(no subject)
Mar. 30th, 2011 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI'm a little behind on AotW reviews. I owe reviews on the last two albums I've listened to, by Metric and Dessa. That will come in due time.
I had cause to reread part of this past November's NaNo text this week, because ofsophia_sol, who manages to continue to impact my life despite not being on the Internet at all. :P The good news? I don't remember writing this stuff. It's like reading someone else's writing. Which means I finally have something of the objective distance required to edit or rewrite the story. The other good news? I'm kind of impressed at how good the writing is. I don't mean the writing, really. I hate the writing. It's clumsy, repetitive, awkward, ugly. It speaks of an author racing to write as many words as possible. I like the characters, though. How did I do such a good job of finding all of their voices?
(Excerpt from Chapter 89)
There are so many different kinds of silence. Brooding silences, comfortable silences, companionable silences, uncomfortable silences. There are true silences, rooms so quiet that the merest noise is audible from the other side. And there are false silences, times when we claim a room is silent when the opposite is true. This bar we're in, for example, is anything but quiet. There's a TV in the corner showing the latest news from the front. It's on at low volume, but it's an inescapable part of the soundtrack of the moment. Underneath the television, a handful of patrons watch, rapt, muttering something occasional to each other inaudibly. (Inaudibly in that from my position I cannot hear what they are saying, but not that I cannot hear them at all. I hear it as a low murmur, not too different from the hum you hear when you're trying to eavesdrop on your parents' argument through a thick door.) At the bar, a short woman is shouting for the bartender's attention, trying to get him to make her a Tequila Sunrise, but he can't hear her because he's busy chatting with an old high school friend about this girl they used to know. And all of this, I described to you with the falsehood, "A few minutes pass in silence." And yet it's a falsehood that isn't really false at all. If you asked any of us at the moment if the statement were true, none of us would have challenged it. It felt to us all like a silence. It felt to us like a moment we were each leaving to ourselves, unbothered by anyone else. We reduced the rest of the sounds that were all around us, that we couldn't help but admit that some part of us heard, to an unprocessed background noise.
The thing I would like to do, honestly, when we come to such a silence is to leave some space on the page blank. All stories are collaborations between author and reader, as I mentioned when I discussed those classified documents that I unfortunately can't share with you in their plaintext. If I leave some time (According to Einstein, time and space are different manifestations of the same physical reality) blank, you can share the silence with me, make it partly your own. You can do much more with the space than I ever could. You can do way more than "A few minutes pass in silence," if I just trust you to handle the space responsibly.
So this part of the book, the next, well, paragraph isn't the right word but I don't know what else to call it, this paragraph is yours. Fill the silence well, I entreat you. Do your best to picture what it's like for me, Melissa, Ali, Hamlet, and Sabrina as we sip our beers together in a quiet that is not really all that quiet, but feels like it is anyway.
I had cause to reread part of this past November's NaNo text this week, because of
sophia_sol, who manages to continue to impact my life despite not being on the Internet at all. :P The good news? I don't remember writing this stuff. It's like reading someone else's writing. Which means I finally have something of the objective distance required to edit or rewrite the story. The other good news? I'm kind of impressed at how good the writing is. I don't mean the writing, really. I hate the writing. It's clumsy, repetitive, awkward, ugly. It speaks of an author racing to write as many words as possible. I like the characters, though. How did I do such a good job of finding all of their voices?(Excerpt from Chapter 89)
There are so many different kinds of silence. Brooding silences, comfortable silences, companionable silences, uncomfortable silences. There are true silences, rooms so quiet that the merest noise is audible from the other side. And there are false silences, times when we claim a room is silent when the opposite is true. This bar we're in, for example, is anything but quiet. There's a TV in the corner showing the latest news from the front. It's on at low volume, but it's an inescapable part of the soundtrack of the moment. Underneath the television, a handful of patrons watch, rapt, muttering something occasional to each other inaudibly. (Inaudibly in that from my position I cannot hear what they are saying, but not that I cannot hear them at all. I hear it as a low murmur, not too different from the hum you hear when you're trying to eavesdrop on your parents' argument through a thick door.) At the bar, a short woman is shouting for the bartender's attention, trying to get him to make her a Tequila Sunrise, but he can't hear her because he's busy chatting with an old high school friend about this girl they used to know. And all of this, I described to you with the falsehood, "A few minutes pass in silence." And yet it's a falsehood that isn't really false at all. If you asked any of us at the moment if the statement were true, none of us would have challenged it. It felt to us all like a silence. It felt to us like a moment we were each leaving to ourselves, unbothered by anyone else. We reduced the rest of the sounds that were all around us, that we couldn't help but admit that some part of us heard, to an unprocessed background noise.
The thing I would like to do, honestly, when we come to such a silence is to leave some space on the page blank. All stories are collaborations between author and reader, as I mentioned when I discussed those classified documents that I unfortunately can't share with you in their plaintext. If I leave some time (According to Einstein, time and space are different manifestations of the same physical reality) blank, you can share the silence with me, make it partly your own. You can do much more with the space than I ever could. You can do way more than "A few minutes pass in silence," if I just trust you to handle the space responsibly.
So this part of the book, the next, well, paragraph isn't the right word but I don't know what else to call it, this paragraph is yours. Fill the silence well, I entreat you. Do your best to picture what it's like for me, Melissa, Ali, Hamlet, and Sabrina as we sip our beers together in a quiet that is not really all that quiet, but feels like it is anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-30 11:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-31 02:15 pm (UTC)Part of the reason my NaNo metanovel spends a lot of time playing with blank space is because I was joking about figuring out how to count meaningful blank space toward my wordcount (I didn't actually do it, but it inspired me), but a lot of it is trying to replicate effects from music and the visual arts that have moved me.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-31 02:28 pm (UTC)It's interesting you should mention "blank space." In my response (which touched upon a lot of similar thoughts to this passage, which was what I really meant when I said this reminded me - but then since it was a response maybe well...idk), I mentioned that silence-as-art reminded me of when I learned about negative space in visual art.