend, you got and email, you have a walk around the block, you bake, or you take a shower : Bim! (this is the sound of an idea coming to you).

Bim!

(The symbol is a bulb over your head, right?)

You hurry to sit in front of your computer. You click on “Write”, while your brain is already organizing things…

What begins commands. We all have our patterns, and when you start you more or less know where you’re going.

My tool here is :

Dial : Beware of “What begins commands”, because it’s too easy. You follow one path but :

1. you could lose branch points
2. you could ignore good bypasses
3. your steam can hide possibilities.

Lever : Stand up, for blog’s sake! Finish your article if you’re too excited, but at one point, don’t publish. Stand up. I mean for real! Stand up and go away. Open a window. Wash a cup and a fork. Pet a cat. Breathe.

 

 

Flaubert, the French author who wrote Madame Bovary, had “un gueuloir”, a “scream room”. He was walking and yelling his texts in this room. It’s crazy? Not that much. You’ll have to find your own way. Just do something else while you think about your article or your page. Maybe print it and take a pen. You’ll find ideas, “furthers”, new branches, words, style nuggets, inversions, interesting bypasses, etc.

OK, go back writing now, you fool 😅

Thanks for reading!

 

Paul Valéry about “writing for someone”?

Paul Valéry writes in one of his Notebooks a dozen lines about… writing. I translate it – sorry for my English :

One must work for Someone; and not for unknowns. One must aim somebody, and the more you aim this someone clearly, the best is the work and the yield of the work. The work of spirit is entirely determined – only if someone is in front of it. The one who addresses, aims at someone, addresses to all. But the one who addresses to everybody addresses to nobody.
It is all about finding this someone. This somebody gives the tone to the language, gives the extent to explanations, measures the attention one can ask.
To picture someone is the great skill of the writer.

Again : sorry for my English. It’s very hard, here. I bolded the bold.

This declaration has a strange effect on me. It’s like being inside the head of a thinker (and in fact, that’s it).

• You want to say “Noooo that’s NOT that simple”.
• You want to say : “One must care about an audience”.
• Or maybe “You must write to please yourself, and the audience will come”.

Questions for bloggers, right?

But somewhere there’s a bell in my head saying “He’s right”. Some of us maybe invent a human someone, aggregating people we know, people we imagine, followers and readers, old friends, until we have this strange modeled golem : our Reader.

 

Thanks for reading, and have a nice day!

Jean-Pascal

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

 

Il faut travailler pour Quelqu’un ; et non pour inconnus. Il faut viser quelqu’un, et plus nous le visons nettement, meilleur est le travail et le rendement du travail. L’ouvrage de l’esprit n’est entièrement déterminé que si quelqu’un est devant lui. Celui qui s’adresse à quelqu’un, s’adresse à tous. Mais celui qui s’adresse à tous ne s’adresse à personne.
Il s’agit seulement de trouver ce quelqu’un. Ce quelqu’un donne le ton au langage, donne l’étendue aux explications, mesure l’attention qu’on peut demander.
Se représenter quelqu’un est le plus grand don de l’écrivain.

 

The Desire of Definition Syndrome

Hi everyone!

I opened a book about Fernando Pessoa and found a phrase about a strange feeling I recognized immediately.

After the rain, roofs are wet, but one can see some blue in the sky, reflecting in the streets’ puddles. It’s the occasion to be joyful, but there’s… a weight, an unknown worry, a desire of definition…

I’m sure that some of my readers will click on this. The Desire of Definition. What can it be?

I’d link it to incompleteness (“I miss something, but I don’t know what it is“) : Something is lacking. But here it’s more precise. It’s like a rush you can feel into yourself, an impetus.

In a way, it’s vague, imprecise. Therefore you feel another impetus under the first one. This is it : the desire of definition. You have a surge of cristallization : PUT SOME WORDS ON IT. Find the nature of it. The source. It’s not to “put words on it”, but more “to express is clearly”.

Maybe to find what it is, simply? Maybe to share it. Or to get rid of it – because how can you be in peace when you feel this spider web stuck on your face without knowing the nature of it. It burns you into your heart, too. It’s… lacking. “I need words”.

One thing can maybe help. Go outside for a walk. Do something with your body : washing the dishes, sortfold the laundry.

The desire of definition leads to words, phrases, explanations, dialog venting if you have the chance to have a soulmate (who is a “birth giver”, like all good friends).

It can also be put in a blog article.

Oh foot! This is exactly what I’m doing here, right?

 

Thanks for reading!

Jean-Pascal

“Write a book!” & fiddlesticks answers

We all know someone who has new ideas AND who is great in thinking & expressing them. Thus we harass her/him this way : “Write a book!“.

More, these thinkers are exhausting, because along the conversations you have with them, you realize (and they too – pardon my French) that they have not one book but two or three books ready in their stubborn head.

But it’s worse, because life is life, people around are not very supportive, one run out of gas, one is empty, tired, parked or/and forgotten. Therefore no writing and no books – even if you whisper “Fiddlesticks!” to their busy bee ear, bzz bzz…

I just discovered “Fiddlesticks” (I suppose it sounds vintage and probably southern, right?) and I like it so much I’ll put it everywhere in this blog for a few days, sorryyy…

– Fiddlesticks!

 

What is worse indeed?

• The person who really deadly WANTS to write a book and never writes it?
• The person who writes a book, which is published and nobody buys it?
• The person who has success with a published book – which is crap?
• Or a thinker full of ideas and visions, who verbalizes them when you’re present, and writes nothing, and will die with the whole package?

 

Endearing, but “people should come to their own realizations”…

When do you begin?

 

Have a nice day!

Ze Post Poppins Blues & other “zooms in”

Mary Poppins & Teorema & My Uncle are three movies about a stranger who comes in a house, disturbs all systems, and at the end leaves the place in a mess of changes. It’s a little pattern in movies history, let’s call it the stranger/revealer. I googled the titles and spent a good time exploring this. Poppins is built on an invisible tree (she comes to “save the father”). The visitor in Teorema is a revealer/disturber – some say it’s God himself, or destiny. And Monsieur Hulot in My Uncle is just the happy French casualness and poetry messing with “modernity”, concrete and productivity.

You can enlarge it in clicking “Mysterious Visitor” in IMDB’s Plot Keywords, you’ll get plenty of, including horror movies.

But I’d prefer playing with the ZOOM today, restraining things to a more little aspect.

I wanted to write something about what happens AFTER Poppins and others. What could happen in movies, after the visit of a disturber. Struggles, changes, back to “normal”, chaos? It could be funny to imagine…

So my tool today becomes : biased Zoom in.

Choose a field, a structure, and choose to find or to study a little part of it, an unknown window, another entry, what happens before, or after. A strange zoom.

You can study resistance to change in hierarchies, but also “what if it was good?”, too. You can write about manipulators, but also about “what happens exactly when the narcissistic perv catches his prey”. You can spend months about mindfulness, but also and suddenly the contrary. How NOT to pay attention, and why.

So, well, the idea is to ZOOM IN on a field, with a deviant will, not in the center, with a bias of invention, generous wrongness, happy curiosity, to find something nobody had the idea to study before. Ideas. Seeds.

Have a good day!

You can read also :

When to NOT pay attention is an Art for decision making

 

Blogger’s Words Horniness & consequences

Yesterday I wrote an “inspired” long article about Genesis and Progressive Rock. I was listening to Firth of Fifth and I was very excited.

But after finishing it, and publishing it, I stayed unsatisfied, I knew it was written in a rush, the building was not OK, something was bothering me. So I polished it endlessly, adding this, cutting that, quoting lyrics… I was like “Yes, but”.

Happily, later in the evening I had an idea to prolong it. I found tools, ideas, common patterns. Thus I fixed my article, I added a paragraph and published it.

I read over it this morning : it was all bouleshit – despite all the dressings I had added there and here. I trashed it immediately.

 

Every blogger knows that there are two kinds of “words horniness”.

1. When you’re in the flow, you write fast and clear, and that’s delightful. You go girl.
2. When you’re excited and you go in many directions at the same time, happy like a fool : you don’t hold your wheel vert smartly (or you invented three wheels and you don’t know what to do with them), you have good ideas but the result is too long, you ask yourself if you shouldn’t divide it in more articles based on this one, you run after a structure you feel you’re about to find, etc.

It’s like a rush. You’re too excited, you look like a leaping mountain baby goat.

 

It’s really like when you have this : “Let’s pretend” and other as if games…

When you feel this little nausea after you just say with someone you “want to believe it’s true but fuck it’s really not” : “Yeah, we are strong !”, “Yeah, we will beat them all”, “Yeah, it will be simple and beautiful !”. Yeahhhh.

 

Every serious author knows this : you have to be cautious with “inspiration”, it can loose you into nothing.

Sloterdijk wrote : “To be sovereign is to choose what will you be overwhelmed with”, which contains the idea of sovereignty : you decide what you do with energy. You canalize it, you organize it.

Baudelaire wrote : “It is impossible for a poet not to contain within himself a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised that I consider the poet as the best of all critics”. This is exactly my point. Inspiration alone is nothing. You have to study and change what your write. And if you’re a genius, it’s the same!

Valéry wrote a lot about this aspect. He says that to write you have to find the “singing”, the little wind, easy to handle, the good temperature – But nervous freedom, fury or impetus are waste and loss. Stay a child, let it spurt, hear the gods, but then be a chief, take your brain, your tools, watch and clean it, build your thing. TAME.

 

OK, I trashed my article. But I liked it, in a way, this ugly child… Therefore, I re-published it, thanks to WordPress, in the past. November 1st. My bad.

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice day!

 

 

Are Bloggers Proustians?

We’re all the same, us bloggers. One day we ask ourselves : “WHY do I blog?”

You can read this article about it : Why do you blog?.

…my theory was that you blog because you want to be loved…

But tonight I think about Proust and La Recherche.

In his long suite of books (“In search of the lost time”), the narrator, little by little, realizes that he has to remember, that memory in important, that he has to WRITE… the book we just read.

Clever loop, right?

I’d like to add this paragraph from Wikipedia :

Gilles Deleuze believed that the focus of Proust was not memory and the past but the narrator’s learning the use of “signs” to understand and communicate ultimate reality, thereby becoming an artist. While Proust was bitterly aware of the experience of loss and exclusion—loss of loved ones, loss of affection, friendship and innocent joy, which are dramatized in the novel through recurrent jealousy, betrayal and the death of loved ones—his response to this was that the work of art can recapture the lost and thus save it from destruction, at least in our minds.

(I bolded the bolded…)

Let’s get to my point : Bloggers are Proustians.

If you consistently write and publish, it’s to be loved (that’s OK, dear), but also maybe to… remember.

To remember what? What you’ve been thinking at? What you ARE? Who you’re becoming? To remember that you like to share?

What?? You would blog because… you blog? Just because you feel you have to?

Nope. Maybe you blog to understand WHY you want to blog…

Clever loop. Proustian. QED.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Non Finito : Inchoateness in #Art

There’s a Wikipedia page about sculpture : Non Finito. We could begin with this.

Non finito is a sculpting technique meaning that the work is unfinished. Italian in origin, it literally means “not finished”. Non finito sculptures appear unfinished because the artist only sculpts part of the block, the figure sometimes appearing to be stuck within the block of material.

An unfinished piece of Art can be caused by the death of the artist, obviously, but now it’s also an esthetics purpose. You can imagine many ways of reading it :

• Showing you a little of the act of creation
• A failure, fatigue
• No more money/no more inspiration
• A refusal to decide it is “done”
• A way to say it could be improved indefinitely
• Impossibility to find perfection
• Something finished or “too beautiful” is exhausting, disagreeable
• It makes the audience think and wander within the “what could have happened”

 

In some fields, the “never finished” thing is constant : there are, for example, no finished Cathedrals in France. And I should explore it about Orson Welles, for example, who constantly seemed to be away and off with the idea of finishing and editing a movie.

Of course, there are problems with that concept. The “unfinished” thing can make the artist appear as a smart-ass doing is “non finito” thing. If it’s a trend to do this, what’s the point?

“This can be finished later” : some composers (or theater plays writers) constantly work on their stuff, and Proust, the French writer, is well known for his “quillings” : he added and added hundreds of little papers, adding fragments of texts to the existing text, and, as says Wikipedia : Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes.

In fact, it’s difficult for an artist to know, therefore to decide, when a piece of art is DONE. Some artists, like the painter Turner, decided to come back to work after a long time, and to put it further. Thus, you can finish is… many times.

Of course, this makes you think about the way it’s done. You can work back on a poem, even on a movie, but it’s harder to do it on an album – I read an interview of Peter Gabriel who was telling that he would love to redo some of his CDs. It can be remixed, remastered, but the record companies would unlikely allow him to change them really.

Mike Oldfield did it with Tubular Bells. He said in an hilarious interview that the original album was full of mistakes and flaws, so he redid it completely with a perfect sound and digital recording. Decades after the 1973 one, the new version was a success, but after a few months, the good old one was back on the shelves…

Tools & Dials :

What about YOUR art? How do you blog? How do you write? When do you know it’s over? Do you ask someone? Do you think about it if you paint?

Thanks for reading!

(So sorry for my bad English)

Instagram : pleasesoft

 

 

 

 

 

“#Blog for yourself and not to please an audience” – wait a minute…

I read many times about big success youtubers who “lost their soul” because they stopped being themselves – instead of it, they began to blog to “please the audience”. That’s baaad! This makes sense, right? Bending their style or their personality to what they supposed to know about the viewers is probably wrong. And each time, the article I read told it this way. Bad bad bad. Nah. On the naughty step!

When I think of that, though, I hear a bell in my head. That’s so precisely evident that my senses are on alert. I know, it’s a reflex.

There’s something similar in poetry. The “poet” is supposed to be “inspired” (by what?), and peeing gorgeous metaphors because… he’s a genius. BUT even the greatest poets agree to say that there’s probably a critic inside their magic brain. Like “another guy” inside, who analyzes and channels/canalyzes the flow.

Let’s listen to Baudelaire :

I pity those poets who are guided by instinct alone: I regard them as incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former a crisis inevitably occurs when they feel the need to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have created, and to extract from this study a set of precepts whose divine aim is infallibility in poetic creation. It would be unthinkable for a critic to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to contain within him a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised at my regarding the poet as the best of all critics.

Charles Baudelaire

This is a perfect pattern, a tool for this article :

Here, we’re searching for a frontier between “I write for myself” and “I write for my audience”.

• If you write 100% for yourself and you’re successful, good to you! You can stop reading this article and have subtle sex with your muse. Take your time, she likes it.
• If you write for your audience, you’re a backwoodsman losing yourself on the paths of wrongness and your audience will sense it. You forgot why they loved you. Kill yourself.

BUT

Think about Baudelaire, our French poet. You are probably aware that you never REALLY write for yourself : you, from the beginning, took care of the readers TOO. You analyze, you think, you weave your words, YOU are your first audience, this is it. It’s a radioactive pattern. You write, you work daily, you throw a bunch of arrows, you write for you AND you take care of your audience. You want to be loved, that’s all! You know the trees, and you also know there’s a forest. You’re great, because you dance with both. That’s great!

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : mariakdolores

 

Sad Heart, Merry Spirit : Chronicle 9

I read in a Claude Roy diary, as he’s around 70 years old, that he would like to reach this season, this state : “Le temps du cœur triste et de l’esprit gai” – the time of the sad heart and the merry spirit.

Here I have a vocabulary problem : is “gai” happy, merry, gay, jolly? I don’t know. I chose merry.

But I’m very fascinated by this “goal”, from an aged author I liked very much. As if he knew he could never heal his heart. But, knowing this, building his own happiness, a “merry spirit”. This touched me, a lot.

 

Just read an article evoking Robert Osborne, a TCM Television Presenter who just died at 87 years old. It is told that Olivia de Havilland had with him :

One phone call a week, for decades.

Awwweeee! (-> this was the sound of my merry spirit). I wish I had a friend so close that she would call me once a week until I die at 87. Like a whatever-happens-I-want-to-talk-with-you. Awwweeee again (my merry spirit if very merried by this idea).

 

I read (but where, is it Casanova or Jünger?) about the Venice Purse, a knack which says that when you have to go to a “dangerous” place (which was Venice at the time), you needed to have two purses, one with a little money in case you’re robbed, attacked, knocked out, and another one with the main part of it – well hidden.

It’s just funny to know, but then you realize that when you travel abroad you really have to think about what you do with your passport, the amount of money you have with you, etc. I wonder what this concept can tell us about life in general : Be cautious? Watch the exits? Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket? But also : GO to places where you need to think about the Venice Purse, right?

Venice, in French, is VENISE. A perfect word to say : Venizzz. Elegant as a swan, right? Venice is more like braking at the end. No good. French better, sorry.

 

Elmore Leonard says somewhere about novels writing : “If it seems written, I rewrite”.

What a beautiful idea, right? Writing Style Dissimulation Efforts.

And a paradox many artists know well : work, work, work, until nobody sees you worked. It’s an interesting goal, and the path itself is enthralling too. How to reach?

There’s a balance to find, I suppose. It means you have the eyes to know when it’s not OK, when it is OK. Experience.

Well I have a vocabulary problem again. When do you use “enthralling“, dear? Can you say that about a person? How is it radioactivitied? Thrilling? Fearful? Exciting? Or more like “plainfully satisfying”?

 

I watched the Iowa episode of Aerial America yesterday. It’s amazing how many times I hear “French” in these. Detroits and Illinois were “frenchised” words, and how Iowa is a piece of this territory called Louisiana, the US bought to the French 214 years ago.

These TV programs tell me how BIG are the United States. Tonight I’ll watch Illinois, following the path of Bill Bryson’s book across America in car (cf Fixin’to traveling in the USA).

 

OK, it’s too long. I seize the run-up since a few weeks (is “seize the run-up” a good title?), like making the most of an epistolary energy…

I stop here. Next Chronicle next week. Here’s le hug by Ze French :

Have a nice day!

 

A woman’s hat on the table – Behaviorism in literature

In a Hemingway short story, the only visual information we have of a couple talking is that she took off her hat and put it on the table. Though, you can almost SEE them when you read the text, because of what they say.

Question :

In a book, do you prefer to read

1. “She was sad, and about to disconnect herself from reality”
2. An inner monologue as if she had a microphone in her head
3. A description of her movements, her mouth, her actions

…showing her disconnected sadness.

Well it’s the same for movies. Do you want to see someone act slowly, randomly and break something, or do you prefer a narrator explaining that “This day, she was bored, sad and electric”?

“Behaviorism is a school of psychology that studies that only behavior that can be observed or measured. It does not include the study of emotions or motives”.

Of course, there are behaviorist writers, who like to SHOW what’s happening instead of EXPLAIN the psychology of characters, as if they were a god.

Tool : What could YOU do about this tool, this pattern, in another field, in poetry, photography, marketing? Show or explain? Do you consider you audience as ignorants you have to tell everything to, or do you trust their mind, their intelligence?

she took off her hat and put it on the table – what does it mean?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

The Sylvia Plath syndrome is about #writing

When I read the Sylvia Plath diary, I was constantly irritated and I wondered why. Then I clicked :

Because she always and absolutely wanted to write a book… instead of writing.

So I invented the “Sylvia Plath syndrome”, it’s when a person absolutely wants to publish a book and barely never writes.

One possibility is that one day the book is there, the axis disappeared immediately : it leaves this person completely indifferent, and sick. We could call this the “So what” disillusion. This needs another article, right?

Tool :

Shut up, et cessez donc de vous plaindre ! Don’t complain about you can’t write, or it’s not the place, or it’s not the moment : write! Now! You go girl (and boy)!

Have a nice day!

Instagram : g.inevra_void

Marguerite Duras – #quote

“Soudain, tout d’un coup, elle sait, elle sait qu’il ne la comprendra jamais, qu’il lui manque la capacité de comprendre une telle perversité. Et il ne pourra jamais aller assez vite pour l’attraper”.

 

“Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her”.

 

Marguerite Duras

A New Way to Read – A Deconstructionist Approach

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

Why do people love crime fictions so much?  It must be personal.

First there is a murder, and who likes dead bodies? Then, comes the policeman.  What is so exciting about police officers?  Boring. It’s all boring. Les polars…

But OK, let’s amuse ourselves… Some of you enjoy using your minds to follow the clues and solve the case. Maybe that’s cool, et si vous aimez ça, tant mieux. Readers enjoy living in the pages where crime has happened, within papers, reports, and discussions and then they suddenly understand the mystery and all in the comfort of their homes. Voilà !

Do you believe that the author has just as much of an alibi as the murderer?  Well he does.  The author’s usual alibi is to paint a historic period, show rising suspense, invent action, criticize a way of living, and exploit a setting.
Most writers don’t write a “polar” (as we say in France) to simply write a police story.  They write for other reasons !

I would like to propose another way to interact with this genre.

First :  What if you read the first twenty pages of your crime novel to get an idea of the plot, characters, etc.  You like the idea ? Good.

Second : OK… bear with me… You read the last five pages of the book. YES. OK, you now know “who did it”, but there is a purpose behind it all. Still with me?

Third :  Go back to page 21 and continue to read the rest of the book. Following the writer’s process of unfolding the story.

With this exercise, you the reader, are changed. You cease to be the victim, the writer’s prey.  YOU are now the investigator discovering how the writer pulls his readers this way and that.

Tools :

• Once in a while try to break the old cycle.

• If you’re bored in the world, invent a different approach in order to make your own power and pleasure.

• Don’t be so serious. You can always break the rules by adding casualness to Art. Pick pages in Proust. Vous avez le droit !

• What would it feel like to stop the Pavlovian response to what media proposes. Invent your own style of perspectives. Write something. Deconstruct anything and above all… Play.

Lastly, at the end, you should maybe pick another crime book and read it properly. That is good TOO. The waldgänger is a hidden discreet rebel, but he sometimes quickly reappears from the dark woods and is back, in a second, within the world of humans.