Sorry for the delay in responding - we're on the road until tomorrow night when we finally hit NYC - anyway would like to see more of the writing - are the scenes then towards a new novel or independent? - Alan
On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Ann Bogle wrote:
Thanks, Alan! There was a novel I started a long time ago now -- seven years ago -- called Bold or Bold something, as a working name for it, and it was not bad. The characters were more reality-based than these, less like caricatures. The plot, the story was to be about pre-established artists who sue each other to make money, but I got more interested in the narrative design -- which is too flat a word for it -- structure, really, which entailed a non-reliable, semi-omniscient narrator with a goddess-sounding & even sometimes prevaricating voice warning of things to come, such as the characters' poverty, interwoven with their actual doings. The main character, a girl named Fred, for Frederika, an East German immigrant from NY in TX, is such an academic lost to her few poems, also lost; then she gets stuck. The narrator becomes more embodied, against her true design (the correct word here) to arouse Fred to more action than she is able or willing to take. The others, a crew sort of like this one, but not exactly -- that is a rock band -- are active around Fred, though Fred is nearly still. I chose to work with familiar settings (a cw program in Houston & other places in Houston) and to invent the rest, dialogue & events. I previewed it at Ruthless Grip in DC in 1998. Then I think (though the audience seemed to like it) that it might seem too "this is a real story" to protect my interest in it -- which was structural or design. I was definitely involved in a line between my memory of real story & creation of realistic story, not history. I got saddled with worry that real people would not be able to judge what was memory & what was invention due to advanced angles in point of view -- which are clearly fun to work even so -- to raise doubts about who said what to whom when in a fiction is fruitless, but fruitless not to write it, that it would replace history in our memory, a risk. To keep themselves independent. The spirit of the reader, then, would be a topic. I sat here blocked on it because I had done mental planning yet not moved on it; no one was waiting for it, of course. This set of scenes is not based on that other novel, yet it is easy -- separated from so many worries. The flood is a background to us but not to the story. AB
( URLs/DVDs/CDroms/books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt - revised 7/05 )
