I've been trying to channel my writing into fiction lately, but it is SO difficult! I keep producing highly worked, tantalizing little fragments of text which add up to nothing. My creative output is a bit like cancerous growth; It can be vivid and copious, but there is little structure to what's going on, and ultimately it serves no purpose.
I'm re-reading Stephen King's On Writing. Mom saw it for sale, and luckily she realized that there must be something for me in there. It must be over ten years now since I first read it, and I hardly remember anything. Still, now that I'm going through it again, it is striking how much it has influenced me. Nearly everything I've been saying about writing (but failing to implement), like my one-page-a-day philosophy, I have from Stephen King. Even the way I shape my text, with archaic constructs and copious adjective use, echoes his work.
Regarding Jørgen's suggestion: I would love to, but I'm in no position to pass judgement over Røkke. How great a percentage of his income does this yacht represent? I spend well over 100% of my income on boating. Of course it is sickening to see a yacht that size, knowing it will probably see little use, but if I were to crystalize my puke into text, it would carry with it the bitter taint of envy. If I want to be respected for my decision not to amass resources, then I must respect Røkkes decision to do so, and also his right to distribute them however he wants. Also, while it's a big yacht and all, there are more spectacular examples of resource squandering in yachting. How about the recent trend for The Nice People to have a supply vessel follow their megayachts around? That kind of says it all to me: Your 200 foot monstrosity doesn't have the necessary space and facilities, so you get a second ship to haul all your cars, boats and misc gear around with you.
One of my favourite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, once compared writing with growng a garden. She said that writing non-fiction is making a garden in a temperate climate: You start with an abundance of vegetation, and your job consists of removing the stuff you don't want there. The writer simply has to take away the stuff that doesn't fit in with the plan for the story, and structure the rest.
ReplyDeleteWriting fiction, on the other hand, is like growing a garden in a desert. You start with a great big nothing, and everything is up to you.
For me, Røkke's yacht is a dramatic symbol of what's gone wrong with the economy: First, we set up the system so that a vast proportion of the nation's resources flow into the hands of people who are primarily good at moving money around, and who squander them on spectacular consumption. Societies grow or collapse, depending on how their resources are used productively or squandered.
We sent the guy to prison for using one of his criminal contacts to bribe a public servant. But when he squanders vast resources that others have worked hard to create, people are expected to stand around in admiration. When I grew up, we had something called "Luxury Tax". What about reinventing that concept?