The Journal, Part 6
January 7th 2007 12:07
5:42pm Tuesday 26 June, 2001
Authors have been trying their best to break literary rules ever since they were conceived or recognised. My area of interest in metafiction is the distinction we make between fiction and non-fiction. We see them as opposites, fundamentally different in opposing ways. Yet I have often observed that the relationship between fiction and non-fiction is much more subtle and complex than that. One can take a piece of non-fiction writing and place it within a fiction text’s context, so that it suddenly serves a new purpose. It has been transformed from a piece of analysis into a tool of the fiction text’s.
4:12pm Thursday, July 05, 2001
"I think Big Brother helps us realise that these are our lives," says Gretel Killeen. "The hunger with which Big Brother is being absorbed is allowing us to recognise that normal life is as enthralling as any other art form."
Here I am, facing something resembling a final idea. This time I’m not squirming; In fact I feel very satisfied, and relieved.
It’s interesting that you’re often not aware of a deep motivation or reason you have for wanting to do things the way you do. I haven’t often related themes of culture to my ideas, and this has interested me, because I’m very influenced by all of the cultures I have drawn from, yet the cultural context doesn’t seem to have been in my thoughts much during my idea-making process. I did not see a cultural focus as central to my (half-thought out) work, yet as I’m developing my idea further, I see that I will need to address this aspect as well.
Each artwork has a creator. Multiple creators, in fact.
Diary entry #1. Stage directions for a play- this introduces themes and concepts which will be recurring and will be explored and highlighted through the Work. Basic Ideas: Incongruously decorated art gallery, 3 walls of which are represented by the stage layout, so the audience has the sensation of looking into the room through the fourth wall. This wall is an invisible one, and in the play the actors scrutinise the public as though they are an artwork upon the wall- this idea was inspired by The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard. (Postmodern theme: questioning of who the real audience and actors are, questioning of the nature of art: ‘reality’ being seen/interpreted as art.) The extras, who are the colorful and intriguing visitors to the gallery, are choreographed to take a tour of the room as to allow for their individuality to be impressed upon the audience. They inspect all four walls of the gallery, and when they come to face the audience, their reactions are diverse and multi-faceted. Audience is to get the impression of being inspected, that THEY are the spectacle. The characters are mostly stereotypical in appearance and in manner, yet when they face the audience they portray complex emotional reactions. (The point of this is to provide an exploration of stereotypes, as in the movie ‘Clueless’, where Amy Heckerling begins by portraying most of her characters as stereotypical, but through the movie’s development they gradually show more depth, complexities and contradictions. Another clever use of this technique is in the TV comedy ‘Sex and the City’, in which New York as a community is being dissected in what appears to be a very superficial way, focussing on first impressions or stereotyping, yet towards the end of the viewer’s experience with minor characters, these previously 2D characters suddenly reveal unexpectedly realistic and profound insecurities and complex personal strengths/flaws. This has a tendency to startle the viewer, and promotes thought on the inherent complexity of someone who possesses stereotypical facets to their nature. Both directors use a superficial first impression to expose audience ignorance towards what
I had the idea to hand over authorship from myself to characters I’d within the play. My pieces would become their pieces, and they themselves would become the creators, multiple creators of multiple artworks.
I began thinking about the interrelationships between the various arts. I thought about how they often intermingled, played, drew on, and inspired each other. If you take for example Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Moulin Rouge’, the film gives a giddying self-reflexivity through the excessive cut and paste, exaggeration, quick cutting and intended incongruity of its historical representation, and at its core is all about ‘metacinema’ if such a term exists. However, in order to do this to full effect, it focuses on music, stage performance, storytelling and writing, using these multiple perspectives to enhance the cinematic experience. This gave me something to think about, and as I was already exploring meta-theatre, meta-narrative, and postmodern conceptual art, I saw the opportunity to stress the similiarities of these artforms and in the process that is undergone to create them.
My writer kicks off the creation process. She is the direct creator of the play scenario. However, once she has had enough of continuing along these lines, she plunges her imagination into the fictitious scenario she has created and puts herself into the shoes of the actor playing the mysterious role she has described. From here her perspective zooms out of that reality, and into more detached perspective, that of the male director of the play. He focuses not so much on the actual effect of the play, but on the impact that his conceptual art on the back wall makes (large blank canvas, with excessively ornate gold-tinted frame, with the words ‘Under Construction’ typed on a tiny rectangle of paper and stuck in the middle of the canvas. Around the frame, on the walls, are stuck an abundance of art materials, particularly paints, paintbrushes, glitter, sketches, etc.). He is reflecting on the curiosity of how he never conceived of the artwork as belonging to a play, yet it seems to add just the right touch to his performance. He considers how it works with the context of the play really well, although he was thinking of it in a totally different way in his imagination, removed from a context like this. He reflects that it filled a need in his play- a symbol for the world he was creating through his play- a world in which an empty canvas is an artwork, a breathing, moving audience is conceptual art, and a world in which things are in reverse order, and the incongruous is the normal and accepted. “I’m part of this world too. Just because I’ve made it into a play doesn’t mean I’m not still living it. We’re at a very funny stage now, us people…”
The director will raise questions about the bigger picture of the world in which his play has been produced. The society he’s living in will probably not be identified apart from being ‘in the Western world.’ The next sequence will then be following the actions of the director’s son. A curious, artistic and sensitive teenage boy, he seeks to emulate his father in his search for capturing through prose the ambiguity of life. He writes a piece on the moon in the night sky which reflects his wit, humour and talent.
3rd August
Okay, so I haven’t written for a while… here are my current thoughts on the conceptual framework of the tale, as seen by me in my mind (yes, unfortunately I’m still not completely ready to translate it onto paper).
Attempts at writing a story… what are they? How are they meant to come together, and what do they ultimately represent? For me the various depictions of experience are for the purpose of stretching my imagination, and going further into complex thoughts and issues. Do they co-exist in full meaning only in themselves, or is their individual meaning obscured by their participation with the other pieces to form one huge collective ‘meaning’? Funny, these are the questions I want to raise, but I’m asking them myself.
Should the writer have all the answers?
What spurns the story on, as it transcends individuals, places, spheres and zones of existence? My preoccupation of the intricacy of life, but captured in a moment or two. I want to represent how rich and complex one moment at a time is, and how inspiring and even life-changing a single moment can be. The importance of perception. I’m encouraging my reader to engage with the moment themselves.
Representation of time: flurried, it jumps around, and is given a different flavour by each person who claims to it. The point is that so much life can be packed into one moment.
I’m going to use ‘standstill’ effects, constant reminders of how deeply we are embedded in the present, and how our awareness of that fact can lead to experience which can be overpowering, frightening, intimidating, challenges our very being, and motivates us to reach unprecedented catharsis and enlightenment.
Begins as if beginning a play, then switches to first person account, the insider, of what its like to be an actor on that set. Then takes a series of spins, at once going deeper into the story while further away from it. Breaking any rule of relation between the subsequent stories it happens to create along the way.
I want the reader to feel ‘in the moment’, to feel that every new level adds depth and contour to the already existing build-up.
Unpredictability is what I’m aiming for.
Point: Life experience is made up by such a collection of fragmented moments, which morph into each other like in a kaleidoscope, and dazzle the eye with the ability to transform themselves and emerge in different forms and shapes, with each swivel of time.
I’ve decided to do something quite important: eliminate the eternally present author and diary. I realised that as I tried to write this actually restricted me instead of doing the opposite. I felt the need for a more ambiguous way of compiling these tales, and to my surprise discovered that even on their own they have textual integrity, made much more intriguing for its lack of explanation. These fragments being explained away by the author provided an interesting opportunity to depict an author’s struggle, but I realised that if I removed the ever-present awareness of the writer, the pieces on their own embraced a struggle of their own. The fact that there is no one to explain them blurring into each other and their ‘unfinished-ness’ actually creates a bigger sense of authorial ambiguity!
One of the things I’ve paid attention to is to make my work interesting for a wide range of readers, and I hope the unpredictable structural experimentation and the vitality of my descriptions work to entertain both discerning readers and a general audience. One thing everybody can appreciate is the transformative power of the present. I hope this is the sort of work people want to re-read.
I think a lot of authors do this, but I’ve seen this Work as an extension of my identity, especially when when I first began it. I’m more relaxed about it now, but I see the changes I’ve made to the work as the constant update of the identity of a 17yr-old girl. When I first started planning the piece, my unconscious plan was to assemble a set of experiences which were refreshing and uncontrived, and link them to each other in the most naturalistic sense possible. I didn’t want to deliberately plan it, because I wanted it to flow and reflect constant inspiration. I was reluctant to decide on a structure, as I wanted the work to somehow magically fall into place without deliberate attempts to do so. I didn’t want my work to feel ‘manipulated’, so I tried my best not to consciously rely on structure, and hence found it very hard to bring together the various concepts and individual themes I wanted to develop. The I realised, recently, that that raw unproduced feel I wanted came with the introduction of planning and structure first.
In my role as an author I rely strongly on my role as a reader of my own creations. I guide the ‘creator-instinct’ by what I sense I want to follow next as a reader. I always keep coming back to this perspective because it’s the most powerful indication of where to go next, what a reader will tolerate, how much they can take in, where to draw the line, etc.
Something I have learned: not to get frustrated over but rather worship writer’s block. To not only accept but embrace your mistakes, unnecessary diversions, and complete loss of the plot means that you integrate them as part of the writing progress, and what happens in the light of this attitude is that you learn from your blocks, they leave you with a deeper sense of direction and understanding of yourself, and have ultimately helped you not only enrich your writing but enrich your understanding of yourself.
)
Authors have been trying their best to break literary rules ever since they were conceived or recognised. My area of interest in metafiction is the distinction we make between fiction and non-fiction. We see them as opposites, fundamentally different in opposing ways. Yet I have often observed that the relationship between fiction and non-fiction is much more subtle and complex than that. One can take a piece of non-fiction writing and place it within a fiction text’s context, so that it suddenly serves a new purpose. It has been transformed from a piece of analysis into a tool of the fiction text’s.
4:12pm Thursday, July 05, 2001
"I think Big Brother helps us realise that these are our lives," says Gretel Killeen. "The hunger with which Big Brother is being absorbed is allowing us to recognise that normal life is as enthralling as any other art form."
Here I am, facing something resembling a final idea. This time I’m not squirming; In fact I feel very satisfied, and relieved.
It’s interesting that you’re often not aware of a deep motivation or reason you have for wanting to do things the way you do. I haven’t often related themes of culture to my ideas, and this has interested me, because I’m very influenced by all of the cultures I have drawn from, yet the cultural context doesn’t seem to have been in my thoughts much during my idea-making process. I did not see a cultural focus as central to my (half-thought out) work, yet as I’m developing my idea further, I see that I will need to address this aspect as well.
Each artwork has a creator. Multiple creators, in fact.
Diary entry #1. Stage directions for a play- this introduces themes and concepts which will be recurring and will be explored and highlighted through the Work. Basic Ideas: Incongruously decorated art gallery, 3 walls of which are represented by the stage layout, so the audience has the sensation of looking into the room through the fourth wall. This wall is an invisible one, and in the play the actors scrutinise the public as though they are an artwork upon the wall- this idea was inspired by The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard. (Postmodern theme: questioning of who the real audience and actors are, questioning of the nature of art: ‘reality’ being seen/interpreted as art.) The extras, who are the colorful and intriguing visitors to the gallery, are choreographed to take a tour of the room as to allow for their individuality to be impressed upon the audience. They inspect all four walls of the gallery, and when they come to face the audience, their reactions are diverse and multi-faceted. Audience is to get the impression of being inspected, that THEY are the spectacle. The characters are mostly stereotypical in appearance and in manner, yet when they face the audience they portray complex emotional reactions. (The point of this is to provide an exploration of stereotypes, as in the movie ‘Clueless’, where Amy Heckerling begins by portraying most of her characters as stereotypical, but through the movie’s development they gradually show more depth, complexities and contradictions. Another clever use of this technique is in the TV comedy ‘Sex and the City’, in which New York as a community is being dissected in what appears to be a very superficial way, focussing on first impressions or stereotyping, yet towards the end of the viewer’s experience with minor characters, these previously 2D characters suddenly reveal unexpectedly realistic and profound insecurities and complex personal strengths/flaws. This has a tendency to startle the viewer, and promotes thought on the inherent complexity of someone who possesses stereotypical facets to their nature. Both directors use a superficial first impression to expose audience ignorance towards what
I had the idea to hand over authorship from myself to characters I’d within the play. My pieces would become their pieces, and they themselves would become the creators, multiple creators of multiple artworks.
I began thinking about the interrelationships between the various arts. I thought about how they often intermingled, played, drew on, and inspired each other. If you take for example Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Moulin Rouge’, the film gives a giddying self-reflexivity through the excessive cut and paste, exaggeration, quick cutting and intended incongruity of its historical representation, and at its core is all about ‘metacinema’ if such a term exists. However, in order to do this to full effect, it focuses on music, stage performance, storytelling and writing, using these multiple perspectives to enhance the cinematic experience. This gave me something to think about, and as I was already exploring meta-theatre, meta-narrative, and postmodern conceptual art, I saw the opportunity to stress the similiarities of these artforms and in the process that is undergone to create them.
My writer kicks off the creation process. She is the direct creator of the play scenario. However, once she has had enough of continuing along these lines, she plunges her imagination into the fictitious scenario she has created and puts herself into the shoes of the actor playing the mysterious role she has described. From here her perspective zooms out of that reality, and into more detached perspective, that of the male director of the play. He focuses not so much on the actual effect of the play, but on the impact that his conceptual art on the back wall makes (large blank canvas, with excessively ornate gold-tinted frame, with the words ‘Under Construction’ typed on a tiny rectangle of paper and stuck in the middle of the canvas. Around the frame, on the walls, are stuck an abundance of art materials, particularly paints, paintbrushes, glitter, sketches, etc.). He is reflecting on the curiosity of how he never conceived of the artwork as belonging to a play, yet it seems to add just the right touch to his performance. He considers how it works with the context of the play really well, although he was thinking of it in a totally different way in his imagination, removed from a context like this. He reflects that it filled a need in his play- a symbol for the world he was creating through his play- a world in which an empty canvas is an artwork, a breathing, moving audience is conceptual art, and a world in which things are in reverse order, and the incongruous is the normal and accepted. “I’m part of this world too. Just because I’ve made it into a play doesn’t mean I’m not still living it. We’re at a very funny stage now, us people…”
The director will raise questions about the bigger picture of the world in which his play has been produced. The society he’s living in will probably not be identified apart from being ‘in the Western world.’ The next sequence will then be following the actions of the director’s son. A curious, artistic and sensitive teenage boy, he seeks to emulate his father in his search for capturing through prose the ambiguity of life. He writes a piece on the moon in the night sky which reflects his wit, humour and talent.
3rd August
Okay, so I haven’t written for a while… here are my current thoughts on the conceptual framework of the tale, as seen by me in my mind (yes, unfortunately I’m still not completely ready to translate it onto paper).
Attempts at writing a story… what are they? How are they meant to come together, and what do they ultimately represent? For me the various depictions of experience are for the purpose of stretching my imagination, and going further into complex thoughts and issues. Do they co-exist in full meaning only in themselves, or is their individual meaning obscured by their participation with the other pieces to form one huge collective ‘meaning’? Funny, these are the questions I want to raise, but I’m asking them myself.
Should the writer have all the answers?
What spurns the story on, as it transcends individuals, places, spheres and zones of existence? My preoccupation of the intricacy of life, but captured in a moment or two. I want to represent how rich and complex one moment at a time is, and how inspiring and even life-changing a single moment can be. The importance of perception. I’m encouraging my reader to engage with the moment themselves.
Representation of time: flurried, it jumps around, and is given a different flavour by each person who claims to it. The point is that so much life can be packed into one moment.
I’m going to use ‘standstill’ effects, constant reminders of how deeply we are embedded in the present, and how our awareness of that fact can lead to experience which can be overpowering, frightening, intimidating, challenges our very being, and motivates us to reach unprecedented catharsis and enlightenment.
Begins as if beginning a play, then switches to first person account, the insider, of what its like to be an actor on that set. Then takes a series of spins, at once going deeper into the story while further away from it. Breaking any rule of relation between the subsequent stories it happens to create along the way.
I want the reader to feel ‘in the moment’, to feel that every new level adds depth and contour to the already existing build-up.
Unpredictability is what I’m aiming for.
Point: Life experience is made up by such a collection of fragmented moments, which morph into each other like in a kaleidoscope, and dazzle the eye with the ability to transform themselves and emerge in different forms and shapes, with each swivel of time.
I’ve decided to do something quite important: eliminate the eternally present author and diary. I realised that as I tried to write this actually restricted me instead of doing the opposite. I felt the need for a more ambiguous way of compiling these tales, and to my surprise discovered that even on their own they have textual integrity, made much more intriguing for its lack of explanation. These fragments being explained away by the author provided an interesting opportunity to depict an author’s struggle, but I realised that if I removed the ever-present awareness of the writer, the pieces on their own embraced a struggle of their own. The fact that there is no one to explain them blurring into each other and their ‘unfinished-ness’ actually creates a bigger sense of authorial ambiguity!
One of the things I’ve paid attention to is to make my work interesting for a wide range of readers, and I hope the unpredictable structural experimentation and the vitality of my descriptions work to entertain both discerning readers and a general audience. One thing everybody can appreciate is the transformative power of the present. I hope this is the sort of work people want to re-read.
I think a lot of authors do this, but I’ve seen this Work as an extension of my identity, especially when when I first began it. I’m more relaxed about it now, but I see the changes I’ve made to the work as the constant update of the identity of a 17yr-old girl. When I first started planning the piece, my unconscious plan was to assemble a set of experiences which were refreshing and uncontrived, and link them to each other in the most naturalistic sense possible. I didn’t want to deliberately plan it, because I wanted it to flow and reflect constant inspiration. I was reluctant to decide on a structure, as I wanted the work to somehow magically fall into place without deliberate attempts to do so. I didn’t want my work to feel ‘manipulated’, so I tried my best not to consciously rely on structure, and hence found it very hard to bring together the various concepts and individual themes I wanted to develop. The I realised, recently, that that raw unproduced feel I wanted came with the introduction of planning and structure first.
In my role as an author I rely strongly on my role as a reader of my own creations. I guide the ‘creator-instinct’ by what I sense I want to follow next as a reader. I always keep coming back to this perspective because it’s the most powerful indication of where to go next, what a reader will tolerate, how much they can take in, where to draw the line, etc.
Something I have learned: not to get frustrated over but rather worship writer’s block. To not only accept but embrace your mistakes, unnecessary diversions, and complete loss of the plot means that you integrate them as part of the writing progress, and what happens in the light of this attitude is that you learn from your blocks, they leave you with a deeper sense of direction and understanding of yourself, and have ultimately helped you not only enrich your writing but enrich your understanding of yourself.
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