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CumGirl
1 day ago
Bi-curious Female, 53
United Kingdom
Forum
Attention Whore
Quote by DXM
CumGirl: The Bartelby point is an excellent one, and it's one that used to bug me a lot. I reread it last summer for the first time since high school, and it worked better for me this time round. The difference for for me was that before I thought of it as a story about Bartelby and his odd "I would prefer not to" quirk. Now when I read it I view it as a story about the actual narrator, whose fascination with Bartelby subtly paints a picture of a man on the verge of becoming aware of the pointlessness of his life's drudgery, but who tragically never quite gets there. I don't mean to suggest that this is what Melville had meant, but I found it worked as a more complete tale when I viewed it as such. And I loved that I had to take the time and bandwidth to puzzle out the right interpretation for me. For whatever that's worth.
bustyreadhead: I think a lot of writers do in fact start from the ending. But a lot of times on your path back to your original point, you find you've ended up somewhere entirely different.
What this is really about is the nature of writing. Certainly much, if not most, writing is plot based with characters and story lines that all need suitable resolution. However, lots of writing is thematic; it is about "something" larger than the individual characters or plot within which they are contained ... so, to stick with Melville, "Moby Dick" is less about hunting The Great White Whale and more about destructive obsession.
In such writing, a clear plot resolution is often counter to the nature of tale ... life, after all, does not come with nice "neat bows attached" endings.
So, bustyredhead, when I write I start with "what it is I wish to say" and a suitable story format to carry the themes ... the characters and the plot both form about that central crux ... and, as Sprite has noted, story creation is a very organic process and quite often you end up nowhere near where you thought you would be when you started.
