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Stacking Stones
​A Creative Craft Blog

From the mind of Jason Kapcala comes an eclectic journal dedicated to the study of creative writing, rock music, tailgating, and other miscellany. The musings, meditations, contemplations, and ruminations expressed here are my own unless otherwise indicated. Please feel free to share your comments, thoughts, and opinions, but do so respectfully and intelligently.
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In Search of the Sideshadow

8/20/2015

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Our lives are anistropic narratives—that is, they are constantly in the process of being created, bound to inescapable directedness from past to future, ‘til death parts us from this mortal coil. As such, they don’t much resemble the narratives we read for pleasure. They don’t, for example, have anything resembling literary closure (unless you count death, but we don’t really get to close the book and ponder it with detached satisfaction or disappointment afterwards), and they certainly don’t contain within them any force akin to foreshadowing (except for maybe intuition, which isn’t really the same thing because it’s not the product of backward causality). 

Unlike fiction or even carefully crafted nonfiction, our lives are open—they are not shaped according to the Freytag’s triangle, are not bound by determinism or, to be literary about it, “plot.” This poses a challenge to Realist writers who must lull readers into attaining Gardner’s fictional dream despite the artifice of form. . . .


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Must Read! -- Once Upon a Time: Steve Almond

1/17/2013

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A little something here to whet the appetite of those folks signed up for our spring class. . . .

In less than four days, we'll be starting Steve Almond's nonfiction tour de force Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, so what better opening act than an essay by Almond himself. In "Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said 'Once Upon a Time,'" Almond takes a close look at narration, specifically that narrators are slowly disappearing from student fiction (perhaps fiction in general), replaced by stories that are "long on camera work and short on coherence."

I've noticed this in my teaching as well (I had to laugh when Steve mentioned students asking in conference, "Have you seen Memento?" because it is a question I've been asked on more than one occasion by student-writers, as well.) I have found that typically these stories that lack the "sense making" voice of a narrator often lack other traditional fictive elements, as well, such as an identifiable setting, rounded and named characters, a plot grounded in present action. The explanation for all this unfounded (and confounding) mystery is always that the writing is "experimental," but I'm not so sure I buy it.


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