Monday, February 03, 2014
In writing fiction, is it OK to always remain onstage?
I’ll be reviewing all my unpublished novel
manuscripts soon, laying all the pieces of interrelated plots and putting them
together as if they were a jigsaw puzzle.
They strike me now as something that could become a television series,
with a multiplicity of characters and some bizarre situations and events that
you find in soap operas.
I have always been “on stage” in my fiction
manuscripts, and this is true in the three “fiction” pieces in my upcoming “Do
Ask, Do Tell III” book. There is
certainly a lot of attention to the nature of my own fantasy material, and of
right-wing-style institutions around that would try to educate “people like me”. This all comes from a long standing
background of being pressured to conform to the values of others. It’s true that some of my nature is beyond my
capacity to choose. But it’s become
apparent to me in more recent years that this is true of many other people and
it affects their real needs.
More recent fiction efforts, particularly the novel
manuscript “Angel’s Brothers”, have focused in telling the stories from the
viewpoints of other characters, including an elderly ex-FBI agent, a fortyish
history teacher (and family) moonlighting with the CIA, and a young college
student with some unusual gifts – maybe “powers”. One of the screenplays is told from the
viewpoint of a journalist, cheating on a pregnant finacee who suddenly “goes up”. Yet, even in these, I am always “in the
background”. Ultimately, my worldview
comes into play and permeates the lives of other more mainstreamer-like
characters.
What would be challenging to write a story about
characters and issues that have nothing to do with me personally. I know this is expected all the time,
expected in Hollywood (I could not imagine want to set up “Labor Day”, for
example), but right now it is still beyond me.
Clive Barker once wrote (in the opening of Imajica) that more than three people on state at a time makes a crowd, and that doesn't help crowdsourcing. If I'm present, I'm definitely an observer, and forward enough (even in the Army) to affect the surrounding combat.
The middle picture: the car really looked lavender.
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