Contemporaneous: Chapters 56 – 57
56. I’ll skim through all the stuff that it took me six hours to do: battle traffic to get to the airport find it impossible to get parking, so I leave the airport, drive out to Tullamarine, and get some street parking try to hail a taxi and, then summon an Uber – neither app worked, and the phone for the taxi was never answered walk an hour back to the airport, then try to buy a domestic ticket there. Their system went down. I waited five minutes, but then panicked that I was disrupting everybody’s else’s lives once I walked back to my car, traffic was clear all the…
Dr. Fuckwit
Whenever I run workshops on writing memoir, biography, and that sort of thing, I instruct participants to keep us mired in the moment. That means if they’re writing about an experience when they were a twelve-year-old, then all I want to see, all I want to know, is what the narrator saw and knew as that twelve-year-old. Keep the narrative as if it’s unfolding then and there. Don’t let the present-day self butt in with present-day wisdom, opinions, or reflection. That punctures the suspension of disbelief. I also always say (and stress this also in fiction workshops I run) that unless there’s a justification for it, keep events chronological. It’s…
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