Fiction--The Essay's Delicate Prey

Originally Posted Thursday, August 14, 2014

I may have to start another blog to write fiction.  I just began a a vignette to put here that was something true but made up, something I did not witness.  The tone was not right for this blog.  It seemed far too artificial.  You can't mix fiction with whatever informal essay/biographical reflection thing I do here.  Fiction is much more difficult to do well and it is more delicate.  It needs protection, even if only a thin eggshell of separation.  Perhaps I'll start a blog with other writers where fancy might be posted.  You certainly can't do a story a week.  It would take a group of writers to keep it going.  We'd have to turn the comment section off or it would become a bad workshop.  Who needs that? 

"You take too long to get the character from here to there.  What's that about?  It is boring.  Cut out the boring stuff nobody wants to read.  Heed the maxim." 

Well, actually, that is my criticism of many people's writing, so I know it is good advice, but not all of the things that got posted would be so profound.  Why is it so easy to see how bad other people's writing is and so hard to see what is wrong with your own?  Another of god's cruel jokes.  But you can feel that it is wrong when you write the bad stuff, just as you know you've hit it when you write the good.  And then there is all the other stuff that is neither.  It is just writing. 

That is fiction.  Essays are another thing completely.  A bad essay is easy to get through, just like bad news writing.  You just skip ahead. . . skip ahead. . . skip ahead. . . . 

Montaigne, of course, is regarded the first master.  Try it (link).   See how much of it you actually read and how much you skip ahead. 

Fiction, of course is personally sacred.  Let me recommend the best books to you.  I mean, really, the absolute best fiction that I know.  If you are anything like me, you probably won't read them.  Not for a long time, anyway.  Fiction has to be discovered.  It must be personal.  Essays are public.  They are for the broader audience.  Vanity Fair magazine has some good ones.  Christopher Hitchens was one who could piss me off to no end.  James Wolcott just won the 2014 PEN award for his work.  You might try them. 

Or you could just stay here with me.  If I decide on the fiction site, I'll let you know.