Saturday, August 16, 2008

starting again

OK, I just finished a draft of a pilot. Now surely i will be interrupted by plays and hopefully TV but now, i want to look at novel writing again.

Tomorrow i turn 31. Time to get serious.

Here is a section from the 2000 or so words i have so far.

This went on for a year or so. Then one day I brought a tile home. It was one of the first tiles I had created and the composition was pretty good, I thought. The main focus was a woman cut from a magazine, smiling but also sad for some reason. Very beautiful so it’s hard to look at her too long, but not the kind of beauty that looks like it was overly manipulated. She looks real and that makes the sadness all the more palpable. I tried to use subtle paint enhancements to show her sadness more clearly and her beauty and her realness, if that’s possible. I think it was fairly successful. There were other objects too. Balls she seemed to be trying to keep up in the air. Glasses of champagne she was about to tip over. And the whole thing had this faint diagonal slicing with these semi-transparent dots I had painted on. And in the middle but also in the corner in dark black letters it said “runk.”
Many people have asked me in interviews and in letters and at parties and on the street and in the supermarket and once in bed where runk came from. And I’ll tell you now what I said each and every time. I don’t remember. It was cut from a magazine and I know runk was not the whole word. It could have been “trunk,” like an elephant’s trunk or swim trunks or the trunk of a tree. It could have been from an article about crunk, because I think it was around the time when people were writing articles about crunk and crunking and saying things like, “isn’t it interesting, these people dancing?” It could have been Strunk, as in Strunk and White. But honestly, I don’t think it matters. The word runk just feels right in this picture and I can’t tell you why except to say it just does. When you see it, if you haven’t already seen it, I hope you agree. I think most people agree it feels right which was perhaps why the whole movement, if you want to call it a movement, solidified around the word. It was just the right word.

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