Retrospective: Part I

For a long time I wrote stories and felt that I had something to say, though it was unclear what I had to say, and it was in writing stories that I attempted to figure out what it was I wanted to say. I wrote a lot of different kinds of stories, in different modes, in order to figure out what I wanted to say. Some of those stories are listed on the right, though a few of the links are now dead/defunct. This period was extremely exciting - lots of young writers were writing really interesting things and everyone was publishing online. It's how I found a lot of the writers I still read now. During this time, from 2004 to maybe 2010, I wrote stories in a very traditional, plot-driven mode, then I wrote stories in a very minimalistic, Lish-type mode. Occasionally I did surreal stuff, but that was less frequent. These two modes, the two dominant modes (basically a kind of basic, realistic mode, and a minimalistic mode), were the two ways I wrote to figure out what I had to say, but I never could figure it out using those styles. Those ways of writing were ways of writing that I saw other people doing, that I knew I myself could do, but that didn't yield an understanding of even why I was writing in the first place. I just knew I could do it - it was interesting, and the stories had a particular shape, but for some reason I felt as though something wasn't quite right about what I was doing. Stories in the first mode over on the right are in Storyglossia, Prick of the Spindle, The Florida Review, The Fourth River, and New Ohio Review. Stories in the second mode are in elimae, Hobart, Dogzplot, Dark Sky Magazine, Monkeybicycle, and kill author (now dead - several links over there are now dead). I began to get frustrated with both modes. Sometime in 2011 I stopped writing in these modes and began writing in a new way. I had begun to feel that these ways of writing were dead ends for me. Minimalism seemed so artificial, and so out of line with the zen I was practicing - though I like reading these authors (authors who regularly show up now in Noon), the way of writing felt like I had to stifle the creative energy I often felt. It also felt that everyone had really sharp sentences, like sentences that reviewers say stuff like "sentences like gems" and "razor-sharp sentences." But I began to feel that both of these modes were too controlled - they lacked messiness that I had begun to prefer, and not the neat messiness of minimal style, where messy things happened, but those messy things were contained in a prose that was excruciatingly controlled. In other words, there was no following the flow of a particular energy, and so the minimal stuff always felt a little stiff, a little too ornamented on a sentence level, and the more plot driven stories felt contrived, but more from a structural point of view. So suddenly I began to write differently. The new way was more internally-oriented, more driven by thought, how thinking thinks, and emotions, and how emotion grows, and while the external world was still there, I no longer was writing much plot and I began to care less about an interesting sentence and more about tracking how I mind worked: in this way, what I felt was "art" was no longer applicable, and I was no longer interested in trying to figure out what a story should be, what 'art' should be, and became much more interested in how I thought I saw minds working (mine and others), and how mind interacts with other minds, and with itself. That maybe sounds pretentious, or possibly it just sounds like nonsense, but that's what I found I had always been interested in, but didn't have a way to write about it: how the mind interacts with itself, forms itself, forms its world, forms its reality, all through very limited keyhole of language, and I began to see that fiction was the way to explore that. Using fiction to explore how we make fictions of our lives, and then the instances/moments when we see beyond the fiction, ie, the mind. Because of this, my writing changed: sentences and paragraphs got longer because I wanted the experience of reading to be like what it was like to be inside a mind (or that's just what naturally happened, how the prose took shape very naturally, very simply - I just followed the mind), and because I began to see that others were similarly sort of stuck inside their heads (even supposed minimalists will talk and talk if given the opportunity, their minds spinning in a not very minimal way), it became clear to me that I would be tracking how thought and emotion become a sort of prison if not met with awareness. I was also meditating a lot at this point and what I saw about myself was that I was endlessly stuck inside my own thinking and emotions, so much so that I had no idea what "reality" was  - I believed what I was experiencing was real, but what I found was that I was experiencing the very surface-y, language-y area of mind/consciousness. That was fascinating because then it became clear that experience happens at a level much deeper than language, but we all go around - writers especially - thinking that everything happens in language. 

The first story in this new mode of writing was in the Missouri Review, and then other stories in this new mode followed. It's the mode I've been writing in for nearly ten years, until last year I wrote a nonfiction book, in which I decided that I wanted to change how I thought and experienced life, and so I began to use a new prose style. That book is what I'm calling a non-fiction-novel. It's what is now driving my interest in writing, which is as a tool to change my consciousness. I'll talk about that in my next post, I think.

This is the end of Retrospective: Part 1. If you'd like to continue reading Retrospective: Part 2, please tune in next week when the world may have already ended or could be just beginning.