After months off from writing my personal blog (and a ton of blog and other writing in my work life), I decided to come back with renewed vigor. This is largely because of some holiday reading I did this winter. First, I read an article in the New Yorker about micro-novels in Japan. Apparently they’re all the rage according to I <3 Fiction.
It’s absolutely fascinating and I kinda wish I read Japanese so I could at least check this stuff out. Is this happening in the US as well? I find writing on twitter absolutely exhausting so I can’t imagine trying to write a whole novel that way. More than that, I can’t imagine what it means to the process of editing and story development. I’m a fervent rewriter (even in blogs). Twittering etc. doesn’t really allow that luxury.
Second, I read The Autobiographer’s Handbook (edited by Jennifer Traig and published by McSweeny’s) for a musical that I’m working on. The character is writing her own autobiography and I wanted to read more about memoir writing. Writing about myself is something I’ve come to very tentatively and it’s certainly not my first impulse so I wanted to get a better sense of why a person does. This book is really interesting and incredibly empowering if you’re one of those people who always dreamed of writing your autobiography. Also, it states one simple principle that I thought made a great deal of sense. In David Eggers’ introduction, he states, “You should write your story because you will someday die, and without your story on paper, most of it will be forgotten.”
This is a nugget of unutterable logic.
Anyway, I may not be able to twitter my next novel or memoir (or write any novel for that matter), but I can be better about writing down what I’m thinking about and I find that I’m a little more coherent and less stultifyingly boring when I’m not writing between the covers of my journal.
Interesting reflections. I saw the New Yorker article, too, and found it interesting. A bit of a fogey, I belileve in complete sentences and, well, spelling, but I’ve done enough Creative Writing teaching with teens to recognize the excitement of developing a new form like this. I guess it depends on your audience. I couldn’t really tell if the New Yorker article was tongue-in-cheek or not!
As for autobiography, have you read Patricia Hempl or Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood? They address the issues in autobiography–memory, fact, the ability to offend real people who remember things differently.
Good luck with this, and thanks for visiting my blog! Can I list you on my links?
Yes of course! I’d be honored. I haven’t quite figured out my own links yet but when I do I’d love to list you in mine if that’s okay. I haven’t read either of them but I’ve definitely come across their names quite a lot.
I’m a huge fan of complete sentences. Since I teach playwriting mostly, it’s less of an issue within dialogue but I’m a stickler for form and specified intention in general. I guess the thing that really fascinates me about the form that’s being created is its severe lack of editing – which I don’t understand. 140 characters – they’re writing novels in text message form. I know that language and its various creative outlets are constantly changing, and I don’t want to be naive about it… but as I fret about it, I suddenly feel very old, one foot in the century I was born in…