What the? Where Did the Day Go?

No real idea how I spent the day. Puttering is a great word that I use all too often. I cleaned up a few things here and there, but nothing meaningful. My apartment is still largely a mess of boxes intermixed with piles of clean, unfolded laundry.

I watched Panic Room earlier. Good. Not great, not fascinating, but good. I’ve always liked Forrest Whittaker for some reason. From a writing standpoint, the crucible is key here. Given the tidbits I’ve heard from fiction writers, you need to have a metaphoric crucible – some inescapable series of events that pit conflicting personas against each other. Events build and build until there is some ultimate action/reaction

Jay Parini was a visiting writer at OSU a few years back, and I remember a quotation that some students from his workshop passed on. Something about people talking, and how that’s always just boring as hell. No one wants to read about talking. Parini’s take was something like If you have two characters talking on a train, there had better be a bomb in the suitcase.

The crucible. Central to all fiction.