preamble to the crime

this weekend i'm volunteering as a gopher (as in "andrew, go for a...") for SPU's MFA in creative writing. during that time i'll shake hands with budding writers and published authors, men and women who know how to spin a good yarn. i'm a little nervous that someone might ask, "and what about you, andrew, what do you write?"

"oh, i blog." it doesn't sound so glamorous, perhaps even a bit foolish.

therefore, i've decided to use this post the post that follows this preamble as a shield against potential writerly skepticism. i'm going to attempt something beyond my means, a device that leaps several yards beyond the imaginative writing course of my college days. yes, i'm going to pretend to be a writer.

you see, writers make a living by being strange. fiction writers invent surreal plots that push around characters so wild and varied that they seem almost life-like. poets fall to their knees in a wet pile of brush, scrounge about for an ordinary looking rock, and then breathe fire into the carbonate core of that common stone, eliciting truths from the ordinary. but they get weirder still. writers are masters of the out-of-body experience. they jump from the self to the other, and leave little trace of what was.

in she's come undone, for example, wally lamb, a rather trim fellow in his fifties, somehow constructs a first-person bildungsroman of a troubled obese girl. there is no trace of testosterone in this book. indeed, lamb's protagonist annoyed me with her ceaseless obsessing and poor decision-making (which is one of the reasons for my rather medium rating of 09 for this novel), but it all struck me as real.

and that is the magic of gifted writers, a magic that i have yet to attempt. so, if the writing muses smile upon my little blog, i will use a future post to brave the dark forest of narration and step boldly out from my own experience. wish me luck!

a clarification about the future post
the future post

andrew david. "the wicked endophenotyper smiles happily at his diabolical research plan." vapshcs, seattle, wa.