Yes, yes, I know it is supposed to be Ray Bradbury, not berry. But now that the master has gone, I don’t want to think of him as bury which is too grave a term. He was a master of metaphor and rhythm and image in writing. His work is much more berry-flavored, and if you really intensively read a novel like Dandelion Wine, you can very easily get drunk on the richly fermented contents of his beautiful writing.
Mental Pie
I’d like to offer you a piece of my mind,
Though not a lecture, rant, or complaint,
But rather a piece of mental pie.
Its taste will be very sweet, you will find,
As I’m constantly thinking in ink and paint,
That gives you wings and allows you to fly.
You see, I think the literary mind does not have to sink to mundane and dark and dreary thoughts and ideas to accomplish lofty goals. Often it is the special dollop of sugary metaphorical conceit that makes a Ray Bradbury or Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut to soar through the astral plane of ideas. I know that’s cartoony thinking, and somewhat loony besides, but I am often frustrated when it seems that the only “realism” modern readers and audiences accept is what is gritty and bloody and depressingly painful. Oh, I get it. Douglas nearly dies in the course of Dandelion Wine. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Billy Pilgrim all suffer as much as we laugh in order to make their points in the novels they inhabit. But the misfortune makes the moment of taking flight that much sweeter. And it is in the language. The loving description of everyday things and everyday events that become extraordinary through extra-close examination. Sometimes silliness and humor and logical reason are not enough, and we have to speak in poetry. We put in metaphors as peaches and plums. Sensory details are raspberries and strawberries. Sing-song rhythms and elegant pacing makes the batter whole and delicious. And I know this whole post makes no earthly sense. But sometimes you write for earthly reasons… and sometimes you try to reach heaven. That is what Ray Bradberry Pie is made of.
Catch a Falling Star 
Finding My Voice
As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies. The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene. But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.
Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.
In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character. Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head. Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland. Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily. And so, on it goes through a multitude of different heads, some heroic, some wise, some idiotic, and some mildly insane. Because it is a comedy about orphans freezing to death, some of the focus characters are even thinking at the reader through frozen brains.
The ponies decide to visit Minnie Mouse’s recycled Barbie Dreamhouse where Olaf the Snowman is the acting butler.
That kind of fractured character focus threatens to turn me schizophrenic. I enjoy thinking like varied characters and changing it up, but the more I write, the more the characters become like me, and the more I become them. How exactly do you manage a humorous narrative voice when you are constantly becoming someone else and morphing the way you talk to fit different people? Especially when some of your characters are stupid people with limited vocabularies and limited understanding?
The ponies are invited to live upstairs with the evil rabbit, Pokemon, and Minions.
I did an entire novel, Superchicken, in third person viewpoint with one focus character, Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken himself. That is considerably less schizophrenic than the other book. But it is still telling a story in my voice with my penchant for big words, metaphors, and exaggerations.
The novel I am working on in rough draft manuscript form right now, The Baby Werewolf, is done entirely in first person point of view. That is even more of an exercise of losing yourself inside the head of a character who is not you. One of the first person narrators is a girl, and one is a werewolf. So, I have really had to stretch my writing ability to make myself into someone else multiple times.
I assure you, I am working hard to find a proper voice with which to share my personal wit and wisdom with the world. But if the men in white coats come to lock me away in a loony bin somewhere, it won’t be because I am playing a lot with My Little Ponies.
Leave a comment
Filed under commentary, goofiness, humor, insight, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor
Tagged as art, books, My Little Pony, News, Snow Babies, technology