ieva melgalve » Latvian

Experimental writing

ieva — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:55:38 +0000

The job I’m doing right now with Virgin is clearly experimental, switching between different perceptions of time, focusing on nuances instead of the obvious, and going slow, having no major stuff happening (yet). This is probably what could be named “literary fiction” if I wrote better, or “high literature” in Latvian (actually, Latvians have trouble even accepting commercial literature as “literature”).
This is enormously delightful. This is also scary for me personally, and not just because the market for mediocre literary fiction is incredibly small.
This goes back to my personal history. Namely, I used to write literary fiction a lot. I was told to; all other kinds of literature was called trash. Besides, there was that myth going on that it’s impossible for somebody from a small country with a tiny language to write commercial fiction. And writing literary fiction was fun and it got me recognition that I thought I enjoyed. I published a book where every story proved a point: there was a story where no two sentences were interlinked in any way (not even sharing a protagonist…not that it had any protagonist), a story with no emotions named, a story where the protagonist is a time-traveling, reincarnating ghost, a story that was repeated many times, decomposing in the process, and a couple of surreal stage plays.
Then, at some point, I realized that there are–cannot be–any rules for experimental writing. If I write to prove a literary point, it will not work for most of the people. And I stopped writing because I lacked that point of evaluation. I stopped writing because I wasn’t thinking “outside the box” since I didn’t have a box at all.
After a few years, I started researching, studying and writing genre fiction because it had a box. I learned what “scene” meant and that my protagonist had to have some sort of personality and needs, and obstacles. I chose to write in English primarily because I didn’t know the language well enough to pull fancy literary stunts. I learned a lot, and I still have lots and lots to learn. I survived the shock of the discovery that instead of requesting stories, editors were actually rejecting them.
Right now, I’m trying to combine both features: the box and the outside of the box. I have scenes and protagonists and antagonists, needs and complications. I am re-evaluating the rules I learned and bending them when I think it could make sense.
Am I ready to do that?
I don’t know.
But this is exhilarating, and it’s scary and it’s what I’m doing right now.
My only consolation: that in any case, I’ll learn a lot in the process.

An Update On Everything

ieva — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:04:16 +0000

I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while.
First, NaNoWriMo. Some days, I didn’t have enough words to write a letter, much less a blog entry. When I did, I rather wrote a letter. The good news is that I got my words done on a steady pace, and I’ll get the 50K by the end of November.
Then, some days, I thought that I was a non-writer who just can’t get her words straight or her thoughts across. That there was some trick to writing, something really obvious that everybody else knew and didn’t even think it would be worth saying, and I didn’t know it and because of that, I failed.
Just when I’d become convinced that was the case, I got my first acceptance for a story in English. The best part about that is that they want a Latvian version of the story too–for me, this means a lot, as I still think of myself as a Latvian writer who’s sidetracked by the bigger, bolder English-speaking market.
And a couple of days later, when I was obsessed by the thought that I won’t have an idea for anything new after I finish NaNo novel, I got struck by inspiration. But that’s a story for another post.

TGIF, or smth like that

ieva — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:38:56 +0000

This has been a long and exhausting week and miraculously, I got a lot of writing done, and the amount of NaNo planning that makes it possible to get to actual outlining soon. Today, NaNo thing surprised me too, because it seems that the novel I started pondering on as “light, funny and easy to write YA serial” is evolving to something dark and troubled. Well probably it’s not so surprising since school is officially the most hell-ish place I’ve been in, and being a teenager in school means you’ve done something really really wicked in your previous lives. (At least that’s what I remember from the time.)

Let’s see how the weekend goes. It can go two ways, actually: a) I finally crash down and yell at everybody, b) I manage to get myself together and, well, don’t yell.

Also, an amusing language snippet: in Latvian, “to eat somebody out” means to make them leave the workplace or the school permanently by intrigues, harassment or bad attitude. I actually wrote “they ate me out of previous school” in character interview. Now I’m wondering could I make this an effect instead of defect.

I’m flued

ieva — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:23:32 +0000

Sooo.
It’s all because of the flu, I swear, that I haven’t written a thing for Vega and am generally a yelling freak (who can’t really yell because of the sore throat but the attempts are brave).
Yesterday, I translated The Final Turn to Latvian and realized why I have a run-on sentence problem: Latvians simply tend to have longer sentences without losing coherency. On the other hand, some stylistic feats raised their ugly heads asking why the hell did that writer do *that*.

All in all, translating seems to be a cool exercise for figuring out the weak spots, at least on sentence/word level.

bitter honey

ieva — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:08:28 +0000

I am surprised and delighted how stuff from my childhood… or, sometimes, the present-that-feels-like-childhood seeps into the story, rendering it richer, at least for me.
Today, it was heather, one of my favorite wild flowers, and heatherbell honey my father recently brought for kids – it is very dark, rich brown and tastes more bitter than you’d usually expect.
This is how heather looks in a typical pine forest:

(Photo by Agita Leimane)
And yea, perhaps we don’t have a hundred words for forest, but I could easily find 14 distinct words for forest in a simple forest classification page and I can think of several others that weren’t mentioned there.

500+ words today, and a lead for follow-up in place.