(no subject)
So I downloaded a bunch of Christmas music over the weekend, and my roommate hung up Christmas lights, and yesterday it rained and I turned off our room light and turned on the Christmas lights and sat on my bed and drank hot chocolate and wrote a Christmas story. Well, that I was my plan, anyway. What actually happened was I got about a paragraph into my story and then one of the other girls came in and somehow I got suckered into watching The Notebook for the first time. I thought it was a huge waste of 123 minutes of my life, which apparently means I am a horrible person and hate love and will die miserable and alone. Which I am actually totally fine with if it means I don't have to lay on greasy asphalt, or have sex (or almost have sex or whatever it is they even do in that scene) in a dirty, dusty, rotting house, or spend seven years crying and angsting and getting drunk and leading perfectly nice people on because I am pathetic and cannot get over it, dear GOD, people, it's been SEVEN YEARS, MOVE ON ALREADY! So yes, my plans were rather thrown off.
I also read Six Characters in Search of an Author which is a really fantastic play and one I recommend to anyone who writes fiction. A few quotes that exemplify this brilliance:
"A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has a life which is truly his, marked with his own special characteristics. ... And as a result he is always somebody! Whilst a man ... in general ... can quite well be nobody."
PRODUCER: And so you'd say that you and this play of yours that you've been putting on for my benefit are more real than I am?
FATHER: Oh, without a doubt. ... If your reality can change from one day to the next....
PRODUCER: But everybody knows that it can change like that! It's always changing. ... Just like everybody else's!
FATHER: No, ours doesn't change! You see, that's that difference between us! Our reality doesn't change. It can't change. It can never be in any way different from what it is. Because it is already fixed. Just as it is. Forever! Forever it is this reality. It's terrible! This immutable reality. It should make you shudder to come near us!
"Authors usually hide the details of their work of creation. Once the characters are alive ... once they are standing truly alive before their author ... he does nothing but follow the words and gestures that they suggest to him. And he must want them to be what they themselves want to be. For woe betide him if he doesn't do what they wish him to do! When a character is born he immediately acquires such an independence ... even of his own author ... that everyone can imagine him in a whole host of situations in which his author never thought of placing him. They can even imagine his acquiring, sometimes, a significance that the author never dreamt of giving him."
And the last one kind of makes me go, "Oh god, I hope fanfic-ers don't get their hands on this." But seriously, aren't they brilliant?
I also read Six Characters in Search of an Author which is a really fantastic play and one I recommend to anyone who writes fiction. A few quotes that exemplify this brilliance:
"A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has a life which is truly his, marked with his own special characteristics. ... And as a result he is always somebody! Whilst a man ... in general ... can quite well be nobody."
PRODUCER: And so you'd say that you and this play of yours that you've been putting on for my benefit are more real than I am?
FATHER: Oh, without a doubt. ... If your reality can change from one day to the next....
PRODUCER: But everybody knows that it can change like that! It's always changing. ... Just like everybody else's!
FATHER: No, ours doesn't change! You see, that's that difference between us! Our reality doesn't change. It can't change. It can never be in any way different from what it is. Because it is already fixed. Just as it is. Forever! Forever it is this reality. It's terrible! This immutable reality. It should make you shudder to come near us!
"Authors usually hide the details of their work of creation. Once the characters are alive ... once they are standing truly alive before their author ... he does nothing but follow the words and gestures that they suggest to him. And he must want them to be what they themselves want to be. For woe betide him if he doesn't do what they wish him to do! When a character is born he immediately acquires such an independence ... even of his own author ... that everyone can imagine him in a whole host of situations in which his author never thought of placing him. They can even imagine his acquiring, sometimes, a significance that the author never dreamt of giving him."
And the last one kind of makes me go, "Oh god, I hope fanfic-ers don't get their hands on this." But seriously, aren't they brilliant?