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I write stuff sometimes
8 replies
14 days old
last post: Dec 8, 2013
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I write stuff sometimes

1 Name: Anonymous : 2013-11-26 18:58
http://pastebin.com/WxPizHGY

It's a short story, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
2 Name: Anonymous : 2013-11-27 00:53
Okay, question. Is there some time travel going on here?
3 Name: Anonymous : 2013-11-27 22:17
>>2
You could interpret it as such, but I decided not to put too much focus on that in this story to leave it kind of as a mystery. It's all up to the reader's imagination.

Thank you for reading!
4 Name: Anonymous : 2013-11-29 08:19
It was very pretty. I liked it and I'd enjoy reading more.

The dialog felt kind of unnatural in places, though. I'm not a writer or even a writing teacher, but I feel like a big part of the struggle of [modern] writing is composing things in a way that sounds natural but that fits within the weird texture imposed on things by being just words on a page. Maybe I expressed that completely wrong, it's late and I'm tired.

[ . . . ]
Interviewer: A manner that created a scandal when Journey came out. Your style shook up a good many conventions.

Céline: It's known as invention. Take the Impressionists.

They took their paintings out into the daylight, they painted out of doors; they saw people really eating lunch on the grass. The musicians worked in the same direction. It's a long way from Bach to Debussy. They revolutionized sounds and colors. My line is words, the position of words. I'm going to give you a little lecture on French Literature—don't get sore. The religions brought us up, the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish . . . well, let's say the Christian religions. For centuries French education was directed by Jesuits. They taught us to make sentences translated from the Latin, well balanced, with a subject, a verb, an object and a certain rhythm. In short, a mess of sermons. People say of an author: "He forges a fine sentence." I say: "It's unreadable." They say: "What splendid dramatic language!" I look, I listen: it's flat, it's no good, it's nonexistent. What I've done is to put the spoken language into writing. Just like that.

Interviewer: That's what you call your "Title music," isn't it?

Céline: I call it "Title music" because I'm modest, but it's a very difficult transposition, it's hard work. It looks like nothing at all but it takes know-how. To turn out a novel like mine you've got to write eighty thousand pages by hand and boil it down to eight hundred. Speaking of me, people say: "That's natural eloquence. He writes the way he talks . . . everyday words . . . almost in the right order . . . you recognize them." Only, you see, everything is "transposed." You don't get the word you were expecting or the situation you were expecting. It's transposed into the realm of reverie, between true and not-true. A word used in that way becomes at once more intimate and more precise than the same word as it is ordinarily used. A writer makes himself a style. He's got to. The trade is simple, it can be learned. A skillful worker has no use for ready-made tools. The same goes for style. All it's good for is to bring out of you what you want to show.

Interviewer: What do you wish to show?

Céline: Emotion. Savy, the biologist, said something very apt: In the beginning was emotion, not in the beginning was the Word. When you tickle an amoeba, it retracts, it has emotion; it doesn't speak but it has emotion. A baby cries, a horse gallops; one has to learn how to talk, the other how to trot. But to us and us alone the Word has been given. The result is the politician, the writer, the prophet. The Word is monstrous, it stinks. But translating that emotion is inconceivably difficult . . . it's horrible . . . superhuman . . . it can kill a man.
5 Name: Anonymous : 2013-12-05 22:43
>>4
Thank you for your honest criticism, I'll try to work on it. And thank you for reading!
6 Name: Anonymous : 2013-12-07 01:07
I think it was pretty cool to read.
7 Name: Anonymous : 2013-12-08 16:45
cling tightly to your day job
8 Name: Anonymous : 2013-12-11 00:21

   人     
  (__)    
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 ( __ )    
 <  `∀´> < >>7 is an imposter! I am real poophead nida
 (つ   つ  
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