Writing Exercise!
Oct. 6th, 2011 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretHi guys... I'm experimenting with ideas for NaNoWriMo, my Pale Fire megafic. And yeah, by the way I finished Pale Fire last night and I'm about 65% convinced that writing Pale Fire fanfic for NaNo is actually going to be a rewarding and fruitful idea.
Pale Fire is a weird and confusing novel that I don't feel like I have a grasp on at all. I think the thing that's got me stumbling is that it's a parody of an academic critique of a poem, but if I were to find this book for real, if some real half-baked academic had really written Kinbote's criticism of John Shade's "Pale Fire", I would totally read it: Because it's so bad it's funny, I would say. I might stop and mull some of the theory of poetics, but ultimately I'd feel they were compromised by the critic's clear lunacy. So the question is kind of: Does the fact that it was intentional change anything? Does the fact that 'nix's friend Nabokov clearly knows that "Yankees Win On Chapman's Homer" is not a printer's error change the fact that Kinbote doesn't?
Basically, Nabokov breaks all kinds of critical theories about authorial intentionality here, and that's the only thing that emerges untainted from the glorious, hilarious mess.
But since I'm playing around in my head with writing styles and plot ideas, I'd like to ask you fine people to help me with a writing exercise by generating prompts.
Suggest a famous line from a book, any book. Suggest some sort of technical specialty of any sort (Bio-ethicist, basketweaver, I don't care).
I will write a footnote on that line in the voice of someone with that speciality
Pale Fire is a weird and confusing novel that I don't feel like I have a grasp on at all. I think the thing that's got me stumbling is that it's a parody of an academic critique of a poem, but if I were to find this book for real, if some real half-baked academic had really written Kinbote's criticism of John Shade's "Pale Fire", I would totally read it: Because it's so bad it's funny, I would say. I might stop and mull some of the theory of poetics, but ultimately I'd feel they were compromised by the critic's clear lunacy. So the question is kind of: Does the fact that it was intentional change anything? Does the fact that 'nix's friend Nabokov clearly knows that "Yankees Win On Chapman's Homer" is not a printer's error change the fact that Kinbote doesn't?
Basically, Nabokov breaks all kinds of critical theories about authorial intentionality here, and that's the only thing that emerges untainted from the glorious, hilarious mess.
But since I'm playing around in my head with writing styles and plot ideas, I'd like to ask you fine people to help me with a writing exercise by generating prompts.
Suggest a famous line from a book, any book. Suggest some sort of technical specialty of any sort (Bio-ethicist, basketweaver, I don't care).
I will write a footnote on that line in the voice of someone with that speciality
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 01:47 pm (UTC)Dog trainer.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 02:56 pm (UTC)The passage makes good use of the well-established literary convention of suggesting the vocal accentuation of a statement with a fully capitalized word or words. I have long observed that nothing so moves a fellow creature as a good, well-timed yell. It doesn't matter what you yell a lot of the time, as a colleague demonstrated wonderfully just last week when he charged into a scrum shouting "ROVER" at the top of his lungs. Everybody seemed to snap out of it when they heard that. There was some residual snarling and a bit of teeth-baring for a couple of minutes, but we managed to get everybody into a neutral corner to cool their heels. Yelling is good for the soul.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 02:26 pm (UTC)Electrician.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 04:03 pm (UTC)Like Mr. Darcy, I too was once considered a marital catch. No, I didn't have you'd call an estate or whadyaknow, but I got union scale, which was my good fortune in this age where skilled jobs are getting exported to China or dumped to motherfucking right to work states. The truth I wish I had known when I was a single man in possession of that fortune, that I wish I'd seen marked out in red print on some electrical schematic of my soul, though I cannot be sure that this advice would have proven equally true for Mr. Darcy or that he'd be able even to interpret the schematic, is that after a day of climbing and descending ladders and exposing myself to dangerously high voltages, is that I would desire most was not female companionship but a cold beer and a soft bed. It may be that Mr. Darcy felt the same way.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 03:27 pm (UTC)Piano tuner.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 04:31 pm (UTC)The chapter's first word sings out with a pair of flighty high As. Then Ms. Bronte slides down the octaves into the mid-range tones of her rumbling, grumbling revelation. In the uncomfortably damp climate of the English moors such a sudden string detuning is not uncommon and one wonders if this was in fact the poetic inspiration for the peculiar harmonics of the sentence. Contrary to common belief, this happens not because the moist strings slip in their pegs, but rather because the moist wood of the pegboard warps and applies tension on the strings, causing them eventually to release, which is greatly preferred to their snapping. Naturally, the thinner, weaker, less solid strings of the right hand are far more prone to this sort of unexpected detuning. Curiously, however, though I can offer no explanation for it, it seems that the strings on the far left of the keyboard snap outright with greater frequency.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 06:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 07:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 09:13 pm (UTC)Architect.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-07 01:24 pm (UTC)The question of who foots the bill for a death is a central one to this moment in the narrative of Paul Atreides. Certainly on a billable hours basis it cost Paul equally as much as Jamis, or perhaps more when you consider that Jamis wasn't exactly present at his funeral. However, one must understand that there are other costs besides those purely monetary. On an artistic basis, who pays the greater part of the debt accrued by a death? Surely Paul Atreides' claim must be discredited on these grounds, for Jamis paid for his death with his very life!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 11:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-07 01:45 pm (UTC)Grammatically, there are two parsings of this word phrase. One can group it as {not for} you or not {for you}, with each having a weight that must be considered part of the overall connotational context of the phrase. {not for} you emphasizes the cultural or legal taboo involved. Things are either for or not for. A tax is for. A gun is not for. For and not for is at the simplest level how societies exert moral control over their members. But the other parsing is more primal yet. not {for you} reduces the question to the socially constructed idea of selfishness. Man in his natural state is not selfish, cannot be selfish, because selfishness requires denial of the other. not {for you} as a linguistic construct involves the most basic kind of self-denial, that which holds a community together.