Dave Freer posting:
Or why writers are in fact a race apart.
If there is one thing I don’t believe in it’s this special race stuff, be it the chosen people, or the wonder of Aryans or the inferiority/superiority of Morlocks and Eloi. Yet I have come to realise that in a self selected way, writers are a in special case. (Well, when chopped up they can fit into several special cases, or even suitcases. Or if diced, into clutch bags for the nights at the opera, although this is a fate I feel should be reserved for the authors of literary works of art.)
It hit me this afternoon like a bolt of lightning… except it was more like a knife sliding through meat and into the spinal column of the dead wallaby I was cutting up. I hit the spine with a little rasping crunch, a tactile sensation carried up the knife blade and I thought: I must remember exectly how that felt. I must find the words to describe this, to capture it precisely. To let people who have never and will never cut into the cartilaginous sheath on the joints between the vertebrae know how it feels and how it sounds, and what raw meat carries to senses. The smell of iron and of blood. The slight tactile stickyness of hung meat…
Then I realised that for many years now I have been slowly drifting away from non-writer humans. They are content to experience and, if you ask them about it afterwards, will sometimes be able to tell you what they experienced, capturing the little details that bring the scene (if not the Wallaby) to life. Writers… writers however find themselves experiencing… and taking notes. I should advise against this in those intimate little moments–your partner may find it distracting and possibly disturbing if, midway, you leap away from him/her and frantically hunt a pen and paper. On the other hand, I’ve caught myself ‘taking notes’ at some of the most bizarre and inappropriate times – losing control on a dirt corner, losing my temper…
So do you do this? Or am I my own subspecies? And what’s the most inappropriate/bizarre ‘only a writer could do this’ that you’re guilty of?
Mad Genius Club 
27 responses to “How to dismember a Wallaby”
Well I kind of do this. How else can you explain how people can run through a cramp (and how even so you have to compensate)?
One of the reasons I take lots of photos is to remind myself of events and sights, although it would be nice to have a smellomatic and sound recorder too
Coincidentally Elizabeth Moon talked a bout something similar here: http://www.paksworld.com/blog/?p=1182
You’re doomed, Francis, doomed I tell you. The inner author is creeping out… Yes, pics help. I often find them to be mnemonic triggers.
I have been known to enunciate the commas and semicolons as I speak. Fortunately my husband has pretty well teased me out of this, so I’m almost fit for decent company these days.
Matapam, LOL. I’d ration your access to voice to text programmes then. Barbs says I a reasonably nice guy to live with… except at the beginning and end of book. IE – about half the time…
I do it too. Certainly.
I fainted once, from a lack of blood (which sounds far more dramatic than it was, I suppose), and woke up thinking about how, precisely, it was different from waking from sleep and how I would describe that. I stepped in volcanic ash and despite being like gravel rather than “ash”, it made a little wave almost like water. The lightning through the ash cloud wasn’t so much a bolt, as pearls on a string and hung in the sky, fading slowly.
And so on. 😉
Oh dear, Synonova. They’ll insist you tattoo a book on your forehead so others can be warned :-). The big problem with ‘really weird’ experience is that they seem quite implausible to people who aren’t there. So our descriptive skills are stretched further, to add veracity…
Indeed. I always figured the ash cloud stuff for “alien color” on a fictional world.
Heh, yes. I even had to explain _why_ I wanted to try certain “high risk behaviors” at a young age n the middle of a psyche test when the results (according to the knuckle dragger administering the test) were tied between two potential personality types. He kept trying to tell me I was MUCH more extroverted and sensory than I am (I must have looked at him like he had six heads and all of them their own unique brand of fugly) or that there was another choice.
I occasionally wonder if he ever recovered from testing me, I was even less likely to fail to share my opinions then, and much less couth.
What? My delicately spoken friend? I am shocked, shocked, I tell you. High risk behaviors go with being extrovert in psyche tests? How odd. Mind you I wish I had been there to take notes 😉
I know, shocking me the soft spoken and retiring type that I am today came from such a…barbarous childhood, its a stultifying thought.
I honestly wonder how many a-dolts I traumatized between say 7 or 8 and 14 or so when I started dumbing down what i said to suit the audience…
Fifteen years and a few months ago, I was in the Intensive Care Unit of the local hospital dying of what was later diagnosed as Intercellullar pneumonia. (Or at least the doctors finally treated me as for pneumonia and I recovered but at the time:) They couldn’t see anything in xrays, had no idea what was wrong with me, and yet my oxygen intake was falling and they thought I was going to die. So my husband called the priest to give me the last rites.
I don’t know if any of you has ever been THAT low on oxygen, but it’s sort of like being drunk. Your mind is fuzzy and you sort of drift in and out. So there I was under the oxygen tent making an enourmous effort to stay awake through it, because I was thinking “If I survive this, there’s that scene where my character is dying, I MUST have the last rites. Okay. What happens next?” (Unfortunately I couldn’t take notes and Dan was not in any emotional state to take notes, so I really don’t remember much of it.)
Sarah, please don’t do it again, to take notes! Make it up. Writers also do that and many people do not know the difference. Really. Trust me on this. But yes. Only a writer would.
I have a habit of taking pics myself. I take pics of everything. I once took a pic at an art fair and the artist about killed me. Even after I told him I wasn’t going to sell or even display the thing he stood there until I deleted the pic. Fortunately for me, I had taken two. (Call it a premonition if you must, but I just KNEW that I need two pics.) Not only that, but I ended up not using the scene in my writing anyway. It didn’t fit the part of my work that I thought I needed it for. My bad.
I have also gotten a weird look on more than one occasion while speaking to people describing this or that messed up situation. Apparently asking too many questions about how something felt is considered to be bad form. Who knew? If you do this, don’t EVER let them figure out that you might use it in a book someday. People err…tend to get a bit snippy at that point.
” don’t EVER let them figure out that you might use it in a book someday” I find eavesdropping is an almost universal writer behavior for this reason! (and that’s my story and I am sticking to to it.) How anyone can WRITE in a coffee shop full of insights into dialogue and the human condition and of course human banality and idiocy is beyond me.
Helping someone caught in an industrial accident (she lost the tips off two fingers) and while part of me was in freak-out, and part was being calm and trying to help the poor woman, part of me observed how very like raw meat the tops of her fingers looked, and wondered how effective putting the chopped off bits (about half an inch worth, if I remember right) in a ziplock then into a cooler full of ice cubes was going to be. (Not very, although the 4 hour wait for the Flying Doctor service probably had a wee something to do with that, too).
This was in a very remote part of Australia, where there was nothing for miles. We drove, in convey, for about 3/4 of an hour to get to the nearest air strip (not an airport, just a flat, graded area that light aircraft could land on in good weather. The nearest airport was at least a 5 hour drive away). The whole time we were waiting, part of me was observing the ebb and flow of pain and shock, the way the people around me responded, and a bunch of other odd bits and pieces. Like nearly forgetting to take the cooler with the fingertips when the plane finally arrived.
More recently, while driving 1500+ miles with a broken right ankle, part of me taking notes about how it felt, and the odd things you wouldn’t normally consider, like the “white” quality of nauseating pain from the ankle if I stepped wrong compared to “red” pain that was the norm through that drive. Also the way it drove out other body signals like “You need to empty your bladder” (I learned, FAST, to stop every 2 hours like clockwork because by the time I got the signal, found an exit with a gas station, parked, and hobbled to the loo, it was too late. These messy bits add verisimilitude, but need a certain amount of care if you don’t want to hit the ick buttons).
Yes, Kate, exactly. People want the story… and sometimes they want their illusions retained too. It’s a fine line…
Hi, Dave. I don’t think I take notes as a rule, but I do regularly find myself wonder how to describe someone, or something or a place while I am there. What I do find, as that the writer’s perspective is brilliant when you find yourself in the sh%t – you can put yourself kind of aside from the drama or pointy end of the situation by wondering – ‘How can I use this?’ ‘What would this character or that character do.’ Very useful.
Writers are the ultimate Recyclers!
Well, it a good thing someone puts all those grim bits to good use. That’s sort of what I mean – look at a scene which is stunningly beautiful, and instead of just appreciating it… you find yourself trying to absorb (or photgraph to USE) and conciously trying to describe the place – while you’re looking at it.
Absolutely… And trying to put the feel of the place into words so that you can capture the unique feel of a place – something I’ve never known a photo to do.
I know what you mean though, Dave. It’s like when you have the camera at the birthday party – when you are trying to frame the shot through the lens you lose the pure experience of the moment.
I think, to evoke — if not quote — Pratchett, we’re always the ones who do and the ones who watch ourselves do…
How to dismember a wallaby?
Get them on the field with the All Blacks (except at a world cup final)
ooh, nasty! 😉 And given my new found allegiences I can’t do that!
I’ll pay that one! (so sayeth the Aussie transplanted to the wilds of semi-urban Pennsylvania)
If you cut the end of your finger off above the first joint, I mean, even if you cut it off till there’s no nail, it will grow back, and “remember” what was there before. I cut off the end of my left thumb once till there was only about a third of the nail, and it all grew back. Witnessed someone cut the end of a finger off by, apparently, reaching under a running lawnmower (????????) and I advised the person taking him to the doctor against getting it stiched. Scientists are trying to figure out how to extend that process to the hand or the whole limb.
What wonderful detail. Now you’ve got me curious.
If you want to know something horrible, ask a fiction writer. We seem to be walking treasure troves of the ghastly.