pressure syndrome

As usual with intense pressure and its release I sat down to work on the thesis and ended up suddenly writing 2000 words on a probably forever unfinished novel in progress. This is the one about me and a friend driving through the southwest, the contrast between my life in CA as part of the r4dical f4erie community (weird right? or was it) and this strange tense life on the road which ended up being heterosexual marriage (short lived, and weirder than the faeries really).

It could end up interesting but mostly I'm just embarrassed at its autobiographicalness and I wish I could write about something else other than myself. At the least I demand of this not-quite-novel that the other people take on real life and changes and reactions so that it's not just me me me me me (snore.)

I thought maybe I could write some more chunks of it and then overhaul it completely and rewrite it as 3rd person and try to fictionalize everything. But I hate it when people are obviously doing that in fiction and it's lame. So I would have to really, really, really, really rewrite it and make it not me anymore.

Or, to hell with that and make it me and put everyone's names in it and piss everyone off all the way.

Fiction seems like a quite attractive way to discuss my own experience, the things I'm thinking of as "unbloggable". This is pretty interesting when I combine it with that book on lying by Sisela Bok (in which she concludes that lying is (almost) never okay, not even a white lie).

Anyway. I was feeling bad about spending time on the most useless project possible, but then it charged me up and I got a ton of work done on the thesis in a burst of focused productivity!

Comments

[elswhere]

Novels! Yeah, how do people write them? I have the same problem every time I try to write a long piece of fiction-- the only subject I write enough about is myself, but then it's not really fiction, is it?

[badgerbag]

I'm getting the idea that it takes a lot of practice... 8-)

[Prentiss Riddle]

Old news, I'm sure, but when Paul Theroux wrote a semi-autobiographical novel and some critics said it was too easy to just write a memoir and call it fiction, he wrote another one -- and it was completely different.