Grex Writing Conference

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Grex Writing Item 163: Reflections on Literature
Entered by remmers on Mon Jul 17 05:34:58 UTC 1995:

        Jack was just a little bit angry.  Just a bit.  Not raging
        mad, mind you.  I didn't say that.  No, just a bit miffed.
        In fact, if you hadn't been looking straight at him, you
        might have missed the fleeting frown that crossed his face
        for but an instant.  So, in summary, he was just a teeny
        tiny bit angry.  Just an itsy itsy bit.

        Is this necessary?  Must the writer try to convey every
        minute detail of an emotional episode, no matter how
        trivial?  Are there not better things with which the
        writer could occupy his time, such as stamp collecting?
        Or, if that is unappealing, perhaps bicycle riding or
        learning to add long columns of numbers in one's head
        would better suit.

        The car screeched to a halt in front of the house.  Two
        men leaped out, followed by two more men, three women,
        fourteen gerbils and a hamster.  Phoebe drew the shades
        quickly and hoped that they were not planning to call
        upon her.  As would anyone placed in a similar situation.
        Except for theatrical agents, of course.

        Aliens.  Every story must have aliens, nowadays.  I mean
        as in interplanetary type aliens, not your huddled masses
        yearning to breathe free.  Stories never used to have
        aliens.  The other day I was reading a collection of
        stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald; not a single alien in
        the whole lot.  You'd be hard pressed to find a collection
        by a contemporary writer that doesn't have any aliens in
        it.  It's the publishers -- they insist on it.  I can
        see their point of view I guess.  They want to make
        money, and aliens is what sells stories.  It used to be
        sex.  Some unscrupulous publishers actually revise the
        texts of classic works of literature to put aliens in them.
        This practice is known as alienation.

        In the old days a writer would have to stop writing when
        he or she ran out of ink.  But nobody uses ink anymore.
        So what will make them stop?

        One must resist the impulse to summarize.

        I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
        The Stillness in the Room
        Was caused by Martians in the Air -
        Plotting out our Doom.

2 responses total.

#1 of 2 by md on Mon Jul 17 12:42:27 1995:

I was surprised the other day to find the story "Roman Fever"
in my Edith Wharton collection had been changed to "Martian
Fever."  Also, I don't think you browsed F. Scott Fitzgerald's
collected stories closely enough, because you missed "The Martian
Death Machine As Big As The Ritz."  I was *greatly* distressed,
as you might imagine, to find the subtitle of Thoreau's _Walden_
changed to: "or, Life on Mars."  I had long ago resigned myself 
to _King Lear_ being changed to _King Mftxlt_, but this was
too much.  Well, what to do?  "Something there is that doesn't
love an earthling," to quote Robert Frost.

#2 of 2 by shade on Sat Jul 22 18:32:28 1995:

this is wonderful
*really* it cracks me up
sso profund and true and my last novel was
about an alien interplanetary rock star
course...
i never wrote a short sotry about aliens. if you wan tot read
a s story NOT about aliens read items 159,162 k?
they are NOT about aliens they are about real life
(and they are not both mine)

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