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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write. Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground. Kiya's gift. I love it!
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Kathleen-613's creation for my blog

"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
CHARLIE CHAPLIN


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Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

David Whyte


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This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts.

October 24, 2016 at 5:57pm
October 24, 2016 at 5:57pm
#895473
Prompt: Julian Barnes writes in his book England, England, “Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”
Do you believe strong early memories offer clues to what people can become later in their lives? And how do you think this idea will play out in your characters’ actions?


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Since our brains are endless depositories and filters for anything important, any information that goes into them is there for safekeeping. For that reason, strong early memories impact people’s actions later in life.

Sometimes we are afraid to do something or we shy away from certain people without specifically knowing why. More often than not, this may have something to do with an earlier experience. For the same reason, to treat phobias, therapists urge people to face their fears and put themselves in the situation that they have a phobia for. The idea is to place a more positive memory on top of the negative one to limit or eradicate its force.

Taking off from this idea, imagine how much an earlier childhood experience will have a bearing on the characters we create. It is a good idea to think about a character’s powerful early memories chronologically or topically and review them. A hero or heroine will be afraid of commitment, for example, if couples fighting is all they have seen earlier in life. Neither would a 007 character become a 007 character if he were told constantly in his childhood that he shouldn’t jump into things for he'd get badly hurt. Yet, I can imagine a truly wimpy character, after finding the right circumstance and motivation, becoming a 007 character and this psychological transformation passing through my pen or achieved on my keyboard. Surely, I’d have to explain that character’s backstory to show his or her character arc.

Talking of the quote in the prompt, Julian Barnes is a well-read teacher and one of my favorite authors, especially after I’ve read his book Through the Window, a compilation of essays, in which he writes mostly about books and their import to culture. He is mostly noted and has won awards for his novels, however. Reading Julian Barnes makes me think more deeply than I usually do.

Here is a link to a Julian-Barnes interview in the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction page, inside the Winter 2000 edition. It offers a portion of his ideas on literature and writing.

{link: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/562/the-art-of-fiction-no-165-julian-ba...}


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