catharsis

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Instincts

I saw an article in the Metro today that I didn’t really understand. I believe the gist of it states that if we want to watch something that will give us a good cry, our brain logically tells us to upload a movie based on a true story. Likewise, if we want to unwind from real life, our brain says read a work of fiction instead of nonfiction, because then we can keep an emotional distance from the story’s events as we know the story isn’t real.

Except our hearts don’t cooperate. We’ll cry just as hard over movies not based on true stories, and feel as deeply emotionally involved with a novel that’s completely fictional as we might with a true story.

In fact, I think the article was trying to say that we’ll feel things even more deeply with contrived storylines.

Well, I should hope so! Filmmakers and writers put a lot of work into mastering their crafts so as to make them emotionally engaging. They work for years to effectively master techniques to tug your heartstrings this way or that at will. If a movie or book is doing its job properly, you should walk away feeling entirely and realistically emotionally sparked.

The trick is, what happens after the movie ends or you put the book down? Do the emotions stay with you as if they had been prompted by real people and events?

Sure they do. Is all that just manipulation? Playing on melodramatic clichés guaranteed to make you psychologically react no matter how detached you try to make yourself remain? Those killing pets, kidnapping children, shooting your spouse sort of contrivances?

A lot of it is, unfortunately. I look for something subtler myself. That isn’t always possible. But I can’t take the raw manipulation anymore some movies and novels insist on throwing at us.

I don’t watch the news either.

For some reason I see all this leading back to the old English One-Oh-One Shakespeare Studies’ concept of catharsis. As one of my characters once said, “I had a bad case of that once.”

But she got better. And that’s really the whole point of catharsis anyway. A surface definition says catharsis is the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions. The idea of this release arising specifically through our experience of drama comes to us from Aristotle’s Poetics. But the usual source we hear about it from is when studying Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Hamlet or King Lear.

The idea is that seeing what the tragic heroes go through projects our own need to release similar and repressed emotions onto a safe canvas for us to do so. We experience Hamlet’s and Lear’s powerful miseries vicariously, thereby letting go of our own. Leaving us psychologically healed by the process. At least for the moment.

I can get into that. But I also don’t have a problem with movies or fiction being sheer escapism either. I don’t find anything cathartic in reading or watching Jeeves and Wooster, but I certainly enjoy doing either. Sitting down with a Lars Von Trier movie, on the other hand …

There better be something redemptive about sitting through that sort of experience. And it better be a good kind of sadness. Unlike a gut reaction to yet another manipulative situation of a child or puppy being threatened.

I had enough of that in the news I used to watch.

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

Publishers and agents all over Canada asked, why even try it once? You’d have to be mad to try it twice.

SO LET’S DO IT THREE TIMES!

BEGINNING MONDAY, DECEMBER 29TH:

REALITY FICTION THREE:

THE INTERRUPTED EDITION

as always, at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

This time with illustrations by the author.

A new year dawning and a Lou Moon rising!

mapping your thinking

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Mapping the Inevitable

I didn’t use to bother with outlines when writing. The story would just tell itself, right? I’d always know what was supposed to come next. Or it would surprise me, which would be even better. Telling the story to myself as if I didn’t know it ahead of time.

Ahem.

I have come to the conclusion that it is, in fact, much more efficient to know what the story is going to say before you write it. Which of course demands the mastery of an entirely different skill. The previously-ignored fine art of outlining.

Outlining can be a very tricky balancing act. If you keep your outline too loose and fancy free, it doesn’t help you a heckuva lot as you try to keep plot, timeline, location, and who did what to who straight. Or to whom. If you explore the other extreme and go in for obsessive detail, you might just as well write the damn story. I find I vary in approach depending on where I am in the story, and how long the story is.

Before I sit down to write, I think for at least a month about what I’m going to write, making random notes. For a novel, I generally start out with an idea of what happens at the beginning and what the ending should be. How to get from Point A to Point B is the tricky bit.

Again before first putting pen to manuscript I make a theme outline. I decide what the major themes of the book will be, and make separate outlines for each, listing which characters are involved and what the major events should be driving those issues forward, in what likely order.

Then, just before beginning the manuscript, I try to link the theme outlines together into a blueprint for a logical beginning and set of expositional early chapters. That generally gets me through the first hundred pages, after which point I usually sink into total confusion.

Is this guy married or not? What did I name this character again? What day is it? What’s the month again? When’s the last time I mentioned this guy? Oh God, I forgot all about her! I should invent a character like this. Wait a second, I already did. Where the hell is everybody anyway? WHY DON’T I WRITE THESE THINGS DOWN?!

In truth, I have started writing these things down. I keep a character list beside me as I write, adding names as I come up with characters. In my manuscript, I make a notation of the date and day of the week at the beginning of each chapter. I’ve discovered this is the only way to stay sane about these details.

As anyone who has actually been reading what I’ve been posting must have noticed, I have a tendency to overpopulate my books. Sometimes the lunatics do take over the asylum and I lose the book. I reach a point where I’m servicing the various groups of characters I’ve thrown in, no longer with a conception as to why they’re necessarily there to further the plot. Sometimes they’re not. At which point the book dies, sometimes after as many as 200 pages of manuscript.

But I don’t throw out whatever concept made me start writing the thing in the first place. If it’s got any legs, I generally get back to it in some form or another later. With the knowledge that I need to keep down the number of voices telling the story to say it right.

In this regard, I’ve recently made an interesting discovery.

If, after 100 pages or so the story is still working and the crowd scenes aren’t too confusing, I can then sit down and write a detailed outline of what should happen to bring the book to its inevitable, previously conceived conclusion. Generally I do this by date. I develop a timeline for the rest of the story, decreeing these events should happen in this order on these dates, and listing the characters involved in each event. Usually that works.

But on the book I’m working on right now, I’m trying a new variation.

For one thing, this book is one of those treatments where I’m combining no less than three previous plotlines that failed, and doing my best to keep the cast down to functional numbers to make them work here to produce one unified story. Because the ideas were good ones to begin with.

I’m coming up on 175 pages of manuscript written. I never got this far into it before on any of the three previous attempts, but I’m getting a bit nervous I can hold it all together to see it through to the end. I’ve got a good conception of the climax, and the four characters who are central to that finish. But how exactly to get from where I am now to there …

I’ve got seven groups of characters exploring different themes converging to produce the climax I want. And I am definitely at the point where I need to work out exactly how that full convergence is going to take place for the book to proceed intelligently. I’ve been clever enough to only use characters that actually contribute to the plot for a change. Now how do I organize them to pull it all together?

I could do what I already mentioned. Organize the upcoming events by dates. There are seven days left in the story. I can’t ignore that, but somehow I don’t find that adequate to the complexity of this particular thriller.

I could do a more detailed theme outline at this point. Not a bad idea, but not adequate to the detail I need to know regarding event order and character relations.

I could just list the four major characters that converge for the climax of the book and build up a timeline and event list around them …

That seems reasonable to me, but when I sit down and try it I discover they’re too central to what’s going on. It’s difficult to separate what one means to another to make a clear list of necessary events to develop.

So I started making lists of the secondary characters in each theme, and how what the major characters did affected them. Bingo!

The central characters are the prime motivators for all action in the story. But to get a clear picture of the effects those characters drive into motion, I have to look at the secondary characters to list the consequences of the actions being accomplished. Those consequences happening to the characters around them are the clearest outline of what the central characters are up to that I feel I can come up with for this particular plot. I mixed these fifth business lists with a timeline detailing when the secondary characters experienced their fallout, and the main characters’ actions fell neatly into place.

From these breakdowns, I can see the logical order in which to complete the first draft of the manuscript, getting the full story down on paper at last. Once it’s down, I can always go back and fix things as necessary, with a detailed big picture to work from.

Because there are some aspects of this process that outlines will not help you with. Such as rhythm, for example. That you pretty much have to wait until you have the story written to see clearly. Rhythm’s more of a matter of how does it read rather than how do I write it?

And just for the record, I don’t think it’s any easier to outline using only a few characters in your story rather than the armies I tend to employ. If you’ve only got a couple of voices, they have to say that much more. You’re still cramming the same amount of event per page into the book.

It’s nice when it does all flow out from the pen. But at my age, even if you get a vision of how it should all come out perfectly in your head to begin with, you better write down an outline anyway. Those beautiful details might not still be there five minutes later.

And trust me. You’ll never remember everyone’s names.

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

The Twitchy Gal comes to its conclusion, the body still spasming a bit, with an Interlude posted on Monday and the end, Chapter Thirty-Seven coming on Friday, December 19th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

At last. The absolute final word on Reality Fiction One. And the observation that calm things down as much you are able to at any given moment, the twitchiness truly never dies.

women photographers

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Take the Picture, Regardless

Photograph by Dora Maar

It’s ridiculous today to think of photography being regarded as an unusual choice of profession or means of artistic expression for a woman. But, as usual, it wasn’t that long ago that …

The concept keeps coming up for me, recently from four different sources, so I’m finding it worth some comment. Most intriguingly it arose in Cathy Macdonald’s new book Put on the Armour of Light, a mystery set in 1899 Winnipeg. She has a character, Rosetta Cliffe, based on a real life woman photographer who tried to make a go of it in those early days of the industry, named Rosetta Carr. Not much is known about Rosetta Carr other than as Cathy says in her afterword that she “plied her craft bravely in the male-dominated commercial photography business of 1890s Winnipeg.” Cathy needed to be tipped off to Rosetta’s existence by Elizabeth Blight, the former head of Still Images in the Archives of Manitoba. Rosetta’s is unfortunately not a name that has gone down in general history.

While Rosetta Carr would have stood out as socially unique in 1899 Winnipeg, my wife Renee, also a photographer, is having the exact opposite problem 115 years later in present day Winnipeg. Renee doesn’t do photography for a living, but she has taken her pursuit beyond the hobbyist stage. Renee uses photography as a necessary and serious means of artistic expression, something everyone should have in one form or another in their lives after they get home from their day jobs.

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

But the thing is, in today’s digital multimedia world, everyone’s taking pictures! I don’t know how many photographers were active in 1899 Winnipeg, male and female, but it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that there were less than 10. Today, practically anybody in a city of 700,000 who owns a phone …

Multiply that figure exponentially when you try to display your work on the Internet. Renee doesn’t hope to make money from her photography, but she would like to be acknowledged as someone taking the pursuit seriously and as a means of personal expression. So you can go from standing out as someone who is a true oddity because she takes pictures at all to wondering what you have to do to stand out and be noticed doing the same thing in the same city in a little over a century. Such are the wonders of technology.

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

Renee is cautiously approaching the Flickr delivery medium for photography. Stay tuned for further updates. For the moment, you can see what she’s done at:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/128997372@N08/

In addition to this homegrown discussion of the subject, two other women photographers from the first half of the 20th Century recently came to my attention through books I read. They weren’t the central characters in either book, but maybe they should have been.

Photograph of Lee Miller

The first was Lee Miller, an American photographer who began as a successful fashion model in New York in the 1920s, until a scandal regarding her appearance in an ad for menstrual pads put an end to that. If you can believe it. She went to Paris in 1929 and hooked up with Man Ray to take an active part in the surrealist movement, developing her own artistic vision.

Photograph by Lee Miller of Charles Chaplin

After leaving Ray and Paris in 1932, she continued to live a life worth a few good movies at the very least. Then in World War II her career took an entirely new direction, as she became the official war photographer for Vogue magazine, documenting D-Day, the concentration camps, and the first use of napalm amongst her many other grittier achievements.

Photograph by Lee Miller

Why isn’t this woman a household name? She could be an icon for any number of movements.

Photograph of Lee Miller

The second artist was Dora Maar.

Photograph of Dora Maar

Dora was a Croatian who grew up in Argentina, moved to France, and in the 1930s became one of Picasso’s competing mistresses when she was 28 and he was 54, taking an active role in Picasso’s creation of his monumental work Guernica in 1937.

Photograph by Dora Maar

It’s been written she was the only one of Picasso’s women who was as intelligent as he was. Or maybe even smarter.

In 2006, one of Picasso’s portraits of Dora, Dora Maar au Chat, sold for $95,216,000 US.

Dora Maar au Chat - Pablo Picasso

Dora’s own work was often classified as street surrealism. She also painted and wrote poetry. However, as with so many others, her life is overshadowed by her association with Picasso’s. Maybe it’s time to correct that.

Photograph by Dora Maar

It may be harder than ever to stand out today, but that doesn’t mean anyone should stop trying. Or stop acknowledging those who may have gone before who should have been noticed despite their own problems being seen.

Self portrait photograph by Lee Miller

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Thirty-Five posted on Monday and Chapter Thirty-Six coming on Friday, December 12th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

The twitchiness builds to its ultimate expression of madness! And for that matter, what did happen to Deb?

don't second guess yourself

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Second Guessing Yourself

Why is it that honest writers can never be certain about what they’ve just written?

I think it might have something to do with endorphins. For a creative sort, even doing some bad writing stimulates the brain so much we think everything’s wonderful off the hop. I find I don’t really get a good perspective on things until about five years later.

But after a little experience, you do realize that no matter how good writing might make you feel at the time, not everything you produce is going to be that consistently wonderful. And there’s always a few pieces you do that are so uniquely your voice and vision that you think they’re nothing less than bloody fantastic. But other people either pass them over with at best an “enh”, or don’t get them at all. And they tell you that. They actually say “I don’t get it.” And you stand there staring at them, stunned. How can you not get it, it’s so wonderful! “But I don’t get it. I don’t know what’s going on.” How can you not know what’s going on! Etc., etc. …

At which point “enh” starts sounding pretty good.

So after a time, any writer will start second guessing him or herself. Is it as good as I think it is? Can it be that good? What if it’s crap? How can I tell? You’d think I’d know, I wrote it!

Any good editor will tell you to always show your work to a different, trusted reader. Which they think must grow on trees. Always readily available and with all the time in the world to dedicate themselves to reading what you’re incapable of being certain of yourself, good and bad. For free.

No, I have gone that route in the past, and even when I have successfully found a trusted reader whose opinion I can accept — and they are out there, they’re just usually too busy — that doesn’t always work either!

I showed one story I really liked myself to a woman whose opinion I value quite highly, and who was familiar with my work at the time. She thought the story sucked so bad she couldn’t even finish reading it, and didn’t hesitate to tell me so. But I really liked the piece, so, without making any changes, I submitted it to a small journal anyway. They loved it and made it the feature piece in their next issue. Not the sort of reaction I usually get. In fact, there’s more than one piece sitting around unpublished in my computer that a trusted reader or two have told me are really good, but which no editor I’ve shown them to yet has come anywhere near regarding with the same opinion.

So, taking these experiences into consideration, which I know are not unique to me, is it really any surprise therefore that many writers end up second guessing themselves into oblivion, not even waiting for the cruel world to do the job of sending them there?

I’ve read of some writers who experience some initial success and then absolutely freeze, unable to believe they can come up with anything to duplicate the standard they feel they’ve now set for themselves. Others second guess themselves into actual clinical depression. Writing is such an isolating activity in and of itself, self doubt seems to run rampant. You have to disconnect to make your work connect, so then, how can you be truly certain anything ever really … reconnects?

A stand must be taken! After giving the matter some thought — then deciding that I must be completely wrong — but then thinking no, dammit, that’s the whole problem! This is what I dare to say is the best attitude to take towards the problem.

Get it out there anyway.

If, after you go through the process of finishing the piece so it is legitimately polished and presentable to an audience and the work still satisfies you, even if there are nay-sayers it is better to put the story out there and have an audience tell you it was a mistake, then to run the risk of suppressing something that might genuinely push the envelope, even for just a small percentage of your readers.

And I’m not going to think about it any more, I’m just going to stand by that.

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Thirty-Three posted on Monday and Chapter Thirty-Four coming on Friday, December 5th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Exploring the complications of practical metaphoric physics as the countryside goes insane around you! To say nothing of unexpected pregnancies …