Jonas David's Blog, page 47

Late night thoughts

Somewhere, there is a tree growing which will some day be cut down and made into your coffin.

No one will ever truly know you, but you.

The person you love most in the world has secrets they will take to their grave, kept even from you.

The things people do for love, when done for any other object or reason, are called either addiction or mental illness.

Eating dead animal parts is really weird if you think about it too much.

You have no choice but to believe in free will.

You won’t remember reading this post a few years from now. How is that different than never having read it?

 

Languages

I wonder how or if my writing would improve if I knew multiple languages.

Haruki Murakami translated his first book into English, then back into Japanese when he first wrote it in order to simplify his style. I wonder if it added new ideas to it as well.

There must be some ideas that are easier to express in other languages, so knowing that language might open new avenues of thinking. Maybe there are some ideas that are only born in certain languages at all…

The answer is obviously to learn every language and find out!

Rewriting someone else

In 1Q84, a writer is rewriting the novel of a dyslexic teen who dictated the entire thing to a friend. He finds passion in rewriting it, because the story is very appealing to him and he wants to improve the writing to bring out the nugget of goodness within it.

I wonder if I could ever find energy to rewrite someone else’s work. I’m not so sure I could. If the story is already written, and already exists, in whatever form, I find I have less energy to create or change it. I have no desire to write fan fiction, for example, or ‘extended universe’ stories. I have far less energy to work on a story of mine after I’ve reached the end. I don’t know that I could ever find the energy to write about the same characters more than once, even.

I wonder about authors with ten or twenty novels in the same world with the same characters. I wonder how they stand it. Probably the paycheck helps.

Trial and error?

I’m still listening to The Trial, and it has less of an effect on my nerves now, and is more just absurd and confusing.

The law system the story is describing, is bizarre, and seems completely removed from reality, though it is a dark mirror of bureaucracies in general, I suppose. The character has no idea what he’s been charged with, and no one seems to even care. That bit of information seems not even to matter to anyone at all. The character has stopped even asking or thinking about it while he works his way through the court system trying to figure out how to get his case done with.

I find it a bit hard to identify with the character for this reason. Every new person he encounters who wants to help him with his case, the first thing out of my mouth would be ‘I have no idea what I’m even accused of!’ but it seems this point is taken for granted by everyone involved.

I am curious how this will end because everyone he’s encountered seems to think it out of the question he’ll be found innocent, and thinks it’s pointless to even try for that.

Daily posting. Six months and ongoing

I’ve now passed six months in a row of posting every single day. I have had more views this year than I did on any year in the past, and it’s only June… I have more likes this year than the previous 5 years combined… and it’s only June.

Posting every day–just like doing anything you want to be good at, every day— works!

Put your mind to it, and you can do it too.

A trial on my nerves

I’ve started reading Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ and just from the beginning am already feeling upset and unsettled. I think this book may not be for me, but I’ll continue for now.

I’ve heard this book described as both a funny satire, and an existential horror story. I’m wondering if this depends on the kind of person reading it. So far, it seems like a horror to me but I can see how it might be found funny.

Being completely helpless inside the giant bureaucratic machine we live in, is pretty horrific, when described this way. I feel my anxiety rising as I go through the story. I hope I can handle it.

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

I am left wondering, about how the world perceives this book. This was not an erotic or romantic read. I can’t think of any point a that I would describe as even slightly arousing. It is the story of a child rapist, who abducts and repeatedly assaults a child over the course of nearly three years.

How does this book have the reputation of being sexy? Of being erotic and romantic? The language is romantic, yes, and some may find the idea of being obsessed over in such a way romantic, but the slightest look beyond these surface details should clearly show the dark interior.

Regardless of the weird way people seem to perceive it, the story was amazing, and concluded perfectly–though not in a way I expected.

In another great case of show don’t tell, the ‘villain’ (from Humbert’s point of view) had me completely stumped, until the reveal–which wasn’t really a reveal at all, but more of a reminder of a couple of the hints and clues.

The ending –spoilers–is great because it is so easy for Clare to confuse and elude Humbert, despite how smart he seems to think he is, and in the end, fittingly, Humbert is reduced to violence–the last refuge of the incompetent.

Lyrical, dark, unsettling, beautiful. I wonder if Nabokov’s other works are this amazing, because if so I want to read all of them.

 

Multitasking with words

I wish I could write two things at once. But I’m terrible at focusing my attention, and anything that took my mind away from my current novel would have to be very short indeed, or risk me never going back to what I’m doing now…

Should I try flash fiction again? Maybe. I’ve never found it very fulfilling but maybe it will feed some part of my wandering mind and keep me more satisfied.

Perhaps there will be some vignettes posted here in the near future…

Are you begging? (72 hour read)

When I’m scrolling through my reader here on WordPress, I often see posts with a little parenthetic in the title like: (2 minute read). I’m trying to put a finger on why I almost never read these posts.

I feel a resistance to click on them at all, when I see those. Unless the title is something very interesting or relevant to me, I won’t click.

It feels almost like a sort of pleading. Please, please read this, it’s so short, it won’t be but a few minutes of your time!

Why should you feel the need to advertise that your post is brief?  This doesn’t say very much about your writing that you feel required to assure me I won’t have to endure it for long…

 

Write about what you love?

I started reading IQ84 by Haruki Murakami recently, and one of the characters is a struggling writer. I am enjoying it quite a lot more than the previous Murakami novel I read, though it has a lot of similarities also.

I wonder, though, how many writers write about writers? How many characters in novels are writers themselves? The common advice is to ‘write what you know’, and every writer knows about being a writer…

Reading it though, has made me want to have a writer character. Maybe that character’s character is also a writer, too. How deep could you go before confusing the reader, I wonder..