{"id":3737,"date":"2014-09-01T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T16:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/?p=3737"},"modified":"2024-12-08T08:49:27","modified_gmt":"2024-12-08T13:49:27","slug":"four-questions-on-writing-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/four-questions-on-writing-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Four questions on writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently tagged by Vivek Shraya<\/a>, a\u00a0fellow Arsenal Pulp Press<\/a> author, \u00a0for a writer-related\u00a0“blog hop” (he also tagged another fellow Arsenal Pulp Press author, Amber Dawn<\/a>).\u00a0In a nutshell, each writer answers\u00a04 set questions on writing which they\u00a0post on their\u00a0website and they tag two other writers to continue the chain of responses.<\/p>\n

What am I working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’m working on a presentation for an event at University of Southern California<\/a> that will intersperse readings of my creative work with discussions on a few topics, including some reflections on the short story form and\u00a0my interest in the work of the artist Tom of Finland.<\/p>\n

In mid-September, I’ll be recommencing work on my novel, which has the working title\u00a0The Meaning of Life and Other Fictions<\/em>. This is a novel that tackles some of life’s big questions, most of them concerning the\u00a0philosophy of religion. I’m right in the middle of writing the chapter that addresses the question “Does God exist?”<\/p>\n

How does my work differ from others of its genre?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This question is an invitation to\u00a0lay\u00a0claim\u00a0to\u00a0innovation but one that I want to turn down. I’m not doing this to be contrary, nor to be innovative by stealth via\u00a0pretending to\u00a0refuse innovation.<\/p>\n

In recent years, I’ve become more\u00a0suspicious of\u00a0artists commending their own work on the basis of\u00a0innovation (and of the ubiquity of demands that they do so). In the arts, innovation is so frequently paired with\u00a0transgression.\u00a0They’re a power couple that\u00a0closes off other ways of assessing artistic value. This coupling has become\u00a0rhetorically formulaic\u00a0and increasingly prone to being\u00a0self-congratulatory about\u00a0the\u00a0riskiness of the art. Dangerously, it can\u00a0lead to\u00a0declaring victory for the artwork\u00a0right from the start.<\/p>\n

Why do I write what I do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s one among many reasons: so I can have extended, multi-staged thinking sessions in which I end up saying more than I meant to say.\u00a0Then I share the results with readers and they\u00a0extend\u00a0on those extended, multi-staged thinking sessions\u00a0and we all\u00a0end up saying more than we\u00a0meant to say. This isn’t to say we’re over-sharing. “Over-sharing” suggests confession (which isn’t to say that confession is never\u00a0involved in the process, nor to denigrate confession in literature.) But I like the idea that these sessions\u00a0become a\u00a0shared exercise in over-speaking.<\/p>\n

How does my writing process work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even more\u00a0tangentially than\u00a0my fiction itself. I don’t think it would be possible for me to write the kind of digressive stories that I do without having a really\u00a0digressive creative process that’s filled\u00a0with\u00a0a big surplus\u00a0of\u00a0ideas. These ideas are\u00a0initially rendered in\u00a0bullet point form and many stay that way, if only because some turn out to be\u00a0short-term infatuations. The\u00a0follow-up and elaboration on my ideas can be quite\u00a0free-ranging and there’s a lot of\u00a0trial and error\u00a0(which makes for a long gestation). I see a\u00a0book project as being a studio for what is predominantly an\u00a0exploratory process.<\/p>\n

I rarely think in terms of plot, character, description or dialogue. I’m much more conceptually-driven. I also pay heavy\u00a0attention to sentence structure. I think it’s because of my undergraduate training \u2013 in part, my background in linguistics, but mostly because I was taught fiction\u00a0by Gerald Murnane<\/a>, who himself is syntactically-driven (even syntactically-obsessed). I’ve long felt that the main units that I deal in as a fiction writer are ideas and sentences.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

To continue the chain of responses,\u00a0I’ve tagged Samuel Ace<\/strong> (a wonderful US poet whom I met at the also-wonderful\u00a0Writing Trans Genres: Emergent Literatures and Criticism<\/em><\/a> conference in May this year; we’ll be reading together at Tucson on December 12<\/a>) and, in a transcontinental move, I’ve also tagged the multi-talented\u00a0Maxine Beneba Clarke<\/strong> (we met via mutual friends in Melbourne, as well as via\u00a0the\u00a0Melbourne QPOC<\/a> group).<\/p>\n

Samuel Ace<\/strong> is the author of three collections of poetry: Normal Sex<\/em> (Firebrand Books), Home in Three Days. Don\u2019t wash.\u00a0<\/em>(Hard Press) and, most recently,\u00a0Stealth<\/em>, co-authored with Maureen Seaton (Chax Press). He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Foundation as well as the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award.\u00a0His work has been widely anthologised and has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review<\/em> and many more. He lives in Tucson, Arizona and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.<\/p>\n

Check out some of Samuel’s work<\/a>\u00a0at the Speech Acts video poetry series curated by TC Tolbert.<\/p>\n

Maxine Beneba Clarke<\/strong>\u00a0is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. She is a slam poetry champion, and the author of the short fiction collection\u00a0Foreign Soil<\/i> (Hachette Australia, 2014) and the poetry collections Gil Scott Heron is on Parole<\/em> (Picaro Press, 2009) and Nothing Here Needs Fixing<\/em> (Picaro Press, 2013). In 2013,\u00a0Foreign Soil<\/em> won\u00a0the Victorian Premier\u2019s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript\u00a0and the title poem of\u00a0Nothing Here Needs Fixing<\/em> won the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.<\/p>\n

Here’s Maxine’s blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Their responses will be available on 15 September.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was recently tagged by Vivek Shraya, a\u00a0fellow Arsenal Pulp Press author, \u00a0for a writer-related\u00a0“blog hop” (he also tagged another fellow Arsenal Pulp Press author, Amber Dawn).\u00a0In a nutshell, each writer answers\u00a04 set questions on writing which they\u00a0post on their\u00a0website and they tag two other writers to continue the chain of responses. What am I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[73],"class_list":["post-3737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3737"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6955,"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737\/revisions\/6955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomcho.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}