Oh, yay! E.B. did it, too...
"Scenes that are out of place leap out at me. I have to cut and paste because they don't belong where I've put them. E.B. White calls this "transposition." He was a big cutter and paster. He felt that manuscripts often have serious flaws in the placement of their material..." --From The Shape of the Novel, at The Tollbooth
I write scenes out of order all the time. It's ridiculous---like my brain is in another time zone.
But it's not as hard as you might think to manipulate the space-time continuum. It just takes days of determined effort. Mwahahaha!
"[I was] thinking about that E.B. White passage you once showed me ... the swooning bit where he says that it's the native New Yorkers who give the city its stability, and the commuters who give it a daily tidal rhythm or something, but it's those dreamers from elsewhere, the striving poets and wannabe circus performers and so forth, who power it with enough heat and light to dwarf the consolidated Edison company..."
That’s one of Ed Park's characters paraphrasing a famous line from E.B. White.
Park's new book, Personal Days, explores how that idealism gets wrecked on the shoals of Manhattan office culture. In addition to his fictional work, Ed Park is a founding editor at The Believer and literary blogger over at The Dizzies.
Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.
Jason Boog:
At the end of your book, you meditate on all the millions of pages of lost, dull prose produced by people in offices every year. When you worked in an office environment, how did you manage to stay creative and productive in your writing? Any advice for writers who feel dulled by their day-jobs?
Ed Park:
Discipline will take you a long way—if you set aside time every day to write, you will find something to write, even if you don’t know what you’re doing as you approach the desk. Continue reading...
My, my-- the things we'll do to appease our children! Though sometimes you just have to admire their spunk... I posted a sketch for this piece a while ago.
A question for all of you illustrators who participate in Illustration Friday-- if you're creating a new piece rather than using one that already fits, how do you schedule it in to your week? What sort of time do you leave yourself for sketches, finish, etc.? Do you always post an image to the site, or do you just use the prompt as an exercise? (Okay, that was a few questions, but I really am curious!)
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You know if we are BOTH messing with the space-time continuum that could be problematic.
Not as long as we stay in our parallel alternate universes.
Something 've thought about before is that we like to think of the universe as linearly ordered but our brains don't work that way. If we are casually telling a story we jump around with the details, with backstory, with asides. We'll start with something later on and build toward it. Sometimes there's value in what our non-linear brains are trying to tell us about the way things connect.
I agree, David. Even stories without flashbacks or other obvious time jumps are rarely truly linear. All books manipulate time in the service of the greater story. Because, as you say, that's how our brains work.
The day I finally mastered cut and paste was a happy one indeed. Now I take out, put back, repeat ad nauseam all day long.
I like what David says about storytelling being nonlinear. Few people start a story at A and finish at Z. It's figuring out where to start that's tricky -- and how many of the letters we should leave out along the way...