All entries for Tuesday 28 October 2008

Vonnegut on Writing Courses

Writing about web page http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/052499vonnegut-writing.html

I quite liked what Vonnegut had to say here about writing courses and how they help.

Madeleine Beresford : 28 Oct 2008 20:33 |  Tags: Icw20089 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Sci–fi C19th gothic novel

Writing about web page http://www.gutenberg.org/files/601/601-h/601-h.htm

Ok, so our task this week was to take a writing style and a genre that doesn't go with it (e.g. sci-fi magic realism or purple prose detective fiction) and write up some of the things we had produced from exercises in class.

In my case, I was reading Lewis' The Monk and so decided that it would be a great idea to do a gothic sci-fi. Only not modern gothic, more 19th century gothic. This was not such a great idea as it seemed, but I like part of what came out of this. So here it is:

“What beauty in those angles!” He continued after a silence of a few minutes. “What sweetness, what stark majesty.” The explorer was waiting on the edge of a dairy-milk ravine while slougs – great, flaccid winged slugs - hovered above. He gazed upon a dead square lying in the undergrowth; crippled into 35º angles, it was a white triangle against the black woods and leaves.

With difficulty he stirred from his delirium. He was sat beneath a great tree. His rich habit and magnificent equipment declared him to be of distinguished rank, but even he could not tell that catastrophe was written in a foreign language on every inch of the great tree’s bark. The tiltbend world had overwhelmed his senses. Its colours and noises: the shed skins of slougs on the ground around him in crackling, crisp oranges.

A sort of mystery had always enveloped the explorer from his early youth because of his habit of sitting alone. Now he sought for others in the same lonely way. This gave to his person an aspect of sadness and suppressed feeling; yet an accident of birth had given him features notable and clear. As he sat, lynchets of the past shuddered in trans-time as the slougs collided in the air. The slougs were guardians of more than time. He was beside their watchtower. It consisted of three rough poles of unequal height and bent in seemingly random shapes. Yet to the knowledgeable it gave the secrets of space-time.

The explorer, however, continued his rapt admiration of one of the squares, a menial creature, that had met its death near the poles. “You have known great suffering,” he spoke. He heaved his breast and thought of his home world. The air above grew dark and thickened with squares. They were black, tarnished and determinedly quadrilateral. They nestled in branches like pinching fists.

Madeleine Beresford : 28 Oct 2008 20:33 |  Tags: Gothic Icw20089 Novel Sci-Fi |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem