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
(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.