toreoffice.blogg.se - Everywriter

This flyer, which I chanced upon while walking to the bathroom, contains one of the most evocative sentences I’ve read all year. I didn’t want a bath, so I ran away without my collar near 26th and Grant. I’M LOST !!! HAVE YOU SEEN ME? I’M TUCKER. Right now, in the coffee shop where I am writing, there is a flyer for a lost dog: How does one stop writing descriptions or journal entries and start writing narrative, a bonafide story, with real people doing real things? Put simply: How can I make shit happen on the page? So how can dogs help us produce conflict? How can we writers think like dogs? At the heart of this inquiry is the question I’ve been trying to answer for as long as I’ve been trying to be a writer, and it has to do with plot. And with all that wanting, it’s no surprise that these barking, slobbering, desperate creatures produce conflict at least as well as they produce shit. They are hungry for touch, for freedom, for squeaky balls, for meat. But they don’t just survive, for they are intensely desirous. They shit on the floor, they bark at the mailman, they fight each other for food and toys, they run into the street - it’s a miracle they even survive, given their proclivity to put themselves in danger at the slightest provocation. I live with an English bulldog and a pit bull, both of whom are walking, drooling plot machines. And what are dogs, if not distraction?īut perhaps dogs are just the thing we writers need, at least those of us who complain that we struggle with plot. Writers must avoid the distractions of public life to write good literature. Knausgaard’s distaste for dogs is part and parcel of a literary assumption that has prevailed ever since Cicero posited in the first century BC that all one needed to write was a library and a garden: writers must avoid the distractions of public life to write good literature.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine, say, Virginia Woolf allowing a big whiny drooler to bark and scratch at the door of that room of her own. In other words, it seems to Knausgaard that dogs are simply too intrusive for writers who need solitude and quiet. As Karl Ove Knausgaard wondered recently in The New Yorker, “Has a single good writer ever owned a dog?” He goes on to describe his own failed attempt at dog ownership, saying that his own mutt was “infinitely kind but infinitely stupid,” needy, solipsistic, and that he didn’t write a single line of literary prose in the time the dog was in his possession. The cat is introverted, solitary, intelligent, carefully withholding, as any good writer should be. I suppose this is because we writers see something of ourselves in cats. Raymond Chandler, Yeats, Dickens, Burroughs - the list of cat lovers goes on and on. Hemingway was a famous collector of cats, as was Mark Twain. The writerly affinity for cats is well-documented.