Personal Myth; Personal Canon

All readers have favorite books. Postmodernists deal in personal myth and each personal myth is symbol to a canon of theory, of philosophy, of experience. Significant to the writing of my novel in progress is that there is a gap in the canon implied by my personal myth in which an unknown volume fits and I am writing that volume, a simple and legitimate motivation.
Human knowledge increases by a process of 'puzzling', finding a missing piece that nears the larger puzzle to completion with Gestalt moments of paradigm shifts when puzzles are recognizably complete and perspectives shift. We live in such an age of perspective shift, a Gestalt moment. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are only a century old and the String Theory that unifies them less than that. Science is now working in Information Theory. It will be another century before we acculturate the descriptively powerful image of scalar fields decaying into particles and all that that implies, a century away from understanding these magnificent theoretical constructs in our cultural behavior.
I have a personal need to write this book and I perceive social value in its existence. This is a difficult and dark dystopian age where meaning is dear and found largely in personal terms. By examining the human condition within the framework of my personal canon and filtered by my personal myth, I might have the germ of idea that will provide the missing piece to someone's personal myth and perhaps contribute to a New Grand Narrative if such a thing is possible. And so I write.

http://www.amazon.com/author/johnfrazier

The Sport of Writing

I have always been fond of sports metaphors and quotes in casual conversation. However today I decided to write a blog comparing writing to sport. It is not far fetched. Sport requires talent, diligent practice, discipline, and will. I could be describing a good writer. The difference lies in the fact that the reader only sees the result of the writer's performance, not the performance itself. With sport, the game's the thing. It is an interesting difference.
Within the writing community, some do appreciate the game itself. We are aficionados of the writing game and it has been characterized as such. Writing is our sport however the reading public sees it and they generally see it in much more grandiose terms. An elegant sentence is the equivalent of a three point goal in basketball. No more. No less. When one is blessed or burdened with a deep understanding of the process of pen across page, it is an incredibly rewarding experience to get all the moving parts moving together like a Rolex and make that three point goal, write that elegant sentence.
Sports, however, are played against other players and here the metaphor gets a bit thin. Any self-respecting writer does play against a canon of similar talent. They wrestle in their own weight class but they do wrestle. I am no Hemingway or Nabokov but I do have writers in mind that I would like to match or better. To me and, in practice, other writers, writing is a sport.

The Fiction Narrative as Product

When I began conceptualizing the novel I am now writing, I first imagined a superb (Indie) bookstore and visualized the shelf on which I was trying to place this book. In other words, this novel is market-driven. Books are written to be read and writing with any other criteria then unit sales in mind makes no sense to the union of pen and paper. I do engage in writing exercises to hone my craft and develop form but always with an eye to saying something worth saying well enough for it to be read and enjoyed.
A generic book is a product in the same sense that a painting is a product. While the category, books by the pound, exists just as the product category, motel art, exists, the defining attributes of vision and talent select certain books for certain shelves in the book market, the universal bookstore.
Unlike some other writers, I appreciate Amazon's business model for the creation and marketing of books as products. They do make mistakes such as treating books as a commodity by lowering unit prices to increase volume of sales but, as it becomes obvious that this is a mistake, they will change their model. Theirs is a pragmatic, heuristic approach to selling more books and, since I want my novel read, I support their approach even when they make mistakes.
I will say that the Amazon search engine, which constitutes the shelves of that bookstore, is mysterious, even enigmatic. In my personal experience, it has behaved brilliantly in presenting certain books of interest to me and in a fairly mediocre fashion at other times. Writing for a search engine is a totally different concept than writing for a physical shelf and I admit that I am struggling to master it.

The Meaningful Sentence

When a writer has, as I have, an irrational fear of writing without saying something worth saying or what I call prattlephobia, it is the focus of the writing exercise to create meaningful sentences. If that focus puzzles the reader, I strongly recommend Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on the logic of language and meaning in his 'Philosophical Investigations'. Otherwise, please read on.
What is a meaningful sentence? It is an approximate solution to a problem in combining idea, lexicon, and syntax. If there is insufficient idea, it is a failed solution. It does not say anything. If the dictates of the market requires a lexicon insufficient to express the nuance of what the writer is saying, it is a failed solution. It does not say enough. If the writer lacks the talent and skill to manage the manipulation of syntax, it is a failed solution. It does not communicate anything.
However one may excuse solution failures in lexicon and syntax, there is no excuse for a sentence not saying anything. If the writer has nothing to say, don't write. Read and maybe an idea will germinate. The craft of writing consists, as far as I am concerned, in creating meaningful sentences that build meaningful stories.

The Art of Saying Something Worth Saying

I'm going to begin this blog by saying that fiction is not well suited to serious thought as such. I can think of very few exceptions to this observation, Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which he inserts a brilliant essay on architecture, culture, and technology in media res being one of them. He manages to do this with style and success, but as far as I am concerned the exceptions prove the rule. I tried to include thoughtful digressions in my novella, 'Chances', with notably poor results.
While it is possible to have reservations about nonfiction, historians spinning facts, theory laden volumes of science, fiction is just fiction. It is a vignette frozen in time of a specific state of imagination and not a vehicle for polemics. My working definition is that legitimate fiction is a valuable vision of the possible which entertains. It is an examination and hypothesis of human conditions of existence but it should not be approached with grandiose personal narratives of the genius of the author as thinker. Genius in fiction lies in elegant, evocative sentences that say something worth saying about human beings. Fiction is, after all, the most humane of written works.

A Sketch is Not a Blueprint.

When I plan a work I want a free-form vehicle to take the story from conflict to resolution. What I do not want is a rigid structure that micromanages my prose. While the romantic image of a novelist just sitting down at a typewriter and tapping out the Great American Novel is amusing indeed, there does, if the planning is done correctly, come such a moment when one simply 'Writes'. That is the objective of proper planning.
To get to that point of 'Writing', I begin by sketching paragraph topics, scene by scene, with a sense of chapter endings and beginnings. I then develop these topics into full paragraphs and those paragraphs into pages of content draft. By doing it this way, I maximize my creativity in the moment while maintaining my narrative structure, while making sense. This content draft is the underlying structure of the book which I then transform, by 'Writing', into a rough draft of some literary merit, of some style.
A novel is a complex and difficult form but it does reduce at some point of experience to a magic mix of what the author said and how they said it. Sketching a work allows that magic to happen. Blueprinting it denies such possibility.

Method and Meaning

How one writes ultimately depends on one's predispositions and abilities. I prefer a loose structure to my writing. I may be and, in fact, am guilty of overthink but I never overplan. That destroys spontaneity and, to me, being creative in the moment defines the practice of meaningful storytelling. I could comprehensively outline a competent story with a valuable moral but, then, in writing it I would be filling in the blanks. Some writers can pull that off with style. I cannot. I like to turn the English language loose and go where it leads me. That results in elegant sentences that say something and that is my concept of excellence.
Next week I will detail how I plan a work to maximize my creativity.