I've been absent pretty much for a couple days now. Friday was my dad's retirement dinner and then a late show of Star Trek. Both were much better than I had anticipated. Saturday was Rose's birthday. Woohoo! And today was Mother's Day. Good stuff. No blogging, though, and no real writing until I through the final 600 words into a short story called, "Vengeance and the Offending Page," which I hope to have prepped for submission Monday or Tuesday.
I still managed to get a couple of flashy fiction pieces written. I like this one. It feels pretty Utena to me. This one is mostly a gag piece. But it does lead into my topic for today...
I've always been surprised at how I get characterized by my writing. I've been called edgy, macabre, dark, pensive, anxious, all sorts of things like that. In reality, I'm a pretty boring guy who gets along well with just about everyone and avoids conflict like the plague.
Do any of the other writers out there have this experience? Where their writing gives a strong impression of personality to their readers -- and that impression is pretty opposite their true personality?
While I eschew post-modernism as much as I can, I can't help but think of the implications this question has for the notion of the author as the hidden character in the story...
.Nevets.
Pimp Tag = Meta.
ReplyDeleteHmm. Well, I know a lot of readers that have a very specific picture of Jane Austen in their head from her heroines. Most readers expect Stephen King to be a huge creep. As rational (thinking) humans in a vastly random world, we try to categorize and separate our experience into bite size portions.
And, yeah, avoids conflict like the plague, I do that too.
That's an interesting question. I mostly identify with the pieces I write in some way because, as a young adult, I either had those same issues of heartbreak, insecurities, etc. OR I WISH I had had the funny, cool experiences I write about. So in some ways my writing is me. In other ways, it's not. That's what I like to write. I guess readers take what they want to. Does that make any sense?
ReplyDeleteI know I've teased you on the Flashy Fiction pieces, but I truly don't see you as macabre individual! You are a talented writer who is very good at that style. That's what you like to write.
People characterizing you by what you write are like people who think actors really ARE the characters they portray in a movie.
Deb, I definitely you and RJ are teasing when you remark upon that aspect of my writing over on Flashy Fiction. And well you should. There's no question what I write tends to be a lot darker than most of what the rest of y'all over there come up with.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I phrased my post entirely right. I guess when I get down to it, what interests me at the moment isn't so much the Tom Clancy, Louis L'Amour, Robert Ludlum, phenomenon so much as, "What the crap does all this edgy, dark stuff have to do with my actual personality?"
A friend and fellow writer once asked me why I put one of my characters through so much harm (physical, mental, emotional), and when would I ease up. "Where's all this coming from?" she asked.
ReplyDeleteI shrugged. I have no idea. However, my characters do seem to endure a lot of trauma.
Bored and annoyed with the same story being told with just the names and settings changed over the course of a few manuscripts, I asked the 70-something writer when he'd write something new. "When I'm done writing about alcoholic, randy old lawmen," he said.