📚 22 - October
Highsmith, Patricia (1983). Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.
Some advice worth considering in here—save quotational dialogue for dramatic scenes; coincidences are fine as long as they aren't totally incredible; get to know the thematic elements you return to again and again and exploit them intentionally and to your full ability; don't shy away from boredom in the writing process.
Highsmith indicates writers have an "individuality" or "style" or "tempo" or "personality" that defines their writing. This quality is natural, unstudied, and unlearnable; readers crave it. Writers should nurture it within themselves and write in a way that allows it to shine through.
김완선 (1989). 이젠 잊기로 해요 [Let's Forget about it].
When I was younger, I had a sense that people kept the totality of their lives on their minds indefinitely, and could (and would gladly) recall their personal pasts as easily as they could recount the plot of a movie they had just finished watching.
I realize now that most people are focused more on the present and future; they avoid thinking of the past, and let large chunks of it slide from view. Indeed, remembrance becomes an act of will—but to what end? Bearing witness to the past is sometimes a moral and respectful act (both on its own and as a precursor to good actions)—but the older I get, the more I see many forms of remembrance as a nasty trick played by the rememberer on the remembered.
It is better to be forgotten? Or, if remembered, remembered in a very particular way? It seems sometimes we remember the wrong things, forget the wrong things. An immense moral failure.
이젠 잊기로 해요 (performed in this video on what appears to be a boat) is a break-up song: since we're breaking up, then we must resolve to forget the moments we spent together. The verb 잊다 is used again and again. Looking it up, I found that it can mean both to carelessly forget and to choose to forget. I was mulling over this nuance when I realized it is encoded in the English verb as well. Forgetting—carelessness and will muddled together. Though of course, so much of forgetting, and so much of remembering, is outside of our control. Much to consider!!
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