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Sally's avatar

Wow! Bare Bones was your first short story? I'm speechless. Otherwise, I'm so interested in your experience of shifting into enjoying short written forms once you were in Japan. I may be stretching a point to say this, but I have always thought that some forms of writing are as embedded in the rhythms of everyday life as color is the play of light. If this is so, I'm not surprised that with your sensitivity to your surroundings, and with the culture as a whole created by boundaries of sensitivity to nature, I'm not surprised that short forms would emerge to be identities whose tangible presence finds you. A "win-win" as they say!

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Leanne Ogasawara's avatar

It was my first short story that didn’t come from my novel manuscript. I also love what you said about how place in forms or judgments and it’s definitely true in this case!

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Greg Pringle's avatar

Not a writer myself but....

When I was studying Chinese, it must have been about 20 years ago, a private tutor set me an essay topic about "snow". Well, I wrote a short piece about depressing weather conditions (I can't really remember what I wrote), and right at the end of the story I wrote that it snowed. The point was that snow was a welcome relief from what went before.

I was told I hadn't written on the topic and I should have looked in one of those books that give you all kinds of Chinese idioms and expressions describing snow.

Not quite the same as writing a short story -- the point was to improve my Chinese -- but I was quite taken aback by the requirement to write a piece about "snow", just "snow".

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Leanne Ogasawara's avatar

Well obviously your essay would’ve been a complete disaster in Japanese since you had missed all of the important 季語 which would have been the point! But on the other hand it sounds like it had a lot of creativity and feeling and that was probably a good practice and using words about emotions? Writing prompts are always interesting!

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Greg Pringle's avatar

Oh, the 季語. Another culture, another straitjacket....

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Leanne Ogasawara's avatar

Lol!!

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Greg Pringle's avatar

Actually, though, I'm not sure I used words about emotions. I think I just described the feeling of the streets. You know, grey skies and stuff like that. But I don't actually remember and I think I threw it out. It wasn't exactly a masterpiece. Still, I thought that ending the essay with snow was a nice touch, which I probably unconsciously stole from somewhere else. (Who knows?)

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