Now that I have gotten a start writing stories rather than sticking strictly to poems, I am presented with new problems to solve. The main one I'm dealing with now is plot. So many odd and interesting things have happened to me that it is tempting to stick to autobiography. But there are some people I have run into and up against that interest me, beyond my involvement with them. They make me curious about very odd and different psyches than my own, and they deserve their own stories, beyond my own life. So I am trying to create them, and I am not really sure how to go about it at this point.
I have always had plenty of imagination. That's not the problem. It's just that I get stuck with life, somehow, and am reluctant to bypass it, to take tiny details, as Henry James describes in his prefaces, and set them in entirely new contexts.
I am sure it is only a matter of time before I use someone's words, life, or physiognomy and that person recognizes it in a story. That doesn't happen in poems because poems don't generally work that way, at least not mine. So now I have to ponder this, or risk being like the person I met years ago in Provincetown who spent all day with her ear (and a stethoscope) to the floor, listening to others' conversations, and putting them, verbatim often, into stories that appeared in weeks to come in the New Yorker. Oh well. I guess I'll write my way out of this problem.
1 comment:
Good luck with the storytelling. Try not to let yourself sidetrack yourself!
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