My Writerly Blog

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about the use of "found" art, as in re-appropriating images, video, code, etc., in stories.  Obviously, in my case, that means digital fiction, though I don't really think it's tied to any one communication genre or medium.  After all, there are plenty of news stories I see that use stock images that either really enhance the piece, or freakishly contrast with it.  It affects the piece, one way or the other. I also think it's related, but a bit different, from palimpsest (as defined by Genette) .  I recently supervised a fantastic MA dissertation on how everything we create (specifically speaking about creative writers) is palimpsestical: re-envisioning our lives, what we've read, what we've written.  It may be done on purpose - those intertextual references we love to embed so much - and it may be done entirely subconsciously, but in the end, the idea boils down to that frustrating and yet liberating adage that ...

My day yesterday was full of discovery. I learned things about people, and rather than smiling and nodding and thinking to myself "Wow, people really suck for not being just like me," I actually absorbed some ideas about people's differences. I know. I think I'm growing as a person. I lecture my students all the time about how everyone's writing process is different, that every writer has to find his/her process, develop it, and go with what works best for the individual. I just never applied that thinking to regular people, i.e., nonwriters. Hell, it sometimes even shocks me to talk to actual writers (NOT students writing their first short stories, which are inevitably about ghosts, or child abuse, or rape, or all of the above), and find their processes are drastically different from mine. I start thinking that way about the rest of my life, too. My husband and I have lived together for years, and I never understood how every single morning his toiletries ar...