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Kerrie
Registered User
(2/27/02 6:55:37 am)
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Combining Past with Present...
In dealing with my own writing, I find I am combining elements of
fairy tale and folklore with experiences and people from my life.
I was just wondering, how others have combined these elements in
their own writing and work. For example, I know Jane has mentioned
that she is the woman on the road in Ruth's _12 Dancing Princesses_
and in _The Wood Wife_ Terri's heroine speaks of Brian Froud's faeries.
Any other instances where this occurs?
Sugarplum dreams,
Kerrie
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Richard
Parks
Registered User
(2/27/02 9:05:03 am)
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Re: Combining Past with Present...
Since anything a person writes is informed by who they are, it happens all the time. Probably the most direct incident in my case is the character who sees a white deer while on his way to work in "Doing Time in the Wild Hunt," in my upcoming collection.
I wrote the story because, on my way to work one morning, I saw a white deer. Can't get much more direct than that.
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ZMethos
Registered User
(2/27/02 10:01:20 am)
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Re: Combining Past with Present...
Yeah, I think people write from experience, so anything they write is in some way self-referencial, although the "links" may be either direct or obscure. I can't say that "Akkad" was somehow directly linked to my experience (and I would have to think hard about how it might be connected to me indirectly), but my new, as-yet untitled novel is very directly related in that some of the things that happen to my main character Nick are things that happened to me as well.
~M. Pepper
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Gregor9
Registered User
(2/27/02 12:59:32 pm)
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Re: Combining Past with Present...
Yes, I think it happens all the time--life informs art.
Some things I've written I call "cuisinart fiction", because they're the result of anything and everything I can grab, put in, and puree into the finished story. But even the ones that aren't in that category contain flashes of real imagery I wrote in a notebook, or a piece of dialogue I overheard, or some other borrowed or transformed piece of reality.
A couple of years ago, I was involved in a 4-way collaboration for a story for one of Ellen Datlow's web sites. I drew the short straw and had to go first. So I started a story that came entirely out of the real image of a huge hulking "Arnold" of a guy in an $800 suit walking down the street and shouting into his cellphone: "No! Next? No! Next? No!" I have no idea what the hell he was doing, but it made a great opening image for the experiment.
GF
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Laura
McCaffrey
Registered User
(2/27/02 4:55:37 pm)
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Re: Combining Past with Present...
I heard Jessie Haas - the Beware the Mare books, Unbroken, Runaway Radish etc. liken her writing to the show Junkyard Wars. She puts bits and pieces together which she's harvested from various parts of her life. I like that image.
I definately use pieces of my life in my writing- the river outside my window, the sound of the waves in Maine, the foot bridge at a swing dance camp where my husband works for a week each summer. I find it's the unintentional pieces that are the most disconcerting. I think I'm writing a story completely out of my imagination and then realize, when I've read it all through, that it's really a tale about something that happened to me that I haven't quite come to terms with.
Laura Mc
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(2/28/02 5:24:50 am)
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Modeling
Actually, I was the physical model for uth's illustrations of the old woman in the woods. I may be that old, but I still thinki of myself as Molly Whuppie or other lively heroines.
Jane
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Gregor9
Registered User
(2/28/02 5:37:42 am)
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Re: Modeling
Jane,
Every time I go to an aikido class, I know I'm really twenty-five. And after three hours of it, I know I have to reconsider my entire belief system.
I thought you *were* Mollie Whuppie.
GF
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Jess
Unregistered User
(3/2/02 10:48:04 pm)
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Experiences
Jane,
I really think that you must be Ruth's model for the woman on the road in 12 Dancing Princesses. You give the aspiring writers on "the road" here hope, advice, encouragment and a little bit of your magic, just like that woman does the hero (I change the hero's name to "Max" which is my son's name so I don't remember it in the book).
Kerrie,
As for using your own experience in writing, I think every writer or illustrator must do that either conciously or unconciously. I find that unless I really "know" my text before it is put on paper, I simply cannot go forward. The funny thing is that when I have a good writing day, the writing unfolds for me. I don't simply write, I am reading my own story as the words pour out, and I am as anxious to find out what happens to my characters as I hope my reader is. I know that sounds silly when I have been working from outlines and research, but still it seems that way.
Anyone else have that same experience?
Jess
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ZMethos
Registered User
(3/2/02 11:23:50 pm)
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Re: Experiences
Jess,
I understand what you mean, I think. On a good day, my writing takes off and my characters (when developed well) do their stuff, and they can surprise even me! Then sometimes, even if I have plans for them, they may veto my outline and do something else entirely. I make it a point not to force or manipulate my characters and stories if they resist what I originally planned because then they just come off as stilted.
~M. Pepper
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MelindaKimberly
Registered User
(3/2/02 11:58:46 pm)
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Re: Combining Past with Present...
Erm. Hi.
Keri was talking about fairytale and real-life elements in storytelling. Beauty and the Beast is my own fav for modern + fairytale elements, as the "beast" can be a whole range of things, from physical ailment and disfigurement to troubled childhood or repressed emotion. Dunno if you've read "The Wild Swans" by Peg Kerr, but she did a marvelous job of using the semi-historical Wild Swans (where a girl is cast out of her father's house and completed a nearly impossible task to break the spell which changed her brothers into wild swans) with the modern metaphorical retelling of Wild Swans (where a young gay man is cast out of his father's house and faces the blessing of finding love and the curse of AIDS).
I tend to glom onto the metaphors of fairytales as a means to figure out what it is I'm writing. The best novels and films do the same thing: FREX: AI is "Pinnochio" and Mercedes Lackey's The Last Herald-Mage series draws strongly off of "Cinderella". I also read two takes on "Beauty": one by Robin McKinley, which sets Beauty and the Beast in a semi-historical setting; the other by an author I can't remember off the top of my head, which not only had a historical setting, but time-traveled back and forth to the modern day. It was odd to see someone talking about being shriven and counting the days by the saints one minute and talking about high school and who's sleeping with whom the next. I can't decide if I liked the work, but it definitely stomped all over the conventions of what makes a "fairytale" while going back to the time before the Victorians, when fairytales weren't for kids alone. (FREX: Sleeping Beauty was raped and impregnanted by her prince while still asleep. The wolf's belly was slit open by the hunter to save Granny and Little Red Riding Hood.)
I'm rambling. Sorry.
My point is that when you see the issues that make a fairytale resonant (love, honor, betrayal, alienation, unconditional love, violence, family bonds, etc.) it's not that much of a stretch to tie these into modern life. People still love and hate and marry and die and hurt and heal. As such, they're living the same lives as the fairytale creatures, just in a different setting. The trick is to decide what conventions and fairtyale elements to use and how to interpret or re-imagine them.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(3/3/02 3:52:09 am)
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found objects
I am a firm believer in the found object. Whenever I am writing something, I know I am on the right track when I find something discarded, or just sort of hanging out there in the universe that echoes what I am working on. It's very weird and idiocyncratic, but I love it when it happens. I was working on a novel, "Soulstring," where the hero is turned into a stag and I happened to find washed up on the beach a fragment of someone's beadwork, a stag on a backround of white beads. I have been finishing a piece on the "winter hare" who climbs down from the moon and learns to fiddle and happened across a small plate in a junk shop painted with rabbits leaping over a crescent moon. I changed the name of a character that didn't feel right and that day went to a new mall and saw a tiny shoe shop with the same last name.
It also goes the other way... I like to wait for objects to find me so I can tell their story. So I have a weird collection of found things...blue beads, a silver salt spoon I dug out of the garden, a jar of marbles collected from all over the world, shards of patterned plates washed up on various beaches, stones with natural holes, a tiny cowboy figurine....junk I guess. But then again most writers are sort of magpies so I guess anything shiney.
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Kerrie
Registered User
(3/12/02 6:37:39 pm)
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Tokens...
All too often, I find myself looking for tokens to remind me of a certain tale, film, etc. Sometimes it is a link to a story idea I had, and I think, "This is what I needed to make it real." Unfortunately, the physical object takes the place of the story, and it often doesn't get written. It seems dangerous, when making it real is the goal, giving it life. Almost playing god or something. Instead of drawing from real life, finding a way to make the story real. Is there a difference? Does this make sense?
Soft whispers and sugarplum dreams,
Kerrie
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