My Homework Turned Into a Blogpost

Maybe its because I’ve grown up with a writer and then grown into a writer
So my mom and I do not have lives.
We have the stories that we are making out of our lives.
So nothing is original because everything is part of the story
Nothing is genuine because everything is being written down as material.
The truth is that if I were to write a story about my life and accurately describe my character it would sound a lot like:

“This happened to me and I thought this about it and decided it was meaningful and that this should happen next if it was gonna say an interesting story… but since its life not a story I cant write it as it happens so what happens ends up being even better writing because there is the added element of the fact that I was pretty sure something else would need to happen for it to be interesting but something else happened and it was still interesting.
The motivating factor in a lot of my character (my) choices seems to be make the story interesting…youve been on one note for too long, next scene, new character... blablabla...
what i mean is: I am awake.

I hear the rest of the people typing in the library around me while I type. I hear the girl across the cubical talking on the phone.
“Hello” she says into the silent library-clicking-keyboard room, just as I type about obsessively watching everything I do for information- hello- she greets me.
“You called me.” She says next… somehow that’s part of the story as well, but I’m not writing a story right now. I’m not writing the story of
‘katie writes an outline for the report she has to give on Dave Eggers tomorrow.” I am not writing a story about me doing my homework. I AM DOING MY HOMEWORK!
Anyway…
This is what Dave Eggers taught me- not how to do it- but he taught me that it is allowed.”

When I read a book I watch the movie of it in my head.
so I tend to like writers who sound like they are talking to you because that is not just like watching a movie.
I like to ‘listen to this person talk’ to me for a while which is something that, without a lot of voice over, you cannot translate accurately into a film.

Dave eggers tells you what he is thinking
He tells you what he thought about what he thought.
He tells you that while he was thinking it he was also thinking about writing it down and using it in this book that he’s currently writing that you are currently reading.

Maybe this is why I tend to like autobiographies of writers-because they get to tell me that they are writers and I find writers more interesting as narrators than ‘civilians’ who don’t notice every layer of the experience the way a storyteller does.

Dave eggers taught me to write it exactly as I thought it.
This might just be because we think alike so when I write down what my brain sounds like it comes out in a similar rythym to what his brain sounds like.

He taught me to tell the whole truth because its more interesting- even the pieces of the truth that don’t make sense because the truth doesn’t usually make sense because the inside of you brain- un altered by the sense you have to put it into when you speak it into words- doesn’t usually completely make sense.

So my favorite books tend to be books that I could never imagine making into a movie because the story is not the point. The choice of words is the point and the little rants that have nothing to do with anything are the point.

That said I think its very interesting that Dave eggers now writes screenplays.

He wrote Away We Go and it kind of didn’t work because his scenerios/ diologue/ characters are so beautifully described to make you completely get it and read into it- that when put onto a screen it seems like overkill. Every character comes out a bit like a characature.

Then he wrote Where the Wild things are.
The point of the way they adapted that movie was the make every event, every character and every image into a symbol.
People found that movie childish, or ridiculous or boring.
But I say- read the movie like a dream, read the images like words.
Everything that is said, everything that happens every image, is symbolic of Max.
People get that and find it over the top, ridiculous…
But Dave Eggers is doing something that feels a lot like writing words with images. Every one of his images is a word. It tells its own story. Every line is layered with meaning almost to the point of indulgence… no TO THE POINT OF INDULGENCE. He is digging into every symbol and laying it out for you and your saying. ‘well duh.’ And hes saying ‘well look at what you’ve come to regard as obvious.’