The Graveyard of Abandoned Concepts

<center><img src="http://i57.tinypic.com/2e4f4mg.jpg"> <a href="http://www.google.ca/">I really don't want to know any more.</a> I consent to [[enter|Dedication]] the Graveyard of Abandoned Concepts.

<center> Table of Contents [[Memoirs Are Not for Children]] [[Plots With No Characters]] [[Characters With No Plots]] [[When Did Microwaves Come into Common Use?]] [[Tragedy Is Just Wish Fulfillment for the Morose]] [[Returning to the Grave|Conclusion]] [[Actually, I changed my mind about that whole artistic experience thing.|artistic experience]]

Memoirs Are Not For Children I’m really good at recognizing fonts and I have personal opinions about all of them. -myself, at [[age thirteen]] I think everyone goes through those phases when they’re people who other people can’t stand to be around. -myself, in a rare display of lucidity, age thirteen When I was thirteen, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with memoirs. Not quite biography, but not quite fiction, memoirs were the right cross between Hello-style gossip and self-deprecating humour of the sort that would become popular several years later with the advent of HBO's Girls. I recently read Lena Dunham's memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, and my immediate reaction was something like: God, I wish this had been out when I was in eighth grade. I would have devoured it, (especially the part where Dunham describes her period as "a monthly car accident in my pants.") I think the phase began when my friend lent me Possible Side Effects, a collection of humourous personal essays by Augusten Burroughs. He had exactly the sort of mordant, acerbic and sometimes disgusting sense of humour that frequently put me into uncomfortable situations with my 13-year-old peers. After I finished Possible Side Effects, I read the rest of Burrough's oeuvre (or at least what had been published at the time.) Then I spent most of eighth grade reading memoirs of increasingly adult content, frequently by famous people whose notable accomplishments I was completely unaware of prior to reading their memoirs. This reached a sort of apex with My Lives, a memoir by the author Edmund White, who is well known as a prominent early figure in gay literature, and one of the founders of the Gay Men's Healthy Crisis. I have still never read any of his novels—it just doesn't seem like they could be more interesting than his personal life. It was around this time that I began writing my own personal essays—intended to be funny, or clever or any number of things that they did not turn out to be. Humour, whether in fiction or nonfiction, rarely emerges by force. The funniest moments in fiction I've ever encountered are generally within dramas, like Six Feet Under, where the very presence of a joke is itself a revelation. the sinews of my heart and letterpress printed onto handmade gampi of his own.) Most of what I find funny in my old writing is the [[cringe-inducing pathos|pathos]] that comes from standing face to face with my younger self. The simple fact is, memoirs are not for children to write. They're probably also not for children to read, but of course children are supposed to do all things they aren't meant to do, so that part is irrelevant. I know that there are rules of writing that can be broken creatively, artistically, politically or otherwise, but this is not one of them. Most children and teenagers can't write all that well for the simple reason that they haven't had enough practise or the life experience that comes from refraining to die for a protracted period of time. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try to write; you have to start somewhere. But that somewhere is not memoir. [[back|Table of Contents]] | [[home|Start]]

<silently> <set $visited_Plots_With_No_Characters = "yes"> <end silently> Plots With No Characters It wasn’t that she was mean to me, or that I annoyed her (most of the time.) There just weren’t many common threads to connect us. -from a fascinating description of the protagonist's sister from an unfinished story It seems that there are two kinds of writers of fiction: plot first writers and character first writers. I believe that character first is slightly more common, because it's the number one complaint I hear from other blocked students in writing classes and casual discussions, on internet forums and in writers' memoirs. Character first writers can come up with loads of characters with intricate quirks of personality, favourites and birthdays and lethal allergies, but they cannot figure out a plot to put these characters into. In a writers' craft class, these people write the sort of stories that have no dialogue at all; the main verb in usage is "reflect." For some reason, these stories are frequently written in the present tense and are more associated with literary fiction or poetry. Then there is the second type of blocked writer: the plot first writer, whose stories are colourful adventures populated by vague, faceless placeholders. Fairytales are a good example of a sort of mass cultural plot-first storytelling. You also find this kind of issue in airport paperback bestsellers. There are lot of twists, turns and reversals of fortune, but all the good guys look kind of the same. I am a plot first writer. In bad times, I am a plot only writer. Having grown up on a steady diet of Nancy Drew mysteries, dramatic historical fiction, fantasy and soft sci-fi, I will openly admit that a story described as "character-driven," a story that "doesn't really have a plot," is not a story I want to read. Most of my stories start off with some kind of "What if..." question. It's not necessarily a very action-based question, but I come to write the stories I wish someone else had written for me to read. I love plot twists, red herrings, insane gambits, lock-picking, Chekhov's guns and all the other tools of the trade. Apparently this makes me a "genre" reader. I am okay with that description. Unfortunately, stories need characters who are [[specific, distinct and in possession of relationships with other human beings|Characters With No Plots]] that are not solely biological or career-related. Even Wilson the volleyball kind of had a personality. I find it very difficult to come up with a character and give it a personality without first immersing it in a plot. Once I get to know a character, I can easily get to know them and flesh out the details of their life, but the initial spark—the creation of a fully formed, real, particular person out of nothing—that's not easy for me. When I write the initial outline or skeleton of a story, the characters are usually referred to by their purpose in the plot— protagonist, focal character, protag.'s father, etc. I often write an intricate outline of a mystery or fantasy story without having decided on whether the main character is a little girl or an old man. Unfortunately for me, there is a black hole of archetypes that follows me around and it tends to try and suck in newborn characters who are not yet strong and stably established in personality. It's hard for me to avoid creating what I call superlative characters—that is to say, if a character is smart, I want to make them incredibly smart. If a character is emotionally reticent, I want to make them the most reticent person in the world. These are bad habits which must be trained out of me, yet there is a childish refusal to believe that a character could, for example, be a loyal friend without being absolutely willing to die for their friends. I hope to someday find a collaborator who has the opposite problem—a person with a veritable orphanage of plotless characters, living their intimate internal lives in a dull and featureless, unchanging world, ready to donate their characters for a greater cause. [[back|Table of Contents]] | [[home|Start]]

<center> Characters With No Plots Michael: An intelligent, rational, straight-talking boa constrictor who is the pet and best friend of Mrs. March... He serves as her confidante and advisor, though he secretly longs for a life outside of her apartment. -outline of a character whose plots has since been jossed While coming up with a plot is generally much easier for me than creating characters, I always have a few castoffs from previous failed stories. Once a plot goes to the Graveyard of Abandoned Concepts, there's almost no hope of redemption; but a character can be transformed to fit a new story. There's one abandoned character I have whose base personality I kept. The character described above has been a boa constrictor, a talking goldfish, a human and an imaginary friend. Other characters have undergone less dramatic transformations. Once I create a character that I like, certain qualities about them never change-—including birthday, personality, motivation and the purpose they serve in a plot--while other attributes, including their name, age, gender, species, family, etc. remain malleable. Other writers are often happy to give away their abandoned characters, particularly if they're character first writers--these writers have so many characters, they won't miss one or twelve. I'm reluctant to adopt, though. A character is initially created for a specific purpose, with a particular plot in mind. If I don't know what that initial story--the abandoned story--is, then I can't really get into the character. [[back|Table of Contents]] | [[home|Start]]

<center>When Did Microwaves Come Into Common Use? ...Knorr Beef Noodle Soup, Kraft Miracle Whip Salad Dressing, Del Monte Canned Green Beans, Post 40 Per Cent Bran Flakes and...Betty Crocker Heavenly Angel Dream Strawberry Cake Mix. -part of an abandoned story, in which I demonstrated my prodigious ability to Google popular processed foods of the 1970s The problem with writing historical fiction is, obviously, doing the research. The solution to writing historical fiction is that if your story takes place a long enough time ago, most people won't be able to tell when you make mistakes. The very large problem of writing fiction that takes place in the recent past is that plenty of people are going to recognize when you made a mistake which was not obvious to you. It's also very difficult to do research into the day-to-day details of life in the very recent past. You frequently don't even notice when you include an anachronism, because it wouldn't occur to you to check when a certain idiom came into common usage, or how expensive canned pineapple is relative to fresh pineapple in a certain time period. I call this problem the [[Microwave Problem|cuteness.]] because it always comes back to me in the form of a microwave. If you're writing a story that's set in the 1970s or 1980s—which you will, if your story is about teenagers at a crossroads in their lives, lounging in some parents' wood-panelled basement, having ambiguous emotions and doing things they'll later regret—you will inevitably ask yourself when microwaves came into common usage. I.e., not when were they invented (1946, FYI)or when they were [[first ever released|microwave woman]] commercially (late 1940s in the US), but at what point it became normal and expected for the average not-rich person to own one and use it as their sole means of melting cheese onto foods that couldn't stand up on their own two-legs, flavourwise. I have asked this question to multiple people who were alive and quite grown up in the 60s, 70s and 80s and not one of them could give me a straight answer. I have gotten some anecdotal answers ("Well, I remember your grandmother first got one when I was in graduate school—actually, no, I think I was finished by then..."), some irrelevant answers that ignore the actual question ("The way a microwave works is basically with multiple lasers that converge...") and some answers that are the verbal equivalent of Let Me Google That For You. There is something intriguing about not-quite-contemporary fiction that draws me back to it, over and over, as a reader and a writer. Maybe it's that it combines the tangibility of contemporary fiction with the fantastical element of taking a journey to a place you can never visit in your real life. I think there's also a certain amount of power that writers assume when they write historical fiction of any era. To recreate a time period, from wars right down to the tiny details—what side of a man's shirt the buttons are on, the introduction of area codes to phone numbers in 1960-requires a kind of absurb confidence. If you didn't live through a particular era, resurrecting it in fiction is very difficult, but particularly satisfying. [[back|Table of Contents]] | [[home|Start]]

<center>Tragedy Is Just Wish Fulfillment For the Morose But his last lady was Johanna and I’m a stopgap for a measure Just unlucky, just Louise -from "Poem for Kayla," technically not a member of the Graveyard, but certainly morose <img src="http://i57.tinypic.com/f4obvo.jpg"> (I did this drawing while I went to York University, in February of 2013. That was literally the most depressing place in Toronto during the most depressing month of the most depressing year of my life. I really like how the drawing came out, though.) Sad stories are my favourite. Though I dislike feeling actual sadness in response to real things in my life, my favourite works of art of all media are almost uniformly grounded in a really deep sense of melancholy. It doesn't mean that there's no humour or adventure, or that these pieces are necessarily cheesy and overwrought. But a [[well-told sad story|Sad Stories]] will stay with me for much longer than a happy one. And I think I share this with many other people; some of the most popular stories--for children, as well as for adults--have at least some element of tragedy in them. That having been said, there is a point at which tragedy becomes emotionally pornographic. It's difficult to get a reader to feel real empathy with your characters when you've just introduced them, but once a reader feels a strong connection to a character, they will put up with a lot more bad writing just to stay with a character who has become a friend. There are many books that have tragedies in them that don't stir me, for once reason or another; but once I feel an emotional connection to the story and the characters, I can be heartbroken by almost anything the writer throws at them. Of the stories I've written and completed, nearly all of them are sad in some way or another. In some ways, this is because a story I'm emotionally invested in is more likely to get the attention it needs. In other ways, I think that writing a happy ending--or at least a somewhat uplifting ending--is the most difficult thing to write. While I try to include at least some element of hope in the ending of a story, a real happy ending is only deserved when the characters have fought long and hard through multiple conflicts. I have a lot of respect for writers who have the audacity to grant their characters an ending happier than their beginning. It's unfashionable and un-postmodern, but in the right story, it can work. [[I have now participated in an artistic experience|Conclusion]] | [[Back|Table of Contents]]

<center><img src="http://i57.tinypic.com/24kwkus.jpg"> Just providing some context here. [[back|Memoirs Are Not for Children]] | [[home|Start]]

<center><img src="http://i57.tinypic.com/111nup0.jpg"> Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? [[Yes!|Table of Contents]] or [[No|artistic experience]]

<center><img src="http://i59.tinypic.com/o5bb54.jpg"> Look at this modern woman who cooked that thing that is definitely food. [[back|When Did Microwaves Come into Common Use?]] | [[home|Start]]

<center>Actually, I really don'twant to participate in an artistic experience. Why is that? <ul><li><a href="http://www.tpl.ca">There are millions of books in the world that are rather more deserving of my time than this.</a></li> <li>[[I think it's not fair|grumpy cat]] that you didn't complete this project when everybody else did.</li></ul> [[Neither did I, at this point in the semester.|Table of Contents]]

<center> <img src="http://i61.tinypic.com/2dtaa80.jpg"> Life isn't fair. [[You'll be alright.|Table of Contents]]

<center>There is not going to be a pull-quote of cringe-inducing pathos here [[for your pleasure|cuteness.]] I couldn't bring myself to do it. Just have faith when I say that there was plenty of it. [[I apologize for the disappointment.|grumpy cat]]

<center><img src="http://i57.tinypic.com/30ljbtf.jpg"> [[Back to Beginning|Start]]

An Incomplete List of Movies That Made Me Cry <ul style="list-style-type:circle"> <li>Brokeback Mountain</li> <li>Dallas Buyers Club</li> <li>Edward Scissorhands</li> <li>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(one of my all time favourites, as well)</li> <li>Fast Times At Ridgemont High (I honestly don't know)</li> <li>Fiddler On The Roof</li> <li>The Green Mile</li> <li>The History Boys</li> <li>Holes (because I was 9 and scared and wanted to leave the theatre)</li> <li>Little Women</li> <li>Me Without You</li> <li>My Own Private Idaho (Don't even get me started. My best friend and I learned the whole movie by heart.)</li> <li>Mysterious Skin (more out of shock and horror than anything)</li> <li>Never Let Me Go</li> <li>Pieces of April</li> <li>Radio</li> <li>Ratcatcher</li> <li>The Shawshank Redemption</li> <li>The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants</li> <li>The Sound of Music</li> <li>Stand By Me (and how!)</li> <li>Stroszek (as the movie ended, I was laughing so hard I didn't even realize that I was also sobbing)</li> <li>Titanic</li> <li>To Sir, With Love</li> <li>Toy Story 3</li> </ul> [[back|Tragedy Is Just Wish Fulfillment for the Morose]] | [[home|Start]]

<center><img src="http://i59.tinypic.com/5ccbo9.jpg"> This looks like it's going to be a problem. [[Table of Contents]]