Finding Energy

I've not quite yet logged an hour of creative writing today, and the writing that I have done consists of an assignment for a class I'm taking  (Special Topics in Writing: Narrative Voice & Character).  It was a fun assignment: we've been modeling our assignments off a story outline in one of the books we're using (13 Types of Narrative, by Wallace Hildick) which involves a young American soldier on leave in Britain who's going up to the top of a cathedral tower to take pictures for his uncle back in the states, and he runs into a young but grossly obese British man on the stairs who--unknowingly for the American--plans to jump off the cathedral, ending his miserable existence.  This week we looked at diary narratives, so our assignment is to write the diary entries of the fat man for six days prior to the day of the tower incident.  I must say it was a lot of fun to write, and before now I'd never really considered the artistic/stylistic/narratorial merits of doing a story like this.  This class is great because it's helping me break out of my 3rd-person-omniscient storytelling mindset.  Who knew that a complex, emotional story can be delivered artfully and meaningfully through diary entries or simple letters?  I didn't.

But anyway, despite how fun this assignment was, it didn't kick me up to an hour of writing.  Did I have a really busy day, you ask?  Well, no...not really.  I had to take a make-up test in Astronomy (I missed the test because I stayed home late from Fall Break due to illness), so I studied for that (and despite my efforts I'm pretty sure I didn't do well on it...my brain's not wired for complex interstellar geometry).  After the test, the introvert in me decided it was time for a nice, relaxing, energy-boosting break.  Only, the energy never came back.  I didn't "feel" like writing much today.  If I hadn't forced myself, I probably wouldn't have written that assignment until tomorrow morning.  (But since I took the time tonight, it's much better than it would have been in a 5-minute pre-class writing session.)  This is bad.  Just because I lack energy is no excuse for not writing.  I wish there was some sort of magic creative-energy-giving potion that would set me on fire for verbal creation...like Gatorade for writers.

But now I realize there is such a thing: it's called "reading." I have been reading more lately (except for today, which might be my problem).  Another class I'm taking is the writing/English majors' senior seminar: this semester's sem is on James Joyce's Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  We've been going slowly, deliberately, through the Dubliners stories, so we have time to take them apart and absorb them before moving on.  I must say, I love this book of stories.  I've heard this prof gush about Joyce's style in other classes, but didn't think much of it till now.  As writers and lit nerds, I and the 2 other students in the class (we meet in his office for class with coffee and tea prepared for us :-) pick the stories apart--after the initial wave of awe and emotion has washed over us--to try and figure out WHY these stories are good.  We've hit some good points: he has great sentence structure, amazingly appropriate diction, perfectly spare yet evocative descriptions, and he chooses carefully what information he has the narrator impart and what is shown through dialogue.  I want to share one of my favorite sentences from his story "A Painful Case" (which is also my favorite story so far): "He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died."  It made me laugh, yet it was also a profound glimpse into the sad state of mind this protagonist has been in his entire life.  I think I like this story so much because it's completely devoid of dialogue but still manages to be an amazing story.

But anyway, there's still a mysterious X factor in these stories that makes them good that we still can't figure out.  Hopefully by the end of this year if not this semester I'll have gotten some more clues into knowledge of the X factor, that mysterious process of literary alchemy that some people seem to just have a knack for. Reading Joyce's short stories has been the catalyst of my desire to read more short stories.  I've owned the complete collections of Flannery O'Connor's stories, Ernest Hemingway's stories, and O.Henry's stories for a while: maybe now I'll actually read them all on purpose.  (However, I am struggling to get through For Whom the Bell Tolls and, honestly, I really don't like it very much.  Maybe I'll like Hemingway's short stories better.) I also have a wish-list for short story collections from people like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Virginia Woolf, and Anton Chekhov.  If I get my wish, I'll have enough books for a small library of my own. 

My recent reading renaissance has catalyzed my desire to write for myself: these stories are so amazing, so beautifully written and presented; the characters so fresh, their dialogue so real and vivid; the plots so organic-feeling that they seem to have grown naturally from the characters' situations, instead of being forced into reluctant existence by a money-minded Steinbeck wanna-be. Through my interesting classes and recent burst of reading, I've come up with some new (hopefully fresh) story ideas; now if I can only muster the willpower to put thoughts to paper, I'll be as good as gold (or at least iron: sturdy, flexible, and dependable).