Saturday, October 10, 2009

Regarding FI

Fiction International embraces the unique. That extends to various ways writers tackle narrative perspective. In the Freak issue, "The Dummy of the Ventriloquist's Dummy" is told through a dialogue between a ventriloquist and a pair of rebellious dummies. In "Haunting Your House," the narrator's benefactor is convinced his apartment is haunted by ghosts. We find that his apartment is indeed being visited, but by former Chinese tenants evicted and angry at the gentrification he represents. He just doesn't see them or their hatred, so they may as well be ghosts.

Thumbing through FI's Pain issue, I'm reminded that narrative can be told through letters and memoir just as well as third-person omniscient.

This is my first blog for Fiction International. I plan to make various observations on narrative process, which may be of interest to other writers. When I scribbled this out I was in a coffee shop with my reporter's notebook, also thumbing through some midnight story ideas.

One strikes me: a confrontation between two writers over proprietorship of written work. One is miffed when he learns that his colleague has annexed some of his material into one of his own stories. He essentially wrote through the scene. If one writer constructs a world, are others allowed to 'pass' through? I'll write it out and see how it develops.

1 comment:

Gary Lain said...

Good post. Your last observation reminds of a time that I borrowed and reconstructed various texts from a workshop I was attending. I remember being really surprised at how pissed off some of the other students were, though some of them got what I was trying to convey: we're all swimming (drowning, really) in a sea of discourse. Why not employ it to our own purposes, instead of just observing it passively?