Hatrack River Writers Workshop: letter in a novel from one char to another

This is topic letter in a novel from one char to another in forum Fragments and Feedback for Short Works at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by msspeck (Member # 1942) on :

hi, everyone-- I tend to write bizarre stuff. is this too over-the top>

thanks-- excerpt from Liberty Isabel Snow's letter to Dr. Thunderhead, American Indian radical professor, recently imprisoned for a series of demonstrations--ie. handing out tollhouse cookies instead of change at tollbooths, etc.

At this point, it may be dawning on you, Dr. Thunderhead, as you squint at my spidery handwriting on violet stationery: "Woman, you are rehashing all of my philosophies from my book "Oil or Apples, Adam's Sin Remains the Same." Here's my favorite quote from that book, Doctor-- "many people say why use "commonsense" at all when if you just click onto Explorer,hop onto Google (as one used to hop onto a trolley) and search the data base of the entire planet, you can gather all the commonsense you need and never have to bother to apply it!"

Dr Thunderhead, I ask you-- what's a world to do, when so many of its leaders-- globally-- are like beetles overturned on their backs-- paralyzed because they don't have have a word in their vocabulary for commonsense?"

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

First off, which of them has been imprisoned for handing out tollhouse cookies (by the way, in the situation described, that isn't a 'demonstration', it's a simple violation of the law--unless you mean simply selling the cookies for change, in which case it would probably be a lesser violation of the law...perhaps only a violation of transit system policy, a civil matter)?

Secondly, how can anything written by a character that is supposed to be something of a crazy person be "over the top" for the purposes of revealing character? The question would appear to have no meaning, no context. We have no way of knowing how crazy or not crazy LIS is except by reading the letter. If you want us to judge whether the letter is crazier than something she would write...we have no other basis for judgement.

The letter shows her to be as crazy as someone that would write this letter, no more and no less. Since all we know about her is that she's the character that has putatively written the letter...this letter is exactly what we would expect from the kind of person that we would expect to write this letter.

Posted by Gen (Member # 1868) on :

Interesting.

I'm reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin asks Hobbes about his science fiction story. (C: "Is it too far-fetched?" H: "Not enough, really...")

From reading it I didn't get the sense of bizarre in a modern-day context. In a world where people get funding for wrapping bridges in cloth, I didn't find this demonstration or this letter to be particularly bizarre. I didn't feel like I *got* the difference between her writing and your writing from this piece. There was no striking tone of her own in the letter fragment, and it seemed perhaps more self-concious than one might expect. Perhaps the old-fashioned tone you seem to be aiming for would, in context, push this towards bizarre.

Perhaps you're aiming for structural bizzarity (word?) by putting this into letters or a mixed epistolary/narrative structure. It's been done, but it's less often seen, if that was what you were referring to...