Dear Reader,
It’s inevitable that every time Word Raccoon interacts with or reads another artist’s words, she will be sparked into action.
This morning, when she couldn’t sleep, she wandered onto her Kindle app and rediscovered the Isabel Allende book she’s reading, Story Telling: A Writing Life.
Turns out WR forgot for a moment that she was reading a book on writing disguised as a memoir, or maybe it’s the other way around. Regardless, she began making notes to herself for both poems and essays.
She looked up a word and its opposite and interrogated both, researching a bit of their origins.
She wrote notes about one of her obsessive ideas sparked by Allende, who “disappoints” the readers of her first novel, The House of the Spirits, who have written dissertations and lectured on the dog in the book.
Reader, she claims it was just her grandfather’s dog.
However.
However, Reader, this is one of the topics I will opine on if given half an opportunity.
I do not disbelieve her. How could I? If she says it was just her grandfather’s dog, okay. I mean no disrespect to her, but I offer another perspective.
As an author, I know that not only do we sometimes purposely add in symbols, etc., but I believe we subconsciously add things, and if a reader can go back and make a case, well, they might be on to something.
That smacks of the death of the author, though, doesn’t it?
I wish I had more to say about this, and maybe I do, but not just now.
(WR is feeling a little under the weather, her medicine, she thinks. But she’s watching Homeworthy: The Collection and enjoying the homes very much. I told her not to go getting any ideas because we don’t have that kind of budget, but she did see a decorating feature or two she might try.)
Allende’s book also has delicious quotes. This Ingmar Bergman quote set WR to writing, too:
“I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.”
That set WR to thinking about the difference between film and novels, the cumulative effect of language versus the approach/reveal of a camera. In fact, she sometimes complains when she sees a camera pushing too hard or “cheating” a shot, in her opinion.
One of her pet peeves about film is when they show a flashback using footage the viewer has already seen, and the person having the flashback sees themselves in the scene just as we, the viewers, did…uhhm…POV problem, anyone? I know we accept it, but should we? (For all I know, there may be films that avoid this. Dear Reader, if you know of any, I’d like to hear about them.)
It’s a good thing WR was feeling fine this morning, because she completed most of her list early. As soon as her (counteracting) medicine kicks in, she will be able to open her novel and start in, I’m sure.
She whispers to me that today is Friday, the beginning of a weekend. I, borrowing from The Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey, ask “What is a weekend?”
Drema