Perfect stories

Posted by SgtPepper | Posted in | Posted on Saturday, April 25, 2009

Some guy (Horacio Quiroga) once said something in some book(decálogo del perfecto cuentista), something about how to write a short sotry; and of course, as the rebellious (wanabe) writer I am, I decided to go the other way around. You see, he said that one should not -ever- write in the moment of the experience of emotions, that only a true writer is able to have such feelings, let them die, keep them, disect them and once back in status quo, use them to drive the story.

At the moment I read it I was flabergasted, how dared he say that we, artists, should not write about true emotion, but a fabricated projection of it. It nearly sounded like an insult to art itself. Because sure there are out there many people who thing they can teach writers around the globe how to be writers; and well, if we all followed that, there wouldn't be such a thing as stylisic evolution. 

But why would it be to fabricate something to wait when one is calmed? It would be because you are no longer feeling, you are not proyecting the feeling itself, you are proyecting the memory of it, so you are not giving the author a piece of you, just a memory; which happens to be not always the same. So is it that we don't plan our stories when we are in deep grief or feel pure joy?

As a good (wanabe) scientific-writer I had to experiment. So the next time that I felt like the world was coming to an end, I felt a complete failure, and that I would never get anywhere in life, I (besides whatching the EMO channel) started to write. And if you know me, you know how much I love decadence, so in such and state, the hypothesis was that I would make the most decadent, depressing and sad story in history. It ended up sounding like a blog, from a prepubert... girl... who didn't got tickets for the JBs... 

At first I blamed it on the fact that I truly am a wanabe (writer), so I lacked the skill. So I started reading short stories from the masters, trying to guess if any one of them felt like written from the most deep emotion. Non was. And so it hit me, it is not about the emotion, it is not about the piece of us we leave to the reader, it is not about venting up. It is about building a perfect universe with the right amount of each emotion, but at the same time make it not so evident so the reader walks the other half of the content.

It is not about emotions, art I mean, at least not entirely, it is about stories.

Hence my obssesion about talking about them



By I'm the penguin

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