I didn't mean to have this happen, but since writing that post about things I want to do someday, I've remembered some things and figured out a few other things about reading and writing.
First, I've remembered that I deeply enjoy reading short stories, especially "new" ("modern"? "contemporary"?) fiction, especially stuff with an "experimental" bent, and especially stuff in the really short ("flash"/"sudden") format (check out what I'm reading to see examples of what I mean).
I've also remembered that I can write pragmatic (i.e. informal non-fiction) prose fairly well, by being forced to do so on this here blog daily. And by "well," I just mean "effectively": I can string enough sentences together, on a daily basis, to make a blog post that's a coherent whole, without agonizing about it for hours and hours. This, as opposed to an earlier period in my life, when I struggled mightily, and ultimately failed, to write academic prose with any degree of skill or confidence.
One big thing I've figured out is that I feel an urge to try to write the kind of fiction I'm reading. I have a history of falling in and out of practices like this, so who knows if I'll still feel like this three weeks from now. But at least these past ten days or so, since I wrote about wanting to write fiction "someday", it's been on my mind almost all the time. I find myself coming up with little snippets and writing in my head, and I'm spending a good chunk of my free time (ha!) on "free-writing". There's no shortage of cheesy how-to fiction writer sites out there (google is your friend, as usual) that describe free/automatic writing procedures and what they're for; basically, it's the writing equivalent of using free improvisation as a generative source for music, with which I'm intimately familiar.
Speaking of cheesy writing sites, this one by Sue Tomlinson, while couched in an offensive font and a horrendous site design that looks like it dates from the early 90s, had some important things to say that I really needed to hear (read?) right now. Ironically, it's targeted at writers of academic essays! But no matter. Her discussion of "generativity", for example, is bang on:
All pre-writing activities take advantage of the generative nature of language. Generative means that your best ideas come to you as you speak or write. Very few people go off by themselves to think and actually do it. Most people go off by themselves to calm down the emotional storms inside them. Getting calmed down is an important thing, but it usually is NOT thinking. When people think, they are usually either talking or writing. That's one of the reasons it's so important to take notes as you listen in class or read unfamiliar material. Even if you never look at the notes again, you have focused your mind on the subject by taking notes. You will have more and better ideas about the subject at hand by writing about it. Sometimes people call this "writing to learn," and lots and lots of research has proved that the principle works.
...which is very much in the same vein as what Casey used to say to us all the time about writing to think when we were trying to formulate essays on our own creative musical work. So, in the interest of generative thinking, here's what I came up with when I stopped to consider what it's been like free-writing these past ten days:
There's the mechanics of writing—sort of like walking: putting one word in front of the other, as it were—at which I'm finding I'm pretty decent, like I said. But then there's the actual storytelling part, at which I think I need to do a bunch of work: where do you want to walk to, and is that an interesting place for the reader; can you maybe even coax them to come along with you to that place without their noticing; and so on.
There's also this sort of multiplicitous narrative focus thing that's happening as I write. How to explain... it's like there are several levels of attention going on at once: on what I'll call the lowest level, there are the sounds of the words, the poetry of their rhythm, their cadence, and so forth. Then on top of that there's sentence structure. Then on top of that, suddenly characters come into it; there are people doing things. There's a paying-attention-to the thoughts, feelings, sensations of the characters on that level. Finally, there's overall plot development. You read all the cheesy "creative writing" sites and they all talk about "making sure you're moving the story forward," and it sounds trite, but I think it's important. Or at least, you need to be aware of that, even if you're deciding you're not going to do it. Like, for example, you're going to go all Beckett on the reader and have Molloy flail around in the ditch for 5000 words—and there's no plot, there's no forward movement. Either way, there's an awareness of movement or lack of movement on that level. (Aside re. the lack of movement: it's like silence in music—"the presence of nothing, rather than the absence of something", as Casey used to say: I think it works if you're aware of it, if your intention fills it.)
So, I've identified four levels of what I'm calling "narrative awareness" in myself: sonic/textural, sentential/syntactical, character, and plot. Probably there are more, and probably I'm being arbitrary in my separation of those layers—they probably blur into each other rather than being discrete—but they're the levels I'm currently noticing as I write. Anyway that's not the point right now. Here's the point: I find I can easily get distracted by one layer, particularly the bottom two, and find it difficult to keep the story moving when that happens. So I either end up at the sonic/textural level writing "bllhalbbhbbhadjff djther fdmasdnmthd thongthongthongthongblongbadong" sound poetry; or I'm at the sentence/syntax level and I'm just playing with whole words, so now it's prose poetry and there's still no story; or I get stuck on the thoughts/sensations/emotions of the characters in some particular physical situation, like poor Molloy in the ditch, and there's still no story!
Now, I have no problem with sound poetry, prose poetry, and absurdist non-narrative minimalism. These are lovely things that I greatly enjoy reading (and even writing). But the thing I'm trying to figure out if I can do is storytelling. The authors I really love right now (e.g. Barthelme, Jarman, Sparling) are still, I think, "new"; they're shaking things up and causing trouble, but at the level of the story, not the sentence, word or phoneme. So: how to keep the free-writing going without falling away from the story? Is that really free-writing anymore if I've got that much intention about it? Do the labels matter?