Bumping Into the Characters

I saved this to share with you:

By MARK HELPRIN in THE NEW YORK TIME
Published: October 3, 2012

“The  great essayist Roger Rosenblatt once generously reminded me that “good writers have good accidents.” Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that along with will conspires to put words on the page. The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable. Fortunately, the world is rich in the interweaving of the two, which can be found almost everywhere, and not least where one lives.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/garden/bumping-into-the-characters.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

 Recently I’ve been looking for signs for a new script I’m writing:  as in mystical/ magical/ unrealistic signs. 

Then in the  news there were several articles about solar flares.  I’m not sure what the ingredients of this happy acccident were, but the idea of solar flares triggered all kinds of brain synapses about electrical accidents.

 The article is a great read, and the last lines will stay with me for a long time:

 “Houses, rooms, our designs of all sorts and all material things will eventually vanish. Because they cannot last, their value is in the present, in memories that die with us, in things that come unbidden to the eye and in the electric, immaterial, miraculous spark that occurs when by accident and design they jump the gap and, like life itself, are propagated into something else, becoming for a moment pure spirit, thus to become everlasting.”

  

One thought on “Bumping Into the Characters

  1. This is great information, Ravenchild. Great article attached. Good to remember to pay attention. I’ve never had anything fall on my head…or maybe I have… What I dislike sometimes is to be creating a story that turns out true in some small sense… Like the time I had to perform a scene for an acting class where I walked into a funeral home to view a body in a casket. When I looked into the casket, I saw my grandfather, had a real moment. The teacher asked me what I saw and how it made me feel and was real exicted about how real I played the moment. My grandfather died shortly after – maybe a week after my impromptu scenework in my extra credit acting class…and when I looked in his casket, he looked exactly like I saw him in my class…

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