Owen's Writing Week 8

It has always been my opinion that, as a writer, I should attempt to push myself as often as possible. It’s the reason I wrote Polyester Tears and Flat Planet, has been the influence behind some of my poems, and is why I continuously work on One Man’s Death (next week’s story). However, there is one piece that has made me push myself to my limits, if not past them. Dreams of Children Dancing and Fire was the last story I wrote at Knox and, I think, best represents how far I’ve come.

Two terms before I took my last Fiction Workshop I took a Poetry Workshop. It forced me to flex my writing skills in ways I hadn’t really tried before and, by the time I finished the course, I wanted to incorporate what I’d learned into my fiction. There was one thing that continued to elude me though: the proper uses of repetition. I had seen it used repeatedly in the professional poetry books we read (Marianne Boruch’s A Stick that Breaks and Breaks even had repetition in the title!). Some of my fellow classmates were also able to use repetition in ways that I could only dream about. By the end of the term my only ‘successful’ use of repetition was in a poem titled On Talking about Line, and even then it was clunky and minimal. So when I sat down to write what would become Dreams I had it in the back of my mind that I still wanted to ‘learn’ how to use repetition in my works.

Besides that I also wanted to try using an unreliable narrator. I am told Stephen King’s Deloris Claiborne is a good example of this style, though I have never read it myself. I’m also aware of a number of other titles including Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper and even aspects of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. It’s a style that can be used in a number of ways including the mentally unstable, children, and even animals as narrators. These goals worked together very nicely, the mentally unstable Fred easily allowed for repetition which then further enhanced Fred’s voice.

However, that’s not why this piece pushes my limits. It’s a bit more difficult to get into Fred’s mind without making myself a bit crazy as well, but it’s the why Fred went crazy that’s the problem. Unfortunately I can’t explain exactly what the situation was as it’s a major driving point of the story, but I can say that the trauma that I imagine Fred going through makes me fearful of the story and almost causes unwillingness on my part to continue writing it. The main real reason I am spending time on Totally Useless Guy at present is because I’m not sure I can handle Dreams despite my desire to dive back in. Eventually I will finish it, but for right now all I can do is think about it.


A little bonus, Waiting for Genies:
During the same term as I wrote Dreams my class did an initial exercise to get into the writing and critiquing spirit. The task was to write a flash fiction piece, an entire story in 500 words or less (to give perspective, what I just told you about Dreams comes in at 496 words). Rather than spending a great deal of time talking about Waiting for Genies (it’s only 500 words!) I’ll state that this story is really the first time that I became aware of what it meant to write a ‘story’. I know that sounds silly, but it’s true. It took trying to compress an entire story into half a page to force me to come to grips with the definition of a story. In this case I can only describe said definition as it’s been described to me. A story has two things: a cross or an X where two separate things meet (people, ideas, times, etc.) and a change.

By the way, thanks for the help Alissa.