Stepping Back
October 7, 1999
6:54 a.m.
My "daily" is growing into "every third day." Terribly sorry about that. I'll try to do better. Hang with me, okay? You see, I'm running head long into something John Sullivan was talking about a while ago. I'm feeling different about my journal these days. It's a different beast than it used to be. I started my journal back in 1996. Back then it was one-liners about rejections or about words and stories I was writing. Lisa Silverthorne and I were about the only two doing it at that point (I think), but a few others jumped in shortly, and we linked. I had maybe 5-8 hits a day on a really cheesy site called "The Place that Ron Built". Then came "Persistence." The thing became more personal. I started using it as a platform, and as a way to put more of myself in front of people--and honestly, to put more of myself in front of myself. I was looking at issues, figuring out what was important to me. I still used it to "force" myself to write--peer pressure is the best influence there is, you know? (Even convinced Myke Cole to start his own journal for that purpose). But it was growing, and looking back on it, I know that journaling helped teach me how to put forward an argument, how ideas had to be supported throughout a flow of thoughts. A killer journal entry is like building a lincoln log construction. You've really got to see the whole thing as you're writing it before it will turn out the way you want it to. Yes, you CAN just grow them. But the best ones are solid, they hold water, usually because they are written to some form of a plan--even if that plan is really not much more than an image in your mind as you get started. Kind of like a story. I started the journal because I wanted peer pressure to help me write. With Persistence, in retrospect, I see the act of writing essays onthe things in my life that made me feel certain ways was helping my fiction grow more vivid, helping my prose grow more descriptive and concise. I won "Awards". I had a good time designing stuff. I taught myself a lot about how I thought. People seemed to like it. Over the months, I built to where I was sometimes getting over a hundred hits a day, maybe 150-300 unique folks at various moments. I don't get that many now, and I fine with that. I was probably a lot more interesting to read back then. I don't put as much time into the place now. I was wondering about that the other day. Why am I slowing down? Yes, I'm busy all the time. But I was busy back then, too. Last night, Lisa and I watched a VH-1 "Behind the Scenes" about Sting. This is someone I haven't paid that much attention to. But I was quite impressed with him as a person during the show. He said something that has me thinking. He said that there comes a time when you stop needing to tell your own stories and can step out to tell stories of other people. Or something like that, anyway. What he meant, if I can somehow keep from butchering his words, was that the stories he was writing were less autobigraphical than they had been before. I interpreted it to mean that he was "becoming" the character, taking on the POV from which the song was coming from rather than being the POV, if that makes sense. This is what is happening to me, I think. (Not that I would ever categorize my own work as equal to Sting's). I'm writing more fiction than I've ever written. My stories, in general, are more deep in character and in setting. I'm truly experiencing the stories as they come, getting into the characters more--characters that are more and more often quite a bit different than myself. I'm enjoying it more than I've ever enjoyed it. I'm spending less time here, pouring myself into the journal because I'm spending more time in the heads of these imaginary people. And in the process, the journal has swung back closer to the original mode wherein I talk more about progress and events than about thoughts and emotions and general persnickety things within the industry. I'm fine with that, too. Daily Persistence, I realize now though, is where I started telling my own stories--day-to-day things, events that occured with Brigid's life, dealings with Lisa and my parents and a bunch of other stuff. I've told a lot of my own stories here. I'm sure I'll tell more of them. Strange, you know? I started it to mark my process, but in the end it turns out to be a place where I told stories. I think I had to do it, though. I think it helped me in more ways than one. Fiction is writing what you know, but your own personality can color things too starkly. My characters are not me. Pouring myself into them would make my fiction boring--every character would be me, after all, and who wants to read a hundred stories about different people that are all me? I mean other than you, Mom. [grin] DP is where I poured things I wanted to pour into my stories, but knew they wouldn't fit. It was a relief valve. After I had purged myself of MY story, I could focus on the stories of the characters I was trying to get into. So, the journal morphed. And then it morphed again, and once again, into what it is now. The natural next question is, what will it become next? The honest answer is: I don't know. I think I'll always have the journal. It's too much a part of my natural process to feel right stopping it. I'll sit down and update--even if it's just for me to read through years from now to see what the heck I was doing way back when. But it will change. Maybe that's the best thing about it. It will change. [grin] Regardless, I would like to thank anyone who has actually read this far. I appreciate you sitting through my stories. I appreciate your e-mails in the past, telling me which ones struck a chord and which didn't by the sheer bulk of their volume and the specific wording of the notes. Telling them has made me a better writer. Telling them has made me a better person. I think that's as good a reason to write as any I can think of.   See ya tomorrow.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
|
"Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever really lost." Eudora Welty |
BACK TO 
|