Shop Talk: Kelly J. Ford Absolutely Can Wait for the Muse shows how to live and write.
KJF: Yes, because I have a full-time job that requires me to communicate with clients, subcontractors, and coworkers in a professional and clear manner. It’s exhausting.
But do I write fiction every day? Absolutely not, because I have a full-time job. I have enough pressure on me without adding the unnecessary pressure of mantras like, “Write every day!” I think that can be damaging to aspiring writers because the flip side is, if you don’t write every day, you’re somehow less hungry, dedicated, serious, etc.
I used to beat myself up so bad because of sayings like that and really ran myself down physically and emotionally trying to complete my first novel (which took me, all told, about 20 years). My guess is that people who tell other people to “write every day” never had to hold down two to three jobs to pay the bills. Good on them. I wish I didn’t. The only time I get testy about it is when it’s presented as a dictum because it’s divorced from reality for so many writers. Like, no, man. I’m legitimately tired and can’t form a sentence, let alone a paragraph or chapter, at the end of the day-job work day. There’s more than one way to write a book. And I can’t write if I’m worried about the electric bill or food in the fridge.***
EC: Do you outline your novels? Just dive straight in? Or do some combination of the two?
KFJ: I met YA author (and Superstar actress!) Emmy Laybourne at the Southern Kentucky Book Festival. She’s so warm and funny. She said “the outline is where the magic happens.” I love that so much. I live that now.
Still, sometimes I outline, sometimes I don’t. It all depends on what the story needs. I primarily work on novels, so I outline after the first draft. (First drafts are free-for-alls, as noted above.) My forthcoming novel, The Hunt, required a ton of outlining because it features a serial killer as well as various “Greek chorus” sections to detail victim stories and townspeople perspectives. Outlines make it easier to keep track of who’s who and what’s where.
Sometimes, I’ll outline the major plot points of my book in a notebook over and over again, removing things or tweaking things I hadn’t thought of. It’s a way I can “sink” the story into my memory as well as note where the characters are acting in ways that don’t make sense. Reviewing it outside of the manuscript helps me to see beyond my darlings to what the story really needs.
...In 1997, his laboratory dropped its ambiguous “postclassical” identity for a new approach by the name of “analytic anthropology”, which held that any “system of thinking” is historically situated; as a result, future readers of philosophical or literary works can never be experientially coeval with them. At best, they can approach these works and their systems of thinking indirectly and remotely.
Podoroga describes this anthropological approach to literature in the preface to Evgeni V. Pavlov’s translation of Mimesis, which first appeared in Russian as two volumes published in 2006 and 2011: “the author whom we are trying to meet can be compared to a guide-informant who explains the tribal rituals in a language that an anthropologist would understand”. For Podoroga, these guide-informants embody two types of mimesis (broadly understood as an ability to imitate; a capacity to appropriate; a desire to transpose conventions and approaches from the place of their origin to a new location). The first type (“mimesis-1”, as Podoroga calls it) refers to the literary work’s orientation towards the external, its replication of reality within the text. By contrast, “mimesis-2” takes literary worlds as its starting point, mimicking various languages, styles and narrative patterns.
And the weirdness?
‘Things started getting weird’: why my novel caused a storm in my small town
If there’s a moral to this tale, beyond never naming a fictional character after a person you know, it’s that people love to put themselves at the centre of any story. For me, the most illuminating part was coming into contact with people who felt insulted because they weren’t in the novel. “Why am I not in it?” one neighbour complained. “I feel like I make myself a little bit known around here.”
Enjoy.
sch 8/5
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