For Writers (And Maybe Readers): Kurt Vonnegut: Literary Fiction & Speculative Fiction; Ecological Plotting, Hemingway; Indiana Poets

We had a very short day at work. I finally got my laundry done, even though it took about an hour-long bus ride for me to get to the laundry. I putzed around with the email this morning, looking at political stuff, and then I decided that I had enough around 11:30. 

That was when I stepped out to get the bus. It was a little late. The State of Indiana has started black-topping Indiana 32 - the machines were rolling asphalt outside my apartment when I walked out the door. The driver picks me up and off we go. Except it is a different route today that does not go to the station (which is on 32). Then off we go on the other half of the run - to the north side of town. On the way back downtown, the driver explains the station is closed due to the resurfacing work. I did not hear him say this earlier. Off I go to catch the bus that will take me to the laundry.

I see I forgot to mention that I had begun preparing for the colonoscopy. 

It is a little after 1 pm when I entered the laundry. After I get everything in the washer, I called CC. Her car is broken down. I cannot say this exactly broke my heart. Eating chicken broth only sucks. It also gives me time to get things done. I called Ball Memorial to cancel the colonoscopy.

That is if I do not waste the time.

I walked back from the laundry. I did a little more putzing. A little before 3 pm, I decided a nap was a good idea. I woke an hour later, feeling worse than I had before. Ball Memorial called and I called them back. A new date was set for next month.

Some items read today: Eric Hobsbawm’s Lament for the Twentieth Century (which is a lament for the failure of Marxism; good reading for those who would think Kamala Harris is a Marxist), and Dreaming Within the Text: Notebooks on Herman Melville. The latter provokes me.

May 3, 1977

“Character in fiction”

Does character in fiction depend on what the hero deals with or transforms? Where are the events of being? Character has to do with the idiom of transformation: an interpretation of the self. Where is the locus of transformation in fiction: in the author, or, is it yielded over to character?

What is the relation of character to the author’s use of character?

Character in fiction is a type of speech which may or may not occur in fiction. It is an interpretation of the self. If it is only a rhetorical device, it will only be interpreting the self as a rhetorical act. However, if the self experiences an internal world and relating, then character speech may occur as a reading of that self.

Rhetorical versus psychological character.

How do we experience the character in fiction? Or, how do others [other characters in a novel] experience the character in fiction? He is set up in others and in the reader. Is the text, the Other for the character? Does it reply to him or hold him?

Does character reflect the mental process of the text? Is character an interpretation of being inside the text? Where text is the psychical process, does character interpret this?

There is something in these ideas - a playfulness, a way of presentation?

Literary Fiction & Speculative Fiction

 10 Literary Books That Made Me a Better Science Fiction Writer by Charlie Jane Anders (Reactor). 

Ecological Plotting

Curiosity bit me, again. So, I read The Forgotten Female Novelist Who Foresaw Ecology, Environmentalism, and Realist Fiction by John MacNeill Miller (on Harriet Martineau). I think it profited me a little, by giving me an insight into what might be. Should be? My City of Jackson stories were meant to tell how people lived through the economic collapse of the town. No story has been accepted by any editor reading them. I still think looking at the ecology was a good idea, but it is beyond my skills to write a publishable story. 

In Martineau’s work, though, these uncanny networks of connection did not stop at the borders of society. Her stories involved lives upended by unexpected patterns of rainfall, by the felling of trees, by the importing of new crops, and by the movements of fish.

Martineau’s work wasn’t just social or sociological. It was ecological. She put far more thought into the entanglements that draw the fates of humans together with those of trees, water, grain, cattle, and fish than any English-speaking novelist I could find before her—or after her, for that matter.

Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut interview (1996) (Charlie Rose) is part of the PR campaign for the movie Mother Night (where have the last 28 years gone?)

Kurt Vonnegut on how to write a short story:

This gave me thoughts on revising "Three-way Split".

Why should you read Kurt Vonnegut? (TED talk):

Kurt Vonnegut Interview The Writers Workshop @ University of South Carolina

1970: KURT VONNEGUT Interview | Review | Writers and Wordsmiths | BBC Archive:

Hemingway revising Hemingway

Hemingway’s blue pencil; Explorations of the editing process by John Vukmirovich (Times Literary Supplement) is a brief review of what might be a book that writers would find useful. One thing I did not understand when younger was the necessity not just of the original creative impulse but the creativity of revision.

“Cat in the Rain” provides an early example of Hemingway’s dedication to revision (and of how his women are often more interesting than his men). His early drafts contained personal references to his wife, Hadley Richardson, and to Pound, as well as to Italian fascism. Cutting such misleading material allowed him to focus instead on a young married couple living vacuous lives. He specifically expanded the dialogue between them to emphasize the woman’s emerging assertive nature. She demands a cat, while her inattentive husband wants only his book. She gets the pet she desires, yet the reader is left asking: what next?

Now for me to get to work on my own writing 

INverse Poetry Archive 2024 Archive Additions

I am done with this post, so I will now eat dinner and shower and come back to work on my story. Hopefully, the pork stew has not gone bad. If it has, thanks for reading.

And "Problem Solving" was rejected, again:

Thank you for sending us "Problem Solving." We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but unfortunately this submission was not right for us.

Thank you for thinking of us, and—

Best wishes,

The Editors of Copper Nickel

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