Topic: Writing

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg talks about how writers have this perverse way of participating and not participating in their life. Edward Albee says basically the same thing in his introduction to "Three Tall Women". Both concede that there's this way that they have of both observing but also being a part of things that are happening around them. That the person in them wants to have fun and purely enjoy what they're doing, but the writer in them also wants to remember specific details in order to use them later to make their pieces more realistic. It's almost as if two different sets of consciousness are occurring at one time: one watching, and one being.

Does anyone else ever feel like this? Ever since I've started writing, this is what I do. I listen, and I try to record. I wish I could play back every scene I can remember (and not remember) in my life (although, you know, that would take 19 years to watch them all). I wish I could play back my dreams. Lately I've been dreaming of weird shit, like I'm reading to myself out of textbooks, and it's things that I don't even actually know. One time it was some Russian history. I can never remember any of it, sometimes only what it was about, but obviously I've absorbed it somewhere in my life. Or I'll be telling myself a story in my dream and wake to some semi-conscious state where I'm still narrating what's going on. I want to record all of these things.

A couple of weeks ago my friends and I were discussing tornadoes, and one of them told a story about how she saw a tornado in her backyard when she was a kid. "I thought the sun fell down," she said, because the sky got so dark. I thought that was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. The sun fell down! It's reminds me of something you'd read in Fight Club. I incorporated it into a poem I wrote for class. She thought nothing of it.

Writing is just that funny thing--anyone can do it. Everyone does it. It's not like art or drawing where you need some schooling to learn proportions of the body or the difference between oils and acrylics (except I read about this seven year old boy in the UK that's hailed as the next Picasso, but he's beside the point). I also read somewhere that 85% of Americans believe that they've got a story in them, and I find that completely believable. We tell stories all the time: the funny things that happened to us in our day, the terrible things that happened in the past, what we heard on the news, what we read in an article, etc. Everyone wants to write their best-selling memoir, because they know they have the most interesting, the most awesome, the most pants-shittingly cool life imaginable.

But what about this writer's double consciousness? Does it even matter? Sometimes I think that thoughts shouldn't be something to be held onto. This is all Buddhist and stuff, but each moment is new and different and something's going to get lost in the transition. We were talking in one of my classes last week about memories and perception. Apparently when your brain perceives something, you're only actually seeing about 60% (or something ridiculous) of what's really there. You're making up the other 40% (or something ridiculous) based on your experiences of what should be there, depending on the situation. So maybe you see some gum and cigarettes on the ground in a subway station because you expect them to be there, given what you've seen in subway stations in the past. So, in this situation, which is representative of all situations ever in your life, there is an extremely blurry line between "being" and "watching," if those two categories exist at all--to me, the whole living thing seems more like "bullshitting."

And I was reading somewhere else that you can manufacture memories (Elizabeth Loftus does a lot of work on the subject, so if you want to Google her and find out some of her experiments, you should, because they're really interesting). I mean, get out a family photo album, and ask the five or so people in it what was happening that day. You're going to get five or so different variations on what was going on.

So people have always been making stuff up! And making stuff up + telling stories = fiction writing. Hell, I guess in this case, it equals non-fiction writing, too.