Struggling in the Margins
What to write for…
Lately, and possibly influenced by the number of poets on Medium who’ve taken the new formatting rather hard, it’s been on my mind to try to figure out what it is I’m hoping my writing (individual pieces and the reason for the whole corpus) will achieve. Last month, in my interview with Zay Pareltheon, I said “I don’t know” to the question as to what drives me to write. That’s not a great answer, not really befitting a writer who does his damnedest, daily, to work out how to express a given moment/memory/an event.
Part of the difficulty for me, as I recently admitted to Eli, is that my reading is entirely chaotic. Speaking of the possibility of writing research-oriented fiction, I had to say that I don’t quite have the discipline to read the entirety of a literature around a given object/event/period and use that to exercise character development (whether I’m actually capable of so disciplining myself was neither the question, nor the uptake from the answer). I am, at the moment, reading Paul Auster, Roland Barthes, Pablo Neruda, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Bernard Cornwell, not to mention the hundreds of writers I read on Medium. Not one of the books I reading reach for same thing as the others. Not one of these authors takes the same historical point of departure. Though all of them were working in the 20th Century, that and the fact they are…
