BIRDS!

To be frank and honest: these essays are boring. The singular essay I was capable of remotely paying attention to was the one about the humming birds. As it stands the essay provides an informational approach to the world of the humming bird. The essay is quite easy to read and plays well into the frame of mind of a layman.

The essays take a general easy going and conversational tone. The humming bird essay contains a story of a friend of the authors who got needled by the humming birds in her apartment area in San Francisco. This story provides a piece of evidence as to how territorial the birds can be.

Humming birds live a life of All-or-Nothing each and every day. They sleep each night in seemingly cryogenic catatonic state, and every morning they either get up or die. They live on the ledge in a fast paced life till they hit the end and drop of the edge; something this packet did in 5 minutes.

"Without death, life would get pretty damn boring pretty damn fast." - Anon

Atlas

Maps to anywhere has proven to be a rather difficult read on the eyes due to small font size and a heavy contrast. out of the many wunderbar stories this piece of literature I have to turn my focus unto The End of Manners just a page before "the house of the future" section. On a separate note I despise the lack of page numbers in this book.

The End of Manners is a small one page, two paragraph piece of work but goes into great detail about its subject. Paragraph one describes a girl, a columnist named Emily Post, and details what she's wearing and what the environment she is in is like. The rain then comes crashing down.

The second paragraph describes a young boy half a continent away described as a rebel. the kid misbehaves and plays with his food, during the time of our window into his life he seems to be metaphorically lifting up into the air. These brief glimpses into these peoples lives pass on, and a reader can feel like they knew them yet didn't at all, an odd feeling of maybe maybe not.

"A house of cards will fall if any piece is removed." - Anon

I got bored and tired and repetitive

This will be a quick review of writing down the bones and my take away from it. I enjoyed that each chapter had a piece of good advice in it. At the end there was usually a good short sentence or two that summed up what should be taken away from each chapter. I particularly like the messages from "trust yourself" and "The Samurai".

"Trust yourself" provided a story on just going with your gut but give the feeling time to stay. The end message was to be patient with your writing  and wait to see if it still holds the same feeling. It is rather good advice and in more than just writing.

"The Samurai" Goldberg gives a story about the analysis of pieces in a group and analyzing what works and what doesn't. What parts should someone take a katana to and cut out, what pieces convey what is needed. One good sentence is worth more than a thousand average sentences.

"We convince ourselves of the illusion because we don't want to handle the reality." - Anon

Fiction Packet. 3?

Well I am out of ideas. At this point I don't know what else I can say about fiction. Each piece is a different story, from a different perspective, with a different outlook. To each their own, classifying fiction to specifics detracts from the original creative purpose. It is like trying to explain to a blind (biologically, from birth) person what a color looks like, describing an abstract concept with abstract terminology keeps it coherent but loses ability in making those not in the know understand.

So far the stories have been about two to three pages each in this packet and they all bore me. I find no connection to any of these characters, though some stories carry a good message, and they lack any significant room to improve or develop. To be brutally honest, if I wanted to read a compilation of stories like this I would have read lesser mythologies or other supernatural stories. Those actually are something I find interesting.

Well if I have to talk about the packet I might as well mention the first two stories, aka the ones I had read before my interest waned. I liked how in the first story the two brothers were portrayed as being deviants, doing what everyone else did not. I feel it helped shed a subtle light on the joy of freedom and individuality. It also struck a chord with me and made me remember my childhood with my brother; Twins- can't separate them. As far as the second story, If one does not think almost entirely in metaphors then this story can come across a little... Weird... I'm done here, I just seem to lack a substantial amount of meat in this weeks response material.

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life." - Simone Weil

Fiction. Again.

I stand by the fact that fiction is a platform of the imagination. Every concept and thought, every idea and expression can be found within. It is the ability to make such inexpiable and emotional things into text that makes it so challenging, yet it has the ability to be anything. Unfortunately, the ability to be anything is a double-edged sword with a barbed and spiked handle. There is bad fiction and good fiction (in a sense of grammar and pace), there is fiction that can make you laugh till you are gasping for air and fiction that can shatter your heart to pieces, and some times you have the fiction you love and hate at the same time; A catch-22. Oates' Blackened Eye is a good example.

Oates is undoubtedly a good writer and knows the English language, but the unique lens we get to use as a reader is unique from the general format of books. Fiction stories are complex and most authors will make it a mix of first-person and narration followed in a relatively chronological format, Oates follows a reflective form, as if reading a journal entree, to tell the story. The tone used to make it reflective, the word choice and parentheses (and parenthesis) that all come together and help make the story feel unstintingly finite, and with the story topic being abduction, rape, and abuse it can make the reader very tense.

I find the story to be a perfect example of an I-Love-It-I-Hate-It story. The way it is written is fantastic, the character is developed and personified, the plot is described as the character would/would be able to describe it, and uses the same World-Laws to keep it seemingly real. Yet the topic is dark and troubling, a reader can easily feel their gut twist with what is written and can forget what text is in front of them is fiction.

"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."-Stephen Fry

Making Fiction

Fiction is a fantastic form of written literature. One moment you can be flying over the expansive planes of (insert world name here) to being a shadow cloaked rouge in the city, possibility is boundless. My personal favorite aspect of fiction is the sheer number of ideas and theories that people come up with, the many creations they scatter about their world. Every part of a story speaks  of the author, what they think and how they view the world. Though out of the concepts that I think are most important, characters tops the list.

A good story has to have good characters, yes it also needs a plot and coherency, but without characters it all amounts to moot. A character needs to be relate-able, the reader needs to feel like they are actually getting to know a real person and for all intents and purposes that is true within the story. People will involve themselves into the story if they can associate and like a character because it is the only window they have into that life, and that is what gets people to like the story: immersion. At the same time you cannot generate a character that is a "Mary Sue", each character will have some role to play and they need to play it well.

Finally there is a small matter at the end to deal with; nothing lasts forever and all good things must come to an end. A story will have an end, what kind is up to the author, but it must have an end. the end should not always be happiness and bliss, sometimes a person dies and needs to die (usually a character you have developed and the audience has become somewhat attached to) to develop a dynamic environment, give it a sense of realism and weight. Ultimately, however, fiction is the expression of the authors ideas; a world created in their head.

"When reading, we don't fall in  love with the characters' appearance. We fall in love with their words, their thoughts, and their hearts. We fall in love with their souls." - Anon

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend." - Paul Sweeney

(Couldn't decide which quote to use so I used them both, as they are both so true.)

Fiction

Fiction is something humans have created to represent everything that they do not perceive as "real", yet history is the fiction we write to convince ourselves. Fiction is the first form of complex storytelling, used to generate moral lessons or explain something we could not understand. Fiction has THOUSANDS of sub-genre, each with at least several sub-sub-genre. The vast diversity means that each person is bound to find some they love and some they hate for any of a vast variety of reasons. I like fiction with a good plot and an involving story, if it can make me cry, laugh, smile, and hate; then it is a good story to me. What I have difficulty with are short (really really short) stories, often due to the lack of substance and the sheer majority that speed through the plot.

On that note I am unsure of what i think of Sharon Krinsky's Mystery Stories. Each story is barely a paragraph long but each is said in a way that they are coherent and complete. In the story The Talking Cat it uses small simple sentences yet manages to say exactly what it needs to to progress the story along, it even manages to use a plot devise of mystery as you do not know any of the characters yet when read they seem to be all there. Perhaps I am simply impeded by my dislike of such fiction to make a full analysis and critique but it seems that it is by all definitions still a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Each story in this section of the packet has this astounding ability to instantly generate relate-able characters and tell something to the reader all in a single paragraph. The concise manner of writing is commendable and I can see a bit of myself in each piece, generated on each character by  my own mind from the lack of description by the author. It is much like taking a manikin and making it a person, it is not that it is now a person but rather that we perceive it as such.

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
         -The King; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland