Somebody’s telling of an event that took place – or allegedly did – and I find myself evaluating it through an either/or lens. This wouldn’t fly as fiction (nobody would believe it) or, oh yes, it would. It’s not a matter of factuality but rather whether it would fit into an acceptable mindset.
I can even listen to people’s names along the same line. First names carry an impression, OK? I’m not sure where the dividing line is on this consideration, but it’s there. Stanley is going to have a few obstacles as a lover, right?
Another viewpoint comes in looking at what’s happening through an imaginary cameraman’s lens. Have you ever found yourself framing scenes or even wondering who could be cast as one of your friends? Just look at how they move around in the picture. Cut! And splice to this …
For an artist, reality often clashes with the ideal, I’d say.
~*~
For a journalist, at least, the biggest difference in fiction is the importance of emotions rather than facts. It means asking yourself how you feel about a detail. Warm? Cool? We’d never ask that of a news story.
~*~
Revision is where we, as writers, step back from what we’ve written to view our pages from a distance, the way a film director would or later, the film editor.
Perhaps you’ve heard of how much footage winds up on the cutting room floor. Writing, it’s the same.
For me, the cut pages were rarely wasted. For example, a lode of outtakes regarding my experiences of Bloomington went from my subway novel and on to what now stands as Daffodil Uprising. Many more of those outtakes went into What’s Left somewhere off in the future. Still more relocated to the Ozarks in Nearly Canaan and the Secret Side of Jaya.
They didn’t go exactly straight, as I recall, but underwent thorough embellishment along the way.
My interactions with the Bloomington as a research associate were much different than they had been as an undergraduate. I didn’t go to as many concerts or operas. My new spiritual and writing disciplines had me rising before dawn. I was emerging as a poet, too, and I was, most of all, newly married. And then that blew up, only to land us, hallelujah, in what I thought of as our promised land, only it was in the open desert rather than the wet thick forests of the Pacific Northwest.
How could this not be material for reading? Or, more profitably, something for the Hollywood treatment?
Jnana's Red Barn 
Everything you see or experience can be transformed into an artefact. In writing like in every art it’s a matter of style. You have to find the right form for your text. For me, as an editor (and writer) it’s not the plot that interests me but the style. You can see that in Jon Fosse’s work, it’s the flowing style, or at Garner’s highly praised ‘Treacle Walker’. There it is the combination of styles that makes the text interesting.
All the best
Klausbernd
The Fab Four of Cley
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
So many plot-driven stories do seem to be one-dimensional in contrast. Thanks for the perspective. What was the plot line of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, anyway? When I first read that, back in high school, I was mesmerized and transformed.
Indeed!