The Royal We

So, I apologize to everyone who may care for the lack of updates but I had lost my book that I pull these exercises from. Buuut it does not look like anyone really missed it anyway. However, I have torn my room apart and emerged victorious. So I am picking up where we left off. Welcome back.

Write a first-person-plural narration of an event from the POV of a very close-knit couple. This means the narrative should sound something like this: We found the body in the outhouse, and Jenny got the can of gasoline from the garage while Benjamin removed all the toilet paper rolls stacked up on the door shelves (No sense wasting them). Jenny and Benjamin are the we at the beginning of this narrative. The reader should be unable to discern which of the two is telling the story. Do not use the first-person pronoun I in this exercise. 600 words.

If you accept the challenge you may learn what it's like to have two minds in the narration - an uncommon experience. I've known couples who write letters this way, no first person pronouns, just this wonderfully eerie we and the names of the individual units of the couple - the two will trade off writing one section or another and sometimes edit or add material to the other spouse's section. Science fiction plays with this all the time by means of telepathy or actual joining of telepathy or actual joining of consciousnesses. I contend that this is difficult to imagine but useful to do anyway. Narration tempered by two ways of seeing the world - a schizophrenic worldview - every rule of narration we know instinctively. A lot of our everyday language is a blend of many different voices and languages - we echo acquaintances , newspaper or television news fragments of thought, advertising, film, fiction, and poetry without knowing it - often all in one paragraph of speech.

Journalism, Confessions of a Procrastinator

Mon, Jan 17th

2:30 pm
I feel like death shat me out today. I felt mostly fine yesterday but as I was working yesterday I began to develop a cough that persisted til I left. On a lark I ran by the grocery store yesterday to grab some ginger ale and cough syrup. I got a good deal on the ginger ale, four for five dollars! For the win. So I went to bed marginally early and took some of that delicious NyQuil and passed right out. I woke up this morning with a horrible head cold and a bloody nose. So I had to call out of work and miss going to the movies tonight. I would work on this damn assignment but my head hurts too much to focus on a screen of any type.

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6:30 pm
I can't even play video games. I sat and stared at the ceiling for the last three hours. Kill me. I am going to take some more the 'Quil and pass back out.

Tues, Jan 18th

11:15 am
So my cough has gotten a little better today. But not by much. I feel completely worn out. I woke up about seven times last night because my nose wouldn't stop bleeding. It got so bad that I just shoved tissue up my nose and went to sleep. I probably got close to swallowing that pint of blood that they talk about.

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1:09 pm
Just threw up blood. Hit my pint mark. Woot.

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3:00 pm
Feeling better. This humidifier is doing the trick.

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6:00 pm
After a few more hours of sleep I feel like a million bucks. My cough is still here but it is not nearly as bad. I might even be able to go to work tomorrow.
Wed, Jan 19th

8:45 pm
I could have used another day of rest but I went to work anyway today because I could definitely use the scratch. Work went by quick enough atleast so I can't complain about that. I am pretty wiped out though. I am gonna go to bed early tonight even though I should start that writing assignment. Meh, It's ok, I still have the rest of the week to finish it.

Thurs, Jan 20th

9:30 pm
Work drug on so long today. I can not say how nuch it sucked. even though I got off relatively early I feel like it is midnight. AND I have to get up at 4:30 am tomorrow to get to work by 5 am. I hate morning shifts soo hard. I wont be able to get to that project tonight either. Oh well.

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12:30 am
It is midnight and I still have not gone to sleep. Fuck me.


Fri, Jan 21st

2:20 pm
I could not get to sleep last night. That sucked soo bad. now I am almost falling over in my chair. I gotta take a nap so I  can be fresh to go to the club tonight. It is rave night in Baltimore! Should be fun, a good number of people said they were going to meet me up there so everything is looking up. And my cough has almost disappeared so that is awesome too.

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3:30 am

Had an awesome time at the club, time to watch anime, eat chicken nuggets and chillax.
Sat, Jan 22nd
5:15 pm

I cannot think of anything to write. I have sat with writer's block for the last five hours gazing at all the internet has to offer and yet I can not think of anything to write.

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7:45 pm

Lol, I just saw a cat get kicked at a TV while some guys was playing video games! Still no progress on the writing. I think that sickness has stolen my creative powers. DAMN YOU RHINOVIRUS! I do not even have any inspiration for drawing.

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10:47 pm

I was in the kitchen looking for some chips or something and I saw a picture my little cousin had sent us. It was a basic drawing of her and her family but it touched me. I remembered drawing people little pictures for thank you cards. They all sucked but I was proud of them at the time and I thought it was a great exchange. I do not know if they kept any of them or anything but the thought was there. So now I am going to draw a picture for her I think that she will like it. I never had an adult give me a drawing in return for a drawing as a kid so I don't know how she will take it.

Sun, Jan 23rd

12:20 pm

Fuck, I didn't write anything all week. I better do something. maybe I can just B.S. this thing and do journal entries like I have been keeping a journal all week.

Journalism

Write a part of a story in the form of journal entries. Everything that happens in the story will most likely happen between the entries. Make sure your readers can see the events off stage, but also present your journalist’s blind spots – She will not present the whole story, just parts of it. Your journal writer may not even understand the significance of the events until a few entries later – if ever. Keep all entries close together in time (within a week or two). This exercise will challenge those who think there is no limit to realism: Make sure that the journal writer is telling a story – showing as often as telling, revealing things about herself. In other words, you have to work just as hard in this exercise to choose the words of this narrator. Writers will tend to think that this journalist can say anything and not look outside of herself Avoid completely self-absorbed narrators here – and everywhere. 700 words.

Mark Mirsky chastised the occasional writer in his workshops for indulging in journalism as opposed to fiction. (By this he meant writing found in journalism writing found in journalism or diaries – although he also intended us to hear the overlapping meaning of newspaper-written reality). Journalism accepts the world at face value. Fiction delves below the surface of reality, spending most of its time proving that there are many levels below the accepted surface.

Another (hidden) point of this exercise is to convince you to keep journals. Writers learn how to write by writing miles and miles of pages. Get some blank books and become a regular and tough-minded observer of the world around you. How else do you get practice writing fiction than by paying close attentions to what’s nearest at hand? 

The Unstableself, "Coming soon"

To fill in soon.

The unstable self "The voice"

Jack walked down the street pondering what to do next. His girlfriend had just called it quits after five long years of a mostly happy relationship. Obviously they had had their ups and downs but there were way more good times than bad. Filled with rejection and self loathing he had taken to the streets to clear his mind. Jack abruptly stopped.

--

I cannot believe she just 'decided' to break up with me. This is bullshit. Why would she do this to me? It was about that time, as I walked down the street, wrapped up in my thoughts that I first heard it.
"Jack walked down the street." At first I thought I was just hearing things so I dismissed it and went back to my dark thoughts but it didn't go away. I listened as it began talking about my break up and feelings. Hello? What the fuck is going on?  I looked around trying to find the source of the voice to no avail. "Confused, Jack looked around cautiously" I had entered a park and figured someone I knew was playing a trick on me with some kind of voice throwing device. The park appeared to be empty though. And who would be doing this anyway. Who would know about us breaking up? WHY DID SHE BREAK UP WITH ME?

--

Reminding himself of the breakup sent Jack into a bottomless hate spiral that made him momentarily forget about the voice that was dictating his movement. "I can still hear you, I just don't care right now."  Feeling like a used diaper and not wanting to continue on with this walk in the park for fear of running into some happy couple Jack sat on a nearby bench and put his head in his hands. He thought back on the last few months wondering if there was anything different that he could have done to change all this. Perhaps it was all just fate and it was inevitable.

--

Great now I am going crazy. This is not what I need right now. Her words still reverberated through my brain. "It's not you it me. I feel like we are growing apart and our lives are going in separate directions." What the hell does that crap mean anyway? I bet it was all a cop-out. She probably just wanted to go fuck somebody else. Why does this voice keep talking to me? And why does it talk about itself in the third person?

--

Jack ran down the street hoping to out run the mysterious voice but it followed him through the city. Jack did not want to deal with any of this today. First there was no milk, then he got dumped and now he was hearing voices. "That's it I am going to kill myself" He decided to kill himself. "That's what I just said." Jack caught a cab to the edge of town where the old dam still stood. The quarry had been drained a long time ago and now the remains served as a popular suicide spot. Jack climbed to the apex and looked over the edge.

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Well, it seems like a cowards way out and most people will probably think I am emo for killing myself but I swear to God I will not listen to this for the rest of my life.

--

It was then that the voice spoke directly to Jack for the first time. "My child, rest easy. Take heart because this, like all other problems in life, will pass."

--

Wait, all this time God has been speaking to me? Why would you do that AND why do you talk about yourself in the third person?

--

Haven't you figured it out yet? God just likes fucking with you guys, its better than HBO. Also, God likes to talk about himself in the third person.

The Unstable Self

Write a story that alternates between the I and the he or she (or name of the narrator), making sure you don’t confuse the reader with the switches. You might also consider other ways of indicating stability –voices (in italics), commands. Or out of body perspectives. Why would this be useful or necessary? Imagine a situation where a character is under such stress that he cannot think straight – or perhaps she’s madly in love and doesn’t carte if she thinks in standard-issue thoughts. Josh Russel, the author on Yellow Jack, supplied the basic idea for this exercise. 500 words

I believe that attached third – person narration is the most accurate representation of how we think and live our lives, but many late – twentieth-century fiction writers came to distrust the third person, seeing it as the method of popular and genre fictions, which accepted the nineteenth-century notion of a stable fictional world and the suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, we rarely use the I in thoughts during everyday movements and activities. The first-person pronoun is provoked by others; it bursts out when you need to differentiate yourself from the surrounding world of other egos. Psychologists say that most people cannot remember new names on first hearing them because they’re replacing the stranger’s name in their minds with their own names as a defense mechanism.

The late Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times many years ago about a friend of his who had recently retired from psychoanalytic practice. The friend turned to reading novels because he missed “all the details of being and doing.” “Tell me,” Broyard said, “what do you miss most? What did your patients give you that fiction doesn’t?” His friend thought a while (and we should note Broyard’s implicit catty criticism of fiction – he was one of the regular reviewers of it for The New York Times) and said:

Most of all, I miss incongruity. A psychoanalyst, or at least this one, is constantly refreshed, even sustained by the gorgeous incongruities that people produce under stress. Such a wrench of perspective is a measure of our range, our suppleness. Occasionally a patient will go through the kind of abrupt self-transcendence that’s one of the glories of our species. Without transition, she’ll leap from the disgusting to the sublime, from the petty of mundane to the wildest shores of human sensibility.

My most common criticism of much contemporary traditional fiction is that it does not reflect these wrenches of perspective. Look for the musical sound of abrupt self-transcendence. Play with the idea that your football-playing character can move from relentlessly monotonous statements to a warbling and even girlish delight in his voice when he discovers the first violets peeping out on his mother’s backyard.

Unreliable Third, Pound

Pound

There Zane stood, looking dejected and alone at the bar, ignoring the music, pulsing and pounding through the air like a rocket attack into London Square circa 1944. So of course Klaus sidled up to him, approaching him as he did all things, crabwise and oblique, for fear of spooking Zane into leaving.

“Dude, put your phone away, you're out to forget about her, not make drunken texts in the middle of the night to a chick that didn't appreciate you anyways.”

“Of course you'd say that as you're always making drunk texts, but furthermore I lack a crucial prerequisite in making a drunken text, namely, being drunk.”

“Well, maybe we should fix that, y'know, loosen up a little, let your hair down, wash that sand out of your vag. I got the solution. Its perfect. Jagerbombs! Or maybe an A-10, c'mon man just relax!”

“I guess this round goes to you... along with the bill, and only, only if you get a water for yourself, you're going to hate yourself in the morning.”

“Psh, whatever man.” Klaus turned to the bartender and ordered 2 Jagerbombs apiece, just enough to get Zane a little drunk when his low tolerance was considered, and just enough to get Klaus himself approaching buzzed.

“To Beginnings! And Endings! And all that crap with everyone in between!”

Zane carefully, painstakingly even, downed his pair of shots as Klaus slammed his down the breech and into the barrel of his stomach.

“Cocked and loaded bro! I saw this chick eye-fucking you earlier, man, she was a sweet piece of ass, the bartender pointed her out to me. She's got a stellar fucking tramp stamp bro.”

“Uh-huh, and I'm sure she loves to be described like that.”

“Well you obviously need more shots.” Turning to the bartender Klaus put up two fingers and kinda twirled them, 4 more shots appeared and disappeared. “Follow me dude, trust me, you'll thank me in the morning.”

“Right, thats what I always do, I thank you for taking me to the sleaziest bar you know.”

“Nah man, this ain't the sleaziest, the chicks here have to leave their tops on, now c'mon, I need to introduce you to Cori. She's more your type than mine, but I'll take the hit and go for Ms. Tramp Stamp 20-11 while you waste your time.”

Dragged protesting through the crowd to an island Zane is introduced to two little petite blondes, one whose name he doesn't catch and Cori. “Not so bad” Zane thinks to himself, “She seems to be almost as disgusted with this place as I am.”

So they talk. Cori, is a 5' nothing, pretty despite her slight overbite, college junior into Politics, having an opinion, Star Wars, D&D 3.5, and most definitely not Nirvana. Zane thinks he's found paradise on earth, despite the provocative “dancing” of his friend Klaus that can be glimpsed through the crowd.

The night continues, Klaus and Ms. Tramp Stamp showing the club how this type of music got to be called “Pound”, while Zane and Cori begin a real connection. Drinks come and go, time comes and goes, and finally all 4 go home together back to Zane and Klaus' apartment.

Things happen there on the couch, again on the table, the kitchen floor, the bathroom, and then finally again in the bed. Followed by sleep. In the morning Zane wakes up in his 1 bedroom apartment, looks over at Cori snuggled up against him and asks “When did you get a tramp stamp?”

Decided to go for a hopefully more humorous and slightly less crazy take on this assignment. 607 words, counting the title. Out of curiosity, who do you relate better to?