Once again I am face to face with grief. The sort that wrenches everything apart. The sort that shreds the fabric of normality.
When the dust settles and the pieces fall back into place, they are never quite ‘in place’. It is a different reality. One that requires another getting used to.
Grief changes people. I know that for a fact. But does it change our intrinsic nature, or merely our world view? Is it possible to go back to a time of innocence, before the fact? I look into my children’s eyes and think not. Even innocence is altered forever.
Blog
The Fault in Our Stars, John Green
A wonderful review! Cannot wait to read this book.
“Write what you know” – Nathan Englander on Misunderstood Advice
Ahh! Some good advice here. 🙂
Gatsby-love thwarted (Spoilers)
Saw the movie ‘The Great Gatsby’ today. Baz Luhrmann kept it quite true to the book, while adding his unique flair to it.
But it got me thinking about who or what Gatsby stands for. Here is a man who has a vision of himself. He has come up the hard way and through dubious means acquired immense wealth. His driving force is his love for Daisy Buchanan.
In his vision, he gets the girl, and they live happily ever after in his enormous mansion. That this vision comes to naught is a moot point.
Had the vision come true, would he have been happy? Probably not. Even as he holds Daisy in his arms, he starts to realise that the green light on Daisy’s dock is starting to lose its significance.
That green light symbolises hope & ambition. Is there not something that each of us aspires to? What happens when we fulfil that ambition? Do we not find that the goal post has moved again?
Gatsby never fulfils his dream, and therefore he becomes a tragic character. Yet the true tragedy of life is,that sometimes holding your dream in your arms is also not enough.
Are human beings by our very nature condemned to certain unhappiness? Is there a little bit of Gatsby in all of us?
Short stories: Yay or Nay?
The Short story seems to be having a revival of sorts. I, for one, have always leaned towards this genre, simply because I am most comfortable with it. There is a certain beauty in brevity. I like the fact that something has gone on before this story unfolded, and something else will happen, after I have concluded it. Whatever that maybe is left to the reader’s imagination.
Despite, my love for it, I often wonder, if the short story is regarded as a poor second cousin to its grander rival, the novel? Invariably I get asked, “Are you working on a novel?” as though I need to move on, to graduate in a sense, to better things. The long and the short of it is: No. I love what I do, and intend to carry on for a while yet.
My question to you however is: What do you prefer?
The germ of an idea, or where inspiration comes from
I often wonder at writers who say that their protagonists appeared in their minds fully formed. J K Rowling claimed that Harry Potter walked into hers quite suddenly. My process has never been quite that painless. My characters are amorphous. Some I can grasp and try and pin down on paper. Others hover on the edge of my consciousness.
Even those that I put down on paper have the uncanny ability to surprise me by developing in ways that I had not foreseen. For instance, Parvathy’s Well, a story that I wrote quite some years ago, had as it’s main character a girl who was shy, overly imaginative and prone to fancy. That she had an unconscious nasty streak, revealed itself to me only as the story progressed.
So, as a writer, inspiration may arrive in the form of a movie, a snippet of a conversation, a glance, a throwaway comment…take your pick. The interesting thing is how that inspiration translates itself into words.
Right now, I have a troubled woman, someone who is tired of the day to day care of her invalid mother, wanting me to write about her. Who is she? No one I know. Will I be able to tell her story? I can certainly try. Will it be the story I have imagined? I can guarantee not. It will be the one that she wants told….tantalisingly vague as it is at this point.
