tnt: what do you mean it's symbolic

[azuire]

Reminders: This Week's Topic. Editors, if you haven't finished previous week's assignments, please do so! They can be found under the editing tag.

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Today's TnT Open Thread was brought you by the lovely thorarosebird.

Do you find yourself writing about certain things when you didn't mean to? Or find recurring themes you didn't put there intentionally?

Comments

[azuire]

I tend to write about death, a lot, mostly in a surrealist sort of way. I also find that I tend to favour a certain type of narrator. Someone who has a strong sense of justice, has some sort of disadvantage w.r.t societal norm, or sees things in a very skewed way.

I wonder what literary critics would make of that...

[so_wordy]

I'm not sure quite what to call it, but I usually write about the characters. All my stuff is behavior heavy, relying on nuances in body language. These are things I notice in real life, sort of like tells or reveals, that I think many people tend to miss.

When it comes to setting however..uh...it's absent. I need to physically see/research something to be able to write about it adequately.

Religion has also been popping up a lot in my poetry. Symbolism = love.

[msmcknittington]

I find myself writing about light a lot. Especially diffuse half-light, like twilight or moonlight or the light of a single candle. Or the transition of light through the day. Or someone opening a door or curtains and changing the light in the room, which definitely has symbolic meaning, but I don't always intend for it to be there.

I also end up setting things in the autumn frequently, transitioning into winter, which does have an effect on the quality of light. Autumn/winter light is that diffuse light. I think I might just like writing about interstitial places and threshholds and things that are neither one thing or the other. Like in the novel I am writing, a lot of it takes place on an airship traveling between countries that are traditional enemies, and one of the reasons the airship captain has that career is because it means he can make a home in the air and not have to become "rooted" in the soil of either country. That isn't something I intended to write about when I started off, either.

(Ha, my novel. Oh, self. I feel like I should be wearing a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows and using an NPR voice. You know, while talking about the dirigibles. *snort*)

I write about difficulty sleeping a lot, too, but I think that's just because I have insomnia and when it becomes obvious that I'm not going to sleep, I write. That's totally me writing what I know. :P

[msmcknittington]

And! What's more! I write about clothes all the time, but that's because that's what I enjoy researching. I mostly write historical fiction/historical fantasy, and I'm trying to turn my love of historical fashion into something that actually informs the reader about the characters and says something about the culture. Rather than going on at length about the BEAUTIFUL CLOTHES, I want it to be meaningful. Otherwise it's just candy, and while candy is fine, I'd rather my writing had secret vitamins hidden it.

I think this Romeo & Juliet fic I wrote two years ago nails most of my tendencies in one small package. Difficulty sleeping, clothes, transitional space of adolescence, qualities of light -- the only thing it's missing is being set in the autumn. Two years! It might be time for some innovation.

[pipisafoat]

surreal death?

[ex_pippin880]

Autumn/winter light is that diffuse light.

I never understood references to this kind of stuff until I visited Great Britain in winter. That kind of sunlightgloom is amazing(ly annoying). First time I've been able to cope outside without sunglasses, though.

[ex_pippin880]

.......do magic boxen count? I seem to like magic boxen a lot.

And human-like children of non-human things.

And strange jewellery.

[msmcknittington]

I live in Wisconsin (in the northern part of the US, like Canada Lite, basically), and we have that thin and diffuse light basically from November to March/April. It's not so much gloom as it is a sort of thing and hard light. Like lemon juice as opposed to lemon curd? It does get bright when there's lots of snow on the ground, because the snow reflects in all back, but it's nothing compared to how harsh the light is in the summer.

[ex_pippin880]

Ah!

Yeah we... don't really do anything like that at all. Not far enough south.

[mercredigirl]

Yep! Recently I've been writing a heck lot of postco & gender themes -- consciously, I think, now that I've noticed, but it was quite unintentional at first. And sometimes things just stick 'emselves in -- my Ada fic, f'rexample, she has an orchid. I don't know where the orchid came from, but now I have to think abt. the historical Chinese presence in SEA just to account for the orchid.

[azuire]

-nods- I can't understand it either!

[solumin]

I write about dreams, especially in my poetry. I'm pretty sure it's because I can never remember my dreams, and even if I do remember them they're always out of focus. So I guess I focus on the mystical side of dreaming: why it happens, why we can't remember them...stuff like that. Love and loneliness also show up a lot, usually as sort of secondary themes or something like that. (I posted a poem a while ago, if you want an example: http://solumin.dreamwidth.org/872.html)

In my stories, there's sometimes a man-vs-nature motif. Gods and the supernatural are usually involved somehow.