Last night my husband and I had a grand opportunity. We met several people from a chat forum my husband participates in. Because I don’t participate in this chat, other than to read over my husband’s shoulder periodically, or listen as he mentions bits of the conversation, I had no preconceived notions of what people would be like based upon their screen names or what they wrote.
Turns out my husband knew two of the posters, one whom he attended Boy Scout camp with as a kid; the other whose daughter lives in our neighborhood. Small world, as someone said last night.
“Red,” the gal who got this gathering together, lived in Minnesota at one time and now lives out-of-state. She wanted to return to Minnesota for a visit and, while here, meet some of the posters. She has had contact with some of the posters before and carefully picked who she wanted to meet, primarily concentrating on those with a liberal bent, but throwing in a few conservatives for good measure. The chat forum often revolves around political issues, so the differences in the political persuasions of posters are pretty apparent over time.
The key here is “over time.” Without physical contact, it is only by following a poster’s writing over time that allows the reader to make judgments about character. And we do make judgments, sometimes too quickly. When we are online with someone, we tend to think we know him/her. A false familiarity builds up. We may make a joke, thinking the person on the other end will know it’s a joke, but the person takes the joke as an insult instead, being unable to read our tone or posture.
Red gave us the perfect example of this phenomenon last night. She discussed a poster who portrays himself as the opposite of what he is in order to get a rise out of others. My husband was suspicious of his comments, thinking maybe the poster was doing this, but he wasn’t sure, so decided not to engage him.
Meeting chat posters last night brought humanity – a physical humanity – to those present. It’s not about words on a screen (sometimes very angry words); it’s about feeling the fullness of a person behind the words, which tempers the emotions.
One man, who was born in South Africa and conscripted into the South African military, where he served on border patrol, has an interesting take on immigration. He feels that it should happen in a slow and individual fashion, rather than en masse. He is now a U.S. citizen, so he understands immigration on a personal level. With insight into his history, those who read his chat posts on immigration will weigh his thoughts more carefully.
Like most people, I am apt to create fictions about others in my mind when I get a brief or one-sided view of them. (As a fiction writer, maybe I’m even more likely to do so.) That’s what made last night’s gathering so great. Reality can certainly be a disappointment, but, as I’ve often found, it can be way better than fiction. So it was last night. Cheers to the chatters!
For those of you who regularly comment on my blog, know that I’d eventually like to meet you in the flesh.
Labels: africa, blog, fiction, husband, immigration, minnesota, online chat, people, red
# posted by Anonymous @ 1:11 PM
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If you're looking for a great book, I've got a suggestion. Try Amy Tan's "Saving Fish from Drowning." Her book, which is fiction, starts with a note to the reader that explains the genesis for the story. Seems Amy was caught in a rain storm in Manhattan one day and ducked into the American Society for Psychical Research for protection. While there she did some research on automatic writing, finding that a woman named Karen from California had channeled a woman named Bibi Chen, someone Amy was actually familiar with. Amy interviewed Karen and read the writings Bibi had sent through her. Bibi mentioned within her writings the disappearance of eleven tourists in Burma. Just after the note to readers, Amy had placed an article from the newspaper into her book that concerns these tourists. From this ingenious premise, Amy constructed her story. She has written it so well (having done her research beyond that of talking to Karen and reading the channeled writings of Bibi) that it reads like nonfiction. I kept asking myself whether this or that part of the story was true. Where did Amy take artistic license? When you can't tell, that's the mark of an excellent writer.
P.S. The title of the book is from a small parable that appears after the copyright page.
Labels: amy tan, automatic writing, bibi chen, book, burma, fiction, fish, saving fish from drowning, tourists, writing
# posted by Anonymous @ 9:16 AM
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My post on favorite books, based on an MPR program, had two takers. Kim at Knit Whimsies and Joanne at Poppy Seed Heart both posted about their favorite literature. Kim did it with a twist, choosing to highlight her favorite authors. Joanne gave a nice summary of why each book was her favorite. This is a difficult little exercise. While my list is pretty firm - only two are ones that I could switch out for something else (My Lord Bag of Rice and Fahrenheit 451), the rest are definite - I have many other favorite writers. (Just figure that I pretty much enjoy all the other works of the writers on the first list.) I decided that my other favorite writers should get their due as well, so here goes:
Michael Crichton - The guy really knows how to tell a story, always with a scientific bent, which I really like.
Edgar Allan Poe - The original master of horror. My absolute favorite of his is the poem "The Raven." Nothing beats reading this aloud.
J.K. Rowling - Imaginative, able to write about a gazillion characters and somehow readers manage to keep them all straight. I've only read books 1-4, so I have some catching up to do.
Amulya Malladi - I have loved both of the books I've read of hers - "The Mango Season" and "Serving Crazy with Curry." I think perhaps I've been reincarnated from India. I have always had an affinity for the country. Maybe it's just because I read and loved Frances Hodgson Burnett's books as a kid ("The Secret Garden" and "A Little Princess").
Stephen King - For as prolific as this guy is, I've only read two of his books - "On Writing" and "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon." Both are fabulous. I shy away from his horror because I'm not a horror fan, except for Poe, of course.
Margaret Atwood - She's an excellent writer, and she's here for that reason. The endings of her stories are dark and leave me very unsettled, which is why they didn't make my very best list.
Kate DiCamillo - "Because of Winn Dixie" and "The Tale of Despereaux" are simply wonderful children's stories. They hooked me.
Growing up, I was a huge mystery reader. Agatha Christie, the Nancy Drew series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred Hitchcock's compilations of short stories were the thing. I'm a big fan of Dr. Seuss, but more so as an adult than I was as a kid. My all-time favorite children's book was a Little Golden Book called "The Saggy Baggy Elephant." One-two-three, kick! One-two-three, kick! He danced through the forest, and then someone made fun of him and he hid in a cave. Eventually, he is told by other elephants that he is beautiful and he is happy again.
This list and my previous one barely scratch the surface of all the reading I've done in my life. There's nothing in here that's nonfiction, for one. My other problem is that I've read many marvelous books over the years, but they don't stick with me. In order to keep track (which helped me with today's post), I've been recording the books I read in a small notebook since 2003. It's annotated, which jogs my memory. It also shows me that I've spent a lot of time reading. Yeah!
Labels: authors, blog, books, children, fiction, knit whimsies, memory, mpr, nonfiction, poppy seed heart, reading, writers
# posted by Anonymous @ 8:27 PM
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Last night, I had a writers group meeting. Great fun. We spend lots of time laughing.
During last night's meeting, we did a writing exercise that was intended to make us think more deeply about how to use props in our writing. Fiction writers often use props (everyday items) to convey deeper meaning in a piece in a way that isn't slap-your-face obvious. The exercise was to spend five minutes riffing about the prop of our choice. I chose a window as my prop and this is the first thing that came to mind:
They say windows are the eyes of the soul, but what about frosted windows?
Another sentence later, I realized my mistake & blushed inside with stupidity. I started over.
Labels: fiction, props, soul, windows, writers, writing
# posted by Anonymous @ 7:37 PM
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I took a vacation day from work, which I used for writing. I'm pleased with my output today - an additional 1,100 words on the story I've started. I already had 550. The funny thing about all this word counting is that I don't know where I'm headed. Is the story going to be 5,000 words or 10,000? In the end, it'll be the length it needs to be to properly tell the story. That's the way it works. The crazy thing is that the characters never cease to surprise me, like when some past event one of them has experienced comes to the surface and explains a psychological trait. That's the fun of fiction.Labels: characters, fiction, story, vacation, word count, writing
# posted by Anonymous @ 4:07 PM
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