Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Story writing process notes
Just a quick update to say I’m continuing to develop my writing style, in bursts of inspiration and research. Just today I discovered what may be one of the most kindred spirit authors I’ve found yet: Charles Williams, British occultist mystical Christian, contemporary of C. S. Lewis and greatly admired in academia, among other things a critic, historian, theologian, poet, and novelist. He wrote weird tales about colliding realities, like the world of spirits and humans merging in “All Hallow’s Eve” (1945) or the world of archetypes breaking into and consuming our dimension in “The Place of the Lion” (1931) or the world of elemental magic controlling our reality through a perfectly drawn tarot deck in “The Greater Trumps” (1932). His “War in Heaven” (1930) may be a superior predecessor to all this Da Vinci Code hoopla. I’m impressed.
My own stories, which I call Consciousness Fiction, are continuing to surprise me. I set aside my novella about mystical Christian time travel and have been working on shorter themes that run in batches. More and more the topics are fantasias upon how to self-modify to perceive other realities. When I considered that really my stories were the illustrations of unconscious dialogues I’m having with nonphysical friends and teachers about the nature of reality, then I quickly wrote a story that involved a woman talking to a guy about how to join her and others in trans-dimensional thoughts experiments. When I realized she was talking to me as I wrote, I got kind of spooked and backed off for a week. Journaling and a blog entry like this help me to orient myself, and I’ve gone back to polishing it up. Another component of my stories is the sequence of names I get sent on for further research. Online references like Wikipedia are so helpful, taken with a grain of salt of course. The three stories I’m working on right now are associated respectively with: Julian Jaynes and Greek mythology, Garden of Eden and Mormonism, Sapir-Whorf and Wittgenstein. (I hope, I believe, I have been told in dreams, that such erudition has an audience). Thus my story writing is a garden path of self-improvement as well as a pursuit of extraterrestrial communication. Ha! It’s no wonder that my night dreams are full of being in classrooms and on campuses with various friends. (I suppose a breakthrough could be to lucidly inquire, so, which of you are the spirits of people I’ve been researching?)
My own stories, which I call Consciousness Fiction, are continuing to surprise me. I set aside my novella about mystical Christian time travel and have been working on shorter themes that run in batches. More and more the topics are fantasias upon how to self-modify to perceive other realities. When I considered that really my stories were the illustrations of unconscious dialogues I’m having with nonphysical friends and teachers about the nature of reality, then I quickly wrote a story that involved a woman talking to a guy about how to join her and others in trans-dimensional thoughts experiments. When I realized she was talking to me as I wrote, I got kind of spooked and backed off for a week. Journaling and a blog entry like this help me to orient myself, and I’ve gone back to polishing it up. Another component of my stories is the sequence of names I get sent on for further research. Online references like Wikipedia are so helpful, taken with a grain of salt of course. The three stories I’m working on right now are associated respectively with: Julian Jaynes and Greek mythology, Garden of Eden and Mormonism, Sapir-Whorf and Wittgenstein. (I hope, I believe, I have been told in dreams, that such erudition has an audience). Thus my story writing is a garden path of self-improvement as well as a pursuit of extraterrestrial communication. Ha! It’s no wonder that my night dreams are full of being in classrooms and on campuses with various friends. (I suppose a breakthrough could be to lucidly inquire, so, which of you are the spirits of people I’ve been researching?)
