Jen M.
From: Jen hahaha
I was 15. Not knowing exactly "why" is part of the pain. Remember, my whole point was that deaths in the family, especially completely unexpected deaths, can have an enormous negative impact not just on direct family members, but spreading out to include and impact even distant relatives. In talking about family values you are not talking about writing. My subject here is reading and writing.
Remembrance Of Things Past (a phrase taken from Shakespeare) a long novel by Frenchman Marcel Proust, is a novel closely based on life with many of the facts completely changed. Most obvious is the character of Albertine whom the narrator describes as a "sealed envelope of a person" In real life that character was Proust's homosexual married chaufeur. (From analysis published in The New Yorker.) Proust knew that the past is most efficiently remembered through recalling the concrete specific sensory memories from that past. In the novel, memories are triggered through remembering the smell of cake dipped in tea at his mother's table. (Outdoors as I remember.) By coincidence I know this to be a truth about memory from Sense Memory exercizes done in acting classes. In fact, later I taught relaxation and sense memory in acting classes.
A corollary of this thesis (after all it can't be 'proved') is that the prospects of a novel constructed entirely from invention is virtually an impossibility. Proof, for me, are the novels of Danielle Steel. In my opinion each novel is written by teams of young women writers following outlines supplied by Steel herself. The result is not believable, and therefore of no interest to any serious reader or serious writer. The scheme is somewhat like a painter's atelier of old, workplaces where there are staffs of painters. Leonardo Da Vinci was such an apprentice painter in the atelier of another.
Barry
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