Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Unconventional: Having Fun with Writing

Being of the prehistoric era, I have written quite conventionally. So don’t let the title of this entry fool you. Yet, recently, I’ve been trying to break the ties of convention and experimenting with writing stories that do not agree with my usual modus operandi. Tsk,tsk! A woman my age! Although what I talk about are not gimmicks but real experimentation with odd pieces.

But then, if what comes out feels like a part of a story, I stick it into a story, later, and sometimes, much much later. Thus out the door goes my planning the usual way, which is: idea development of the idea or the three-sentence outline characters to fit the three-sentence outline fully developed outline that includes the setting and what have you.

When the conventional methods are given the pink slip, then comes the tiny pieces that go nowhere on their own.

My favorite of all those tiny incomplete pieces are my lists. Sometimes I even write a short piece using my grocery list after I come home from shopping. They usually stink, but they are fun.

Then comes the slice-of-life or vignette type that offers a random moment, scene or observation but it is not a complete story on its own. I love doing this, too. Sometimes, I write the same scene or moment from the POV’s of several different characters, which can be quite tricky. I think this is called Rashomon after the movie. It ends up in not too successful, though interesting, work since it can confuse the reader, but who cares when you are having fun? Right?

Talking about fun, while writing, I always have fun. If I didn’t have fun, I wouldn’t write. I am no masochist, believe me, and I never sympathized with the angel of death that came and slew the Slaughterer that killed the Ox that drank the Water that extinguished the Fire that burnt the Stick that beat the Dog that bit the Cat that ate the Goat…and so on.

As such, there was that experiment with epistolary fiction, but without an outline or even an idea. I chose two of my old characters one from one novel and another from another novel, and without any central concept or direction, I had them write letters to each other. Voila! A new story was born, however incongruous.

All these, I fool around with in a note-book, not the kind that comes inside our computers but the old-fashioned wire-bound one. It is more fun to let the ink flow onto the paper.

I have always been a lover of free-flow; however, free-flow I can do on the computer just as well. These things I am experimenting with are better suited in wire-bound notebooks, lest I mix them up with other work in the computer. Mind you, I am not saying serious work, because the word serious scares me, and I never do serious work with fiction or poetry.

Getting back to unserious, maybe in my next venture, I’ll try something else, by introducing a character smarter and more knowledgeable than I am. More knowledgeable is already done, as most of my characters are. By smarter I mean someone like a geek, someone who knows more science than the science that already exists and that we can research, then act like we’ve known those fancy facts, all along. Geez, I think I just described an alien. How about another epistolary between that alien and Poppaea, Emperor Nero’s wife? A real odd couple that would make.

Now I wonder how many more bizarre ideas will take hold of me next?