Old Stuff

As a result of a fun little digital attic-browsing adventure, I found “The Dead Man's Burden”, the first full length short story I ever wrote (after I had first seriously started 'writing stuff.'), and have since been going back over it. There's really not much that's made me cringe so far, since being 17 wasn't really that long ago, and the more uber-adolescent, fantasy-fulfillment type stories I had already written had been expunged via writing fanfiction (Shh, dark secret). Not that I'm in awe of it either, it's still full of the same issues that plague my current fiction writing, but still, reading it has been great fun, and I think I might try to go for the task of giving it a long overdue revision. Wouldn't the 17 year old me - who left junior prom early to finish writing the first draft of it - be proud? No, probably just horny.

At the time of the story's writing, I was still pretty fanatical about my two earliest influences - China Mieville and George R.R. Martin – and I hadn't really read much outside of them. I was more or less balls-to-the-wall set on writing speculative fiction. I had written a few things outside of that story, early chapters of a novel set in the same universe, a few miscellaneous short stories, and an endless volume of notes on the world I wanted to create. Really, it was Mieville and Martin's skill in shaping their own universes that really got me into writing. They weren't worlds that I fantasized about or worlds that I wanted to escape into, they were worlds that were boundless in their imagination but still confined within a very real, comprehensive sort of internal logic. The fact that a person could do something that convincingly with language, and not be confined to making a halfassed Tolkein-ripoff, was what really melted my brain with amazement, and got me into the idea that I might actually want to create the same sort of thing.

Speculative fiction truly rules. It's my old flame, I guess. I'd still like to write that novel I first started someday, if I ever get a grip on world-creation, which is a hell of a skill.

Getting back to the story itself, what's interesting to me is that I've found the same problems in both it and my more recent work. The one universal issue I've been having is fleshing out the characters, making them actual relatable humans instead of bland mechanisms that are just an excuse for the plot to happen. I realize that my thinking process about new stories tends to be more plot oriented, I get more excited about what happens or how to describe what happens, instead of who it happens to.

I'll amend that problem eventually, by jebus.

Guess I'll get to working on it. It's a lot longer than anything I've written recently, around 4200 words or so. The long haul. Bring it.

Learning to learn

I logged about 6 hours of work today in the library, getting waist-deep into research for a paper about Robert Browning and the emergence of the dramatic monologue, which made for an interesting romp with analysis. While slogging through various academic tomes, a cool point that stuck out to me was this whole notion of personal internal division in monologues – the dramatic monologue is considered to be the first notable example of psychological, character-driven fiction. One scholar wrote about how authors of these monologues created them by taking elements from both lyrical poetry and stage plays. And how the synthesis of these two forms was well suited to expressing characters torn between multiple, contradicting states of mind.

So basically, different modes of creative expression harmonize well in a way that better communicates a sense of disharmony. Headfuck, huh?

When getting genuinely excited about stuff like this, I have a semi-joking fear that I'm somehow selling my soul to a geeky satan who's welcoming me into insular academic hell. When you're young and a veteran of compulsory education, there seems to be a sense of minor shame towards educational enthusiasm. But in wondering on this whole tangent, and about the teachers and professors I've had who've made or broken my educational experience in the past, I find myself thinking about what exactly makes a good teacher, especially when being taught is something that many people are involuntarily taught by routine to dislike.

A good teacher can make you genuinely enjoy something you're used to hating. Maybe the teacher knows how to navigate an assigned essay within the boundaries of your own interests, or put an interesting flare on lecture material, even when the ideas involved seem dull on their own. A good teacher more or less gets you enthused about learning, or tricks you into learning something even if you're resistant to it. Because a truly good teacher realizes that learning is not force-feeding freeze dried ideas for the singular purpose of a grade. Because part of learning is figuring out what kind of things you want to learn, the areas of knowledge that get you excited, and maybe, jokingly questioning whether it's a bad thing to be excited about.