I just ("just" meaning within the past few minutes) finished the first draft of a new short story I'm tentatively calling "Beige."
I feel really good about it because it's about an issue that's really important to me, but I feel like I'll never be able to clean it up enough for outsiders to truly understand some of the symbolism.
First of all, I laugh now at the very idea that I'm sitting here planning what symbols there are going to be in my work.
When I was going through school and analyzing countless works of literature I was so idealistic as to hope that these great writers had included those very profound connotations inadvertantly...as if Charlotte Perkins Gilman didn't intentially craft every word in "The Yellow Wallpaper" to convey some very specific point about emotion and womanhood (it ain't about the paper, folks).
I wanted to think that they were just SO GOOD that they spewed this stuff without even knowing it and that we were just sitting in class applying meaning to things where the author hadn't intended there to be any.
My problem is that I'm torn between wanting to write "literature,"--that is, the stuff that you take notes in the margins of and read twice to figure out--and writing humorous, "don't need to think about it to read it" disposable garbage.
*sigh*
Anyway. I have a lot of work to do either way.
Posted by Tiffany at August 19, 2005 10:19 PM | TrackBack