INKBLOTS-our first play wright joined us tonight

INKBLOTS – September 27, 2011

Vully pinot noir from Switzerland; three of us tonight is all, but quality not quantity (and avoid clichés like the plague).

John S leads off with his contemporary fiction. “It must be fall,” but why would she not know this? Work on air being dead quiet; better adjective for quiet. It is sometimes difficult to put back in, pick up where we left off when hearing our ‘Blots brothers read last time. This is a dream, or what? Can you make the description more a piece with her hallucination, or whatever it is; can her observation of the details of their clothes, etc., be more from her perception; maybe her condition makes her keenly observant of things around her. Limbo. Then Emma woke up. This is chapter 15 of 21, a dream that she has that she thinks is from God. She believes that the dream means that her child, if aborted, will go to this mysterious place of Limbo.

Ken comments that as a reader, it would help to have had a subtle clue going into the. Difference between truth and fiction: Fiction has to makes sense. All fiction is contrivance. It just can’t trumpet the contrivance or the verisimilitude is lost. If you have a bazaar dream or hallucination it has to fit in the fabricated reality of the fiction and appear believable to the reader. If a reader says to himself while listening or reading, “This is too far fetched,” then I haven’t done my job sufficiently.

Having said that, John’s dream chapter reminded me within the first couple of paragraphs of C S Lewis’s Great Divorce, sort of a colorless, numb existence, featureless, not happy-not-sad sort of place. Which got us on what age we will be in heaven. Augustine believed we would all be 30 years old, the age of Jesus when he commenced his earthly ministry. The problem of evil. If there’d never been evil, there would be no backdrop on which to see the glory of God revealed. It just doesn’t seem such a terrible place, so why will Emma be so adverse to aborting her baby so that it won’t go there? That isn’t clear to me.

Ken critiqued John’s title idea, graciously, but that’s what Inkblots is about. Confusion about using gospel in the title of the book, with all the gospel of Judas, and other goofy new discoveries.

Ken Williams shared about his writing. He wrote this piece about sixteen years ago when he was off work for two months. Floaters, a murder mystery spoof in three acts. Full length stage play. Act 1, scene 1. 1930s, southern, pool side. Ken does a great southern accent. Kids of wealthy heiress sitting pool side awaiting the demise of their mother, and the windfall inheritance they anticipate.  I find it intriguing how Ken adds considerable director’s narrative in between the dialog of the play. I’ve never tried writing a play, and wonder if this is customary for the director’s script. Shakespeare didn’t add director’s narrative, though he does imbed hints in the dialog itself. Maybe modern plays are like this. His reading of it is energetic, and so that I can see the action happening. We have often discussed this at Inkblots, but the issue of swearing comes to the table again. We talked about Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christy and crime fiction a bit.

I read from chapter 6 of WEAPONS OF VENGEANCE, or MEAD HALL VENGEANCE, or whatever (still working on that title thing).