Week 3, Crowl's Log:
Professor Chacon sounded off through my Sony headphones, the pale Starbuck's tile perfectly muted against the sharpness of his assertions. My knees cradled the chair under the table as if to console me from his resonating, and intensely convicting, words...
Professor Chacon's Flash Film and Fiction:
Flash Fiction is a shortened story with "detailed images" that "accelerate and decelerate" its narrative course. Flash film and fiction utilizes "Characterization, dialogue, setting, props, lighting, etc..."
Crowl Clumsily Interprets Chacon:
Like the brief nature of a camera's illumination, flash fiction is a quick, yet imagistic, brightening of the reader's and viewer's mind. Flash fiction and film seek to tell a rich, yet efficient, story through the aforementioned tools and elements.
Chacon's important elements of the text, characterization, setting, etc.
"Stories or work should be meaningless in order to be meaningful." Our "agendas will come out organically when we write or create." We don't need to come to the art with an agenda. "It's wise, for now," not to think of the effect you want your work to have." "When we follow language or character need the themes are created by the elements themselves."
"Characters should want or need something" "In fiction, irony can operate as a character wanting one thing, but really wanting something different." "A story should accelerate and decelerate depending on the need of an individual work." 'Let's use our imagination ahead of our intellect."
Crowl Clumsily Interprets Chacon:
Agendas are insidiously churning within the caverns of our, the writer's, minds, pushing the ink from our pens and the thoughts to our page. Every character we write and setting we erect are embedded with every truth or conviction that courses and stirs in their creator's mind and heart. Our imaginations and characters are the engines that yield meaning and theme.
Chacon and Flannery O'Connor Separate Prose Poetry From Flash Fiction:
"We want to tell a story. It's not about poetic language that sometimes doesn't tell a story. We want interesting characters and a compelling plot."
"Form is not structure. The aspects of your story should help readers arrive at the meaning of your story. The affects the art has on its readers is its meaning."
Crowl Clumsily Interprets Chacon and O'Connor
We need to sacrifice the meaning of flash fiction on the alter of character need and language. For some reason, maybe it's the high chair fatefully left by the last patron who occupied this table, the metaphor of parenting comes to mind. I've spoken to so many parents who declare that raising a child is an adaptive venture, with the child often revealing his or her needs and the parent responding to those needs as they arise. If we treat the language and characters in our stories as our children, we might stop leading with our intellect, strong arming our stories to adhere to the agendas we preconceive, and our stories may start to mature and reveal our influence on them, organically. Our children are born with our genetic code, our tendencies imprinted on their
double helix, much like the stories written and filmed are the offspring of their creators.
As I read through these stories, I noticed that some of them didn't really have a traditional plot. I looked at "The Laugher" on my blog and there is no real plot there. I wonder how that fits in with this "compelling plot" necessity. I did find the character interesting, though.
ReplyDeleteAlso, this was a great post. Any time you can bring in O'Connor, you know it is good. The reminder about finding meaning in the affect is a welcome one.
Hey, Rob. Good post - interesting read! You said: "Agendas are insidiously churning within the caverns of our, the writer's, minds, pushing the ink from our pens and the thoughts to our page."
ReplyDeleteThis made me think of Chacon's statement about Picasso in his audio introduction. He said that if we could watch Picasso paint, we'd see that "he follows the brush." Don't we do the same? We follow the ink, the keypad, the typewriter keys (if we're really old school). Remember playing with the Ouija board? (Or am I really dating myself here?) Sometimes I feel like writing is as tremulous as that, as placing our fingers on that little little piece of wood and seeing what it spells out.
Last semester with poetry we studied a lot about form and content and which dictates the other. We can often start with a form we have in mind and then find as the content comes the form changes or vice versa!
DeleteThanks T Pal, I love your allusion to the Ouija board. You didn't date yourself to me. I love the likenesses to writing. A Ouija board is typically moved by someone, yet we never know the forces behind it. No one admits to moving it which is like writing. Sometimes, I feel extremely passive in the writing process and even uncomfortable when allowing my fingers or pen to follow my odd imagination.
ReplyDeleteRob, although I agree that the father and son seemed to have a special bond, I didn't feel that there was conflict between the boy and the mother. In the first paragraph we are told that it was the mother who had previously cut his hair, "had trimmed it gently behind his neck". I also though her buying him the cap was less about materialism and more about the boy having what he wanted, a cap the same as his cousin. Norris certainly exploited the tenderness between the father and the son but I don't think it was at the mother's expense. I found this story disturbing and unsettling in that we often as parents unwittingly harm our children with words and unleashed frustration. It was so evident that the mother and father had issues other than the blackberries, I felt sorry for both of them and the fact that the small boy had to witness their anger and no doubt in some way feel responsible for it also garners sympathy. It is such a sensitive story!
ReplyDeleteI agree, francine. I didn't think there was necessarily tension between the mother and son, but definitely less of a bond between them than the father and son. I also agree that the tension in the story resides primarily between the mother and father.
ReplyDelete