The Confabulator Cafe

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  • Stories Are A Luxury

    My writer friends may take exception with this, but I don’t think the world needs stories.

    Stories are a luxury.

    This idea that stories (and any other form of art) are somehow a necessity is false. It’s a notion that we artistic types often perpetuate because we’re trying to assuage our own insecurity about the career path we want to pursue. It’s as if we still need to be convinced that being an artist is legit and worthwhile.

    Here’s the stone cold truth, people: Art is not a required staple. It is not food nor is it shelter. The world will continue to spin even without the stories we tell.

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  • Base Instinct

    evolution-406x226Why does the world need stories? I don’t know that we have a choice in the matter. Stories seem to be the thing that separates us from the animals. Forget about writers for a moment. Forget about books and movies. All of that is just an extreme extension of a base instinct. Even if you took that all the way, we are a story species.

    When you see someone you haven’t seen for a couple of days, the first thing you do is tell a story of what you did last weekend. When you get up in the morning and look at the paper, you are reading a story. When you get in the car and turn on the radio, regardless of your listening preferences, you hear a story.

    Our religions are based on stories, some of the most archetypal stories in history. Our philosophies are based on narratives. Decartes meditated in the form of narratives. Plato put forth his theories in the form of fictionalized dialogues of his teacher Socrates. Everything we know and do is based around a story, a dream, a narrative powered by aspirations and advertising. (more…)

  • Do We Need Stories? (Week of February 3)

    Imagine ancient man, sitting at a campfire with his family and friends. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider what happened next. He started telling a story. Whether it was a recounting of the days hunt, or a wish for a plentiful summer, it is highly likely that early man told stories.

    And we still do today.

    But are stories really necessary these days? We’re connected as never before in a web of communication. We have facts and data at our fingertips. Scripted television seems to be dying, replaced by reality shows. The media has made celebrities of people whose lives are recorded and viewed for our pleasure.

    This week, we’re asking the writers in the Cafe to ponder the imponderable: “Why does our world need stories?” Can humanity survive without them? Are they necessary to our existence? Are they a frivolous luxury for the rich and idle who are not working?

    We hope you enjoy our responses to this question. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.

    Until next week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Ephemera – What was the last nonfiction book you read?

    This week at the Cafe we talked about what we’d write if we were to tackle non-fiction (or what we write if that is the genre we’d normally write). It seemed only fitting to ask what, if any, non-fiction the Confabulators have read recently for this week’s Ephemera. Do we read non-fiction about our craft, for information, or just for fun?

    Christie Holland

    The last non-fiction book I read was Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon.  I know there are a million books about creativity, but I highly recommend this one.  It’s quick, simple, and straight to the point.  I read it in about an hour.  It was worth it.

    Larry Jenkins

    I’m currently working my way through the audiobook version of “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief” by Lawrence Wright. It’s a bit slow at times, but there are enough interesting tidbits to keep you going. It’s also fun to study how Wright organizes the book and uses narrative hooks to keep you reading. There’s a lot to learn from this book, so if you have the time and inclination, I’d recommend picking it up.

    Ashley M. Poland

    Ummmmmm… I’m sure I’ve read one. A few months ago my mother-in-law sent me a copy of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne & Dave King. It was a fairly interesting read, actually. I’m not really into non-fiction, in case that’s not painfully obvious.

    Kevin Wohler

    I am currently reading My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business by Dick Van Dyke. I have been a fan of his since my childhood, and I love reading the biographies of comedians.

    Sara Lundberg

    I just finished reading Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible. It’s one thing to read a science fiction novel and wonder if it’s got any scientific truth to it, but it’s a whole other ballgame to read this book and have him outright say “yeah, this could possibly happen in the next century.” I love this kind of stuff. I’ve never tried to tackle writing science fiction before, but books like this make me excited to try. Any science fiction writer should check this book out. You can even borrow it from me. All I’m gonna say is: teleportation? Not as impossible as you might think.

    Jack Campbell, Jr.

    Right now, I am reading Literary Criticism: Theory and Application by Charles Bressler for a class. Also, I have been reading Fiction Writing for Dummies for a couple years without much success working through it. It really isn’t the type of writing book that holds my interest. There is too much glossed over, and overall too much information. They have a section on how to pitch your book. That’s fine, but if you don’t write it well, you’ll never have to worry about that. There is a lot of what you should do and not enough about why you should do it.

  • My Love/Hate Relationship With Non-Fiction

    I actually do write non-fiction to pay the bills. I write short Web articles about computers and the Internet, or computer-adjacent topics. Like this one about teens on the Internet, or this one about my favorite lady scientist, Ada Lovelace. They’re not very good.

    If there were an office hierarchy of freelance writers, I would be that guy who does his 9 to 5: just good enough not to be fired but not good enough to advance. I’m not ambitious or educated enough to branch my career beyond the Web. My writing is merely okay. What (in my incredibly unhumble opinion) makes me a good fiction writer is my blend of character and plot — the creative parts. Technically, I’m nothing to call home about.

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  • To Serve… Others

    Asimov's robots are the ultimate in customer service. Humans should learn a thing or two from them.
    Asimov’s robots are the ultimate in customer service. Humans should learn a thing or two from them.

    I’m primarily a fiction writer. Actually 99% fiction writer. The exceptions are these posts for the Cafe, some real-life stuff on my own blog and a rather largish pamphlet I wrote back in the early 2000s (the Naughties – heh) on the subject of making mini comics.

    Once upon a time there was a website called SixShooterComix.com (it’s now defunct but you can see a shot of the forum here thanks to the WayBack Machine). I met Rob Schamberger  and Thom Thurman at a comics convention in Kansas City around 2001 and we hit it off. Rob has gone on to become recognized for his paintings of wrestlers and we’re still friends.

    Before I go any further, 6SC was very good for me. I met a wonderful artist in Svetlana Chmakova and we produced exactly one story together. There was potential for another but things never worked out. Anyway, based on the success of that story and the fact that I was still producing mini comics on my own, Rob asked me to write a column on the forum about my process. He anticipated three or four columns, but there’s a lot to making comics. Add that in with the fact that I like to talk and I produced I don’t know how many columns. Eighteen or nineteen if I remember correctly. (I have a copy around the house somewhere but it would take earthmovers to dig it out.)

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  • Wherever I Go, There I Am.

    I know what kind of non-fiction I wouldn’t write.

    Academic or scholarly writing. Memoir or biography. Mainstream journalism. Gossip or tell-all. Anything that involves an interview.

    This week’s topic was my idea. I’m really interested in how my fellow Confabulators will answer. But I’m nearly stumped.

    I already write non-fiction for my job, and I like the kind of non-fiction I’m doing now. I like reading through diverse stacks of primary source material and synthesizing it for various audiences. I like learning the obscure history of common everyday things. Who was this guy? What did he do? How did he get involved in this situation? What is his relationship to the problem we’re trying to address now, sixty years after he died?

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  • Strange and Unusual: Non-Fiction and the Paranormal

    “I, myself, am strange and unusual.” ~ Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice

    I Want to BelieveThe great thing about writing fiction is that everything you believe can be true.

    I’m not much for writing non-fiction. I don’t like referencing sources. I hate bibliographies. I’m constantly afraid of misquoting someone or failing to attribute a fact. But if I were to devote myself to writing non-fiction, I could see myself delving back into my research from my early Internet days.

    In the early ’90s, I was really into researching UFOs. So much so, that I considered myself an amateur ufologist. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Too many episodes of The X-Files and way too much time on my hands.

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  • I’m Listening

    ME_339_Advice-640x199
    Cartoon from Mimi and Eunice: http://mimiandeunice.com/category/advice/

    It seems every question here at the Café is tricky lately, for one reason or another. This non-fiction question had me stumped at first—not because I couldn’t think of anything, but because we’re a bunch of writers, most of us writing in similar genres, so other people kept grabbing my answers.

    My go-to answer was to say I’d write about depression. I was not alone in this response, so I moved on. I write urban fantasy. I read a lot of cryptozoology articles and know way more than I should about aliens, Bigfoot, and chupacabras.

    Again, that subject got snatched up for this assignment pretty quick, too.

    So, I had to dig a little deeper and be a bit more honest. I have to confess something a little weird about myself. (more…)

  • Non-Fictions

    Various non-fictions litter my reading and writing past; I am an enthusiastic connoisseur of the art of the differently true writing. Each time I find a new enthusiasm, it leads me to heaps of fascinating, genre-crossing work. Every new group of texts makes me ask myself if I can contribute something to them.

    I sometimes wonder if every woman who has escaped the clutches of fundamentalist Christianity has written a memoir; and if so, if I have read them all yet. If I haven’t, it’s not for lack of trying–I grasp those memoirs eagerly and read them through in a day or two, all other work and reading and writing thrown aside for the great moments of identification. Every one of the dozens I’ve read have the same characteristics–the chafing, the quiet doubts, the discovery of feminist thought and practice, the realization that the Bible is not literarily true, the men telling us that we were not staying in our place by thinking, etc., etc. The extreme similarity of our experiences is probably not all that surprising, for their origins are in a movement that glorifies central authority and normalisation. (more…)