11/27/2023 0 Comments A burn after writing book hauntingThis is in the back of my mind as I think about how hauntings - disruptions and contamination of the text - will help. How do I then find and adapt the structures that will best support these approaches? Structures that will perform best under the stress of a foreign regard? Once you realized that just at face value “contamination” acknowledges a world that is much more invisibly volatile and teeming with life than most fiction is able to portray, it is only logical to move on to ways of removing the distance between “person” and “environment” and even narrowing the perhaps too-wide gap between “Nature” and “Culture.” As, especially, I try to write from nonhuman perspectives in ways that I hope are not overtly experimental, in ways that remove an emotional reaction…all of this thought feeds into that attempt, even though it could feed into more traditional ideas of fiction. That there is a hidden agency that is often connected to the human but is not the traditional idea of “agency” in a work of fiction. In a microbial sense, “contamination” is the condition of all living things - and occurs to all of us on an hourly basis, with invisible actions and reactions taking place that demonstrate there is less difference between outside and inside, between our bodies and the world the move through. “Disruption” is useful in terms of the idea of either having enough distance from your creation, or seeking it, to think of ways that this might organically push back against neatness or inertia in the narrative - and “contamination” because it suggests a transaction resulting in layered richness. But both terms are useful in the context of fiction. “Disruption” as a term is currently revolving in a decaying orbit due to the tech industry and “contamination” a negative one due to ancient instincts and, necessarily, the CDC. We can believe we are adhering to a classical idea of unity of form, when in fact we are simply creating something that might have more life if it were in some sense rougher or messier. The point, too, is that we can become too enamored of the smoothness or seamlessness of our scenes and mistake that for success rather than perhaps something too pat. This is also a valid approach, but not one that appeals to me currently.) (If you destabilize the text by breaking the fourth wall, all other effects you are attempting are defined by that breakage. Nonetheless, because these effects are visible to the writer, they likely change the narrative experience for the reader. Hauntings, as I see them, are one way of destabilizing the text without breaking the fourth wall, and are meant to help create texture and richness that may or may not be consciously noticed by the reader. (Artist Jeremy Zerfoss created all diagrams reproduced here, unless otherwise noted. Additional content can be found at the Wonderbooknow website. A revised and expanded edition of Wonderbook was published this month. The following is adapted from a lecture given at Columbia University in April, 2018, and some of the images are reprinted from the author’s Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction.
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