{"id":145,"date":"2005-05-19T05:54:07","date_gmt":"2005-05-19T00:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=145"},"modified":"2005-05-19T05:54:07","modified_gmt":"2005-05-19T00:54:07","slug":"leeching-off-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2005\/05\/19\/leeching-off-reality.html","title":{"rendered":"Leeching Off Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was surprised last night to find that I once attempted to write a novel. In a box full of papers and junk from Tampa I found a stack of papers with a fully outlined, partly written novel of a dozen or so chapters. It’s about a sado-masochistic relationship between an older woman and a younger man. It interweaves elements from my life in 1992 with a story from a call made to the Apology Line<\/a> around that time.<\/p>\n

I remember almost none of what I wrote, but here and there are turns of phrases that I still use today. If not for the occasional recognizable sentence I might question whether I wrote this stuff at all. The quantity is amazing to me. page after page after page of stuff for which I have no memory.<\/p>\n

It’s funny to recognize the elements. As part of the story one of the characters required a particularly unusual, distinctive name. I used the name of someone from my sister’s high school –someone I never knew for anything except her unusual first name. I couldn’t even tell you what she looked like, but her name floats through this story disembodied from its source.<\/p>\n

Other characters in the book step from the page as people I worked with, people I remember but never knew, or those who are what the FBI would simply call “persons of interest.”<\/p>\n

I question the integrity of leeching off reality for works of fiction. “Write what you know” is standard advice for anyone crafting a story, but at what point is one simply using the people in their lives for their own gain, or for their own reputation?<\/p>\n

The writing is overblown. It is an avalanche of words. Where one word would suffice I use twelve. Where one short sentence would communicate the story I fill a full page with two paragraphs. Sentence after sentence sodden with multiple superlatives. Funny how this now-obvious weakness must have felt like a tremendous strength at the time. O lost!<\/p>\n

But the story has its moments. The death scene is particularly interesting to me, as are other moments. Gonna think about this.<\/p>\n

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I was surprised last night to find that I once attempted to write a novel. In a box full of papers and junk from Tampa I found a stack of papers with a fully outlined, partly written novel of a dozen or so chapters. It’s about a sado-masochistic relationship between an older woman and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-181-2","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-2l","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}