Writer's split
My writing these days is mostly driven by newspaper deadlines. Writing about events, people and politics in a crunch hardwires your brain to a certain style of writing that dulls creativity or at least makes it difficult to think outside the box especially when articles follow very specific rules. Just the facts, ma’am.
I do find, however, that fiction pops into my brain from time to time. Like a whisper on a wind I hear a sentence that tells me about a character that exists somewhere out there.
Part of the challenge for me in switching from non-fiction to fiction has to do with information overload and mental clutter and what to make of all the random headlines and Facebook posts that live in my brain and just occupy space. What does all of that extra information add up to? It changes our brains and changes the way we think and has a profound effect on imagination and creativity that could be negative or positive depending on the person.
In his NY Times review of ‘Gods Without Men,’ by Hari Kunzru, Douglass Coupland writes about a new literary genre he calls Translit.
“there is something psychically sparse about the present era, and artists of all stripes are responding with fresh strategies,” said Coupland. He describes a new reality absent the predominance of any era — a flattening of time and space.
“I do wonder if being a writer in 2012 means needing to be able to write in multiple genres, as do Kunzru, David Mitchell et al., but not as some sort of postmodern party trick.”
Coupland said that genre shifting is fundamental. Kunzru achieves this shift because he writes about events in his novel that happen in different time periods but all interconnect.
I think the trick to switching the brain from nonfiction to fiction is to find the points of intersection. To break free from rules. To find the place in the middle where time and space coexist where nonfiction and fiction meet.
