Jonas David's Blog, page 4

how long do you go without writing because you worry about ‘originality’

nothing is original, also, everything is. originality is defined by whether the reader has seen it before. the more you’ve read, the less you will think anything is original, its a pointless aspect to chase, especially if your audience is well read.

anyway, here is a new story by me about someone chasing originality

sometimes i look at old blog posts

and am bemused at the number of exclamation marks everywhere. they create a strong impression of naivete, of a loud smiling voice with no clue about anything he’s saying. i think i used to present myself in this way intentionally, as a defense against potential criticisms. looking back, it makes me wonder what i thought people would think. did I want to be perceived as a happygolucky buffoon without a care in the world? as someone without any real insight? as someone who was not meant to be taken seriously? or maybe I was just happier then, back then, when i still had true hope for the future, and belief in humankind.

Didn’t read it: The Novelist: A Novel, by Jordan Castro, a noview

Imagine that you wake one morning and at the foot of your bed is a glowing blue portal cut from the air, a shimmering gateway to whoknowswhere, you step blearily and excitedly toward it, it could lead anywhere, anywhen, turn you into anyone, the vibrating, shimmering edges seem to pulse with possibility, this, finally, is the escape from your dreary godforsaken repetitive live of wake work sleep wake work sleep. Tears of hope trickle down your face as you step, without a look back or a goodbye to anyone, into the portal

and immediately find yourself awake in your bed, in your exact same life.

That searing, heavy depression–the numbing, tiring monotony of living ones life–is what washed over me as I read the introductory pages of Jordan Castro’s new book, which contained intricate description of the narrator signing in to their laptop, opening their email, replying, clicking on twitter, reading tweets, all preserved in exact detail down to the position of their fingers on the trackpad.

I’m not going to read this, I thought, there is no way on earth I would continue reading this, I thought to myself as I scrolled disbelievingly on through the sample on Amazon, what kind of person would continue reading this, I asked myself aloud in my office as I dragged my middle finger down the scroll wheel causing the words to scroll up.

“Superbly captures the circuitous psychosis of the degenerate social media user who can’t stop clicking and eventually becomes one with the cursor ” says Alex Perez of the Washington Examiner.

Twitter, over time, had proven calamitous when it came to getting work done. I clicked unthinkingly, often feverishly, and if I started in the morning, I would generally continue, unhinged, throughout the day, on both my laptop and my phone, everywhere I went, no matter what else I was doing. Through trial and error, I’d observed that if I refrained from clicking Twitter in the morning, I wouldn’t check it so much throughout the rest of the day, and so I turned this into a kind of rule: Don’t check Twitter before noon. But this-self-knowledge and the imposition of a rule-didn’t do me any good; the clicking continued more or less unabated, and once it began, it was out of my hands. The more I clicked Twitter, the more I wanted to click Twitter, and so on.

I watched as it loaded in front of me.

White header, matte blue background, tweets against a white background do you want to kill yourself yet? Are you desperate to shut the book and take a breath of cold air outdoors, to get out of that featureless landscape that is an exact mirror of your current existence? I was, and I did, and I thought about the desperate loathing I felt for the light, halfhearted way in which the modern world is described in these pages, how the narrator (and presumably the author) is a writer, yet only uses the most mundane, straightforward language to describe only the most boring things that a basic twitter user does every day, the surface level, baseline thoughts every average social media consumer has had, typed up in simple dull words. Why did I feel physically ill, as If I’d been staring at a spiraling optical illusion, after reading these few pages of simple, bland prose?

Perhaps it was the knowledge that so many others enjoyed it, found it unique and witty and fresh, and that they all read onward, perhaps while chuckling and thinking ‘haha, that is just like me’ and smiling with anticipation for the next facet in the mirror, and perhaps it was dread that I felt twisting inside me, perhaps it was the inescapable unease of being an outsider, of being separate from the crowd in my disgust with the banal and the common, of being alone in my desire for the new, new, new, I can not take another page of something so familiar, something so painfully normal which by virtue of being published and praised is being presented as a revelation. God get me out of here

-Rating: no, please god no

Best writing year yet?

Today I have had yet another story accepted for publication, that brings the total to 7 this year.

To put that in perspective, before this year, the total number of stories that I’d ever had published was 10.

What happened? Why this sudden streak? Well, one major key is I’m sending out many more stories, and to multiple places. Another factor is I’ve been much less discriminatory in where I send my stories. Does it seem like they might like it? Go for it. None of these places has paid me, or has a very big readership. But any readers at all is what I am after.

A final factor, which I’d like to believe is a major one, is I’m writing better stories. And I believe in them enough to keep sending them out after a couple rejections, which I often haven’t done in past years.

In the end, I think that really is the main thing: believe in your own work enough that you don’t toss it in the bin after one or two people don’t get it. And if you don’t believe in it, then keep working on improving until you do.

Memories of Birds

My novella about various birds and bird related things is now available to read here: https://writingdisorder.com/jonas-david-fiction/

Though it says ‘fiction’ right at the top of the page, I feel it may not be obvious that this is fictional. The narrator is not (exactly) me, and the ‘author’s preface’ at the beginning is also part of the fiction, written by the narrator.

I was very heavily influenced by the novels of W.G. Sebald when writing this, as mentioned before, and it was my aim to approach as closely as I could to his singular style.

I hope you will enjoy it.

a new story

The first of five recently accepted pieces of mine is now available to read here:

https://www.bebarbar.com/blog/dinner-at-home

I hope you enjoy it!

the end of a long, dry era

I received an acceptance last night for a novella I wrote in 2019 and 2020. After many years of rejections and uncertainty, it finally has a home.

This novella is important to me because it is the first thing I wrote after deciding not to give in to my fears of inadequacy. It is something I wrote to prove to myself that I could. And it is incredibly validating and freeing to know that someone beyond myself can find value in it.

Many years ago, when I first started taking my writing seriously, I wrote science fiction. I was way more successful than most beginners, and sold several stories at professional rates in my first years of practice. But then, calamity struck. I began to read literature, and there was no turning back. I lost all interest in sci-fi, or any genre fiction at all. My goals and writing style completely changed, and I went from publishing sci-fi stories regularly to publishing literary stories never.

As the years went by, I knew that I was improving. I could look at my current writing and see that it was miles beyond the hack sci fi I’d been writing before. But there was no results to validate this belief. Year after year went by, and my stories sat unread on my hard drive. I began to think that if I’d stuck to sci fi I probably would have been a successful writer by now. But I knew there was no going back. I could only try to write what I loved to read, and I loved to read art.

Then, further calamity. In 2017 and 18 I read the books of W.G Sebald, and was so overwhelmed by their subtlety and beauty and power that I completely rethought my entire existence as a writer. Those books were to me, so incredibly out of reach, so impossibly good, that I knew I could never write anything like them. The mountain I’d thought I’d been climbing had just turned out to be a small hill at the base of Everest. This perspective shift was devastating.

And things began to add up. What was I doing? Why did I think I could write real literature? Why did I think I, who had no education, and no kind of life experiences to pull from, why did I think I could create art? No one wanted to publish any of my stories–wasn’t it clear? I had panic-filled, sickening days where I began to believe that my entire perception of myself was a hallucination, and that I was not talented, or skilled, but in fact was only completely mediocre and would never be anything more than average, that I was just another one of millions poking at a keyboard fancying myself a ‘writer.’ I began to suspect I was afflicted with delusions of grandeur and that everyone around me only humored me by praising my completely banal, average, and self-indulgent writing. I, for a moment, felt a cold emptiness, and a complete helplessness as if floating in a dead void. If I am not good at writing, I thought, then I am nothing.

After reading Sebald’s books, I did not write for nearly a year. Everything I had written and everything I tried to write seemed pointless, pathetic pretensions by comparison.

Then, in mid 2019 I read another book that changed my life. The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard.

The Loser is a 200 pages long stream of consciousness rant by a bitter pianist who has given up playing piano because he can not be the best. It is clear that he is skilled, but because he studied with Glenn Gould, and was completely blown away by Gould’s talent, which the narrator felt was beyond anything he himself could achieve, he gave up piano and over the course of the novel completely debased and humiliated his own talent in the face of his bitter frustration. He, the narrator, could have done just fine as a pianist, he was talented, even one of the best. But because he was not the best, he gave up.

As I read this book and shook my head at such ridiculous behavior, I realized I myself was behaving like that. Sebald was my Gould. I was giving up, for the same petulant reasons as the narrator of The Loser. Some missing piece clicked back into place then, and I decided that I would not be a loser. I decided that even if I could never reach the heights of Sebald’s perfection, I could still keep climbing up the mountain. I decided then, that I would attempt to write in a style inspired by Sebald’s books, just to see if I could.

And the result of that attempt is the novella which was just accepted at Writing Disorder.

Sebald killed me, but Bernhard brought me back to life. And an ironic coincidence is that the only reason I read Bernhard’s books in the first place is because Sebald had listed him as an important influence on his work. Even further irony is that lately I have been writing in a style inspired by Bernhard, and have had one of those stories accepted to a lit magazine as well, the first short story I’ve had accepted in my literary style. Shortly after that, 3 more were accepted, all forthcoming in the coming weeks.

It’s been ten years since I was publishing sci fi regularly. But, all that time I have been building up to this. I have not been waiting around, I have been sharpening my edges and pushing ever onward.

I may not be Sebald, but I’ve absorbed a piece of him, and I have absorbed a piece of Bernhard as well. As long as I can keep adding to myself, I see no reason to stop.

Daily writing promptHave you ever broken a bone?View all ...

Daily writing promptHave you ever broken a bone?View all responses

I have broken the bones of cows and sheep and crushed them in my teeth and sucked the marrow. I have torn open the skulls of fish and plucked out their eyes to lick the gelatinous socket. I have splintered the bones of trees with saws and with my feet and burned them down to black coals. But the bones within my own flesh have never been fractured, split or bruised. They’ve only grown stronger through the years, by feeding on those others.

careen

Daily writing promptWhat is your career plan?View all responses

My career plan is to dig a hole. When all desirable and fulfilling jobs are done by machines and AI, I will dig a hole to prove my worth to a society obsessed with work. I will dig a hole six feet deep and eight feet long and two and a half feet wide, and then the next day I will fill the hole, and the day after I will dig it out again. This will be my ‘job’ when all jobs are done for us, when there is no need for work and all necessities are provided for. It would be nice to simply rest, and enjoy the progress of humanity, to dream and create and love and rest, but unfortunately I’ll be dead before our culture gets over its blind obsession with work and productivity. So to ‘earn my keep’ I’ll dig that hole, and fill it in again, until one day I’m ready to lay down in it.

Daily writing promptWhat was the last live performance yo...

Daily writing promptWhat was the last live performance you saw?View all responses

-The mountain glowing white and blue on a cloudless dawn. Three goldfinches dancing circles in the wind. A rabbit chewing warily on a blade of grass still wet with morning dew. A golden bee burrowing into the purple puff of a garlic chive. The shadows of a flock of geese flitting across the ground, stretched and fuzzy like ghosts. Wind hissing through glittering leaves. Afternoon light glinting white in the ripples of a trickling stream. The branches of a row of pines and maples glowing from beneath in the setting sunlight. A chorus of frogs filling the darkening sky with their ancient song. The arrival of the icy stars, a handful of salt cast on black velvet. The great, white moon, dancing in the wavering air above a flickering fire at midnight.