#like oscar wilde was asked why he didn't write a longer book

[unravelingwires]

Orts

One of my recent projects has involved quote gathering. It’s based on an assignment from my creative writing class intended to make us think about turns of phrase in our free time: we were supposed to gather quotes from our everyday lives and read them aloud in class. After the class ended, I started writing quotes from the books I read on sticky notes and putting them up on my room walls.

Over Thanksgiving break, I gained six new quotes. I’m torn between two for my favorites. My first is a Brennan Lee Mulligan quote from The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One: “Many who have destiny curse it, but what a burden to choose any path under the sun.” My second is from Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music: “It was sad music. But it waved the sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could but you were still alive.” 

I have an old love for turns of phrase so sharp my fingers bleed. It feels a little bit like blasphemy to steal sentences from their home, rob them of their context, and dangle what’s left from the walls of my room. I can’t help it, though. The brilliance of wrapping yourself in the wisdom of the world is too good to pass up. 

[hergan416]

@user-needs-new-hyperfixation Thank you for the tag!

Also I'm glad you answered this at the same time you tagged me, because reading your responses literally helped me understand what the heck kind of media this didn't exclude.

Rare writer ask game: name three pieces of media that are not novels/short stories or movies/TV that were formative for you, and tag three people.

Like you, I really don't consider this "formative" to my writing but to my sense of "self."

Anyway:

This is maybe a cheat? Because I still read it? But The Importance of Being Earnest. I really hope that a play is separate enough from TV/movies & novels/short stories to count for this because it really does seem adjacent, and like I'm being overly technical about it but ANYWAY. The unit on this play and on Oscar WIlde generally was like - I dunno. It was a lot of things to me.

So for one, The Importance of Being Earnest is absolutely hilarious, and I genuinely enjoyed reading it. For two, even though a lot of WIlde's statements about writing as a craft were made in relation to The Picture of Dorian Gray, our unit on this book also talked about his attitude in regards to literature and morality and art and aestheticism pretty extensively - I think because this specific literature teacher is awesome, but also because he was arrested during a showing of this play? But all of THAT was also formative. (I could also probably put Billy Joel's Only The Good Die Young here for the same reason - I tied the two together in my mind so if this play can't be it, then that can take over. But the play also was formative when I was trying to get myself back into reading stuff because I no longer read the kind of... "genre" stuff that I read as a kid/teen and I was trying to come up with something I'd actually want to read, and came back to Oscar Wilde like "hey you made me happy before... what's your other writing like?" I was not ... really. expecting. The Picture of Dorian Gray to be Like That the first time - what a tone shift! But that ALSO was formative much later and this is why that showed up for me when it did so.

Next I guess I'll just say "Green Day" - like all of Green Day. At least their discography up through 2009. Like - I already agreed with them, so I guess they didn't really change my mind or influence me much in that sense. But the Green Day obsession was certainly a personality trait for a while. And like - I still jam with King for A Day or Holiday or St. Jimmy or whatever. The characters on American Idiot absolutely made it into some of my fanfiction at the time. It was a major piece of my life.

And I'll end with Arkham Horror: The Board Game (1st/2nd edition) This game was something I was introduced to in college and I had never played anything like it. It is cooperative (games can be won by all the players at once!?! totally foreign to college-aged me) and long and complicated. It took several sessions of playing it before the owner of the game taught me how to set it up even. It's one of those. And without it, I don't think that I'd be who I am today. We also played D&D and Munchkin and Killer Bunnies and some zombie RPG where I played a prostitute and Catan and Axis and Allies and Starcraft The Boardgame... and so I probably would have ended up this brand of nerd either way. But this brand of nerd is horribly central to my world.

I work in a board game store. And this is the first job I've had that doesn't make me feel like killing myself. It's a lot of work, but at the end of the day I'm in the business of having fun. I get to sell people a good time. We're not so corporate that we have no lenience, but it's structured enough that I still thrive. The kind of people I met playing those games in college are why I shopped at this store and how I got this job the first time - and my personality is absolutely affected by this.

Uhhh ok yeah I talked a while here. Let's tag... @sakuplumeria @vitya-nikiforova and @dragontamer05?