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| This page features new writing unavailable elsewhere. January 2009 Christopher has recently begun to explore audio-visual media. While work on THE PLAGIARIST: THE MOVIE continues, he has completed an audio recording of the short story 'House of Fit' which appears in Bad Houses. Right-click and save target to download and hear it as an MP3 (approx. 6MB) here.
January 2009 In the Summer of 2008, Christopher Nosnibor completed a novella-length manuscript composed in its entirety using simultaneous narrative. Entitled From Destinations Set, it follows a brief period in the lives of Tim and Anthony, who are very different people, leading very different lives, following different careers in different cities. Tim is a conformist: office job, moderately successful, and teetering on the brink of a premature midlife crisis. Anthony is a rebellious non-conformist: a writer who sneers at the hum-drum and derides ‘corporate sell-outs.’ But are they really so very different? Tim is tortured by the tedium of his job and struggling with his work / life balance. The combined pressures of his circumstances and his mindset are contriving to push him close to losing the plot. The fact that he keeps finding himself in strange places and situations, with no recollection of how he got there only exacerbates his fear that he’s going mental. Anthony has a book to write, and a deadline. He has plenty of ideas, but is having difficulty expressing them. As time begins to run short, he hits the bottle and embarks on a frenzy of revision, through which author and narrative become difficult to separate from one another. The two narratives of From Destinations Set trace these characters’ activities as they occur in parallel – not only in terms of time, but also literally, with the page divided into two columns with one story in the left, the other in the right. As events and personalities unravel in each of the two separate stories, the similarities, rather than the differences, become apparent. But more than this, as the two plots develop, questions are raised as to precisely who’s writing the script: is Tim’s dislocation symptomatic of his breakdown, or is there some connection between him and Anthony? These questions are not intended to be answered: From Destinations Set does not seek narrative closure, and is not primarily a plot-driven work. Instead, the narrative, in which time-shifts and repetition are frequent, is forged from the fabric of everyday life, exposing the idea of ‘character’ and ‘plot’ as social and literary constructs and posing questions to which the reader must find their own answers. While the manuscript gets touted round a few publishers, here’s a taster of the book as a .PDF. (Anyone interested in helping to get the full text to the masses should get in touch via the Contact Us page of this website.)
January 2008 Christopher Nosnibor, On Dialogue and Simultaneity. Preface to a new short story (link at the end of the essay).
For some years now I’ve been interested in creating credible dialogue, and have made it something of a mission of mine to explore ways of presenting that dialogue that reflect ‘real life’ (whatever that may be).
To create dialogue that I consider credible, I stopped writing my own and started stealing other people’s. I have a good memory, and reasonably good hearing, which means I can walk down the street, capture dialogue, and write it down when I arrive at a place where it’s convenient to transcribe it. Pubs and coffee houses, and also trains are great for sourcing dialogue, too, and it’s more socially acceptable to sit and scribble away in the corner of such an establishment than other locations. As I spend a lot of time in all three, I’m able to mine the air for conversations pretty rigorously.
What’s amusing to find is the way readers respond to my ‘real’ dialogue. Before the story ‘Scum’ came out in Bad Houses, I put it up on Urbis to gauge the reaction. It was mixed, as I’d expected, with a few comments on long and lumpy sentences (something I’ve taken years to perfect), and a few complaints that it was a lot of reading for not much of a story (again, life doesn’t have a definite ‘plot’ so why should a ‘story’ if it’s intended to be a slice of life, as ‘Scum’ is?) but what tickled me most were the comments relating to the dialogue, particularly the following passage:
Back in present time, another mother, this time dragging a toddler by her side as she waddles to and fro, her flip-flops flapping against the yellowing soles of her feet, crosses my line of vision.
“Nathan! Shut up, or I’m going to smack you so hard….” She bawls at the child who is in turn bawling, its face red and chocolate-smeared, its fists clenched and also covered with the same sticky brown gunk that is slaumed not just on its face but also its clothes. The threat just brings more intense, raw-throated fraught wailing and a new intensity of combined anger and anguish to the flow of tears and snot, the reward for which is a sharp blow to the buttocks, with the inverse of the desired effect. “I fuckin’ warned you!” (Bad Houses, p. 88)
‘No-one would say that,’ was one comment. And apparently no-one would dare smack a child, especially in public. Which is funny, because much of ‘Scum’ isn’t fiction in the conventional sense. No, I didn’t encounter all of the people described on a single journey: it’s a composite. But all of the events described did take place, more or less as detailed. Which I suppose just goes to show that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
Of course, while I strive to use ‘real’ dialogue as often as possible, it’s not always practical to present dialogue ‘realistically,’ because inevitably, a degree of readability is sacrificed. By readability, I man what readers have come to expect from written narrative, in which the established format is one character speaks, then another, working down the page. But people don’t speak like that. They interrupt one another, speak over one another, and they don’t speak in perfect sentences. Listen carefully: when people speak, naturally, they make no sense at least half the time.
Out of this have come a number of pieces, one of which I noted the dialogue for while sitting in a pub one evening while my friend was at the bar getting the beers in. As such, it took no time to write, but rather longer to sort the formatting when it came to transcribing the vignette. I wanted to convey not just real-time, simultaneous dialogue, but also the idea of the observer’s internal dialogue that runs concurrent with this. Written about eight months ago, this untitled piece was submitted and accepted for publication by a little underground magazine that sadly folded before making it to print. It’s been lurking on my hard-drive ever since, and rather than spend time trying to convince another magazine that they want it and that the formatting is not negotiable, I thought I’d stick it up here.
This essay first appeared as a MySpace blog entitled 'Four Narratives for the Price of One: On Dialogue and Simultaneity' on January 14, 2008.
January 1, 2008 Kicking off 2008, a new short, 'The Fear.' It doesn't have a beginning, middle or end in the most obvious sense, and this piece may be rewritten and / or incorporated into a larger piece at some point in the future. However, for now, it's hot off the press, unavailable elsewhere, and stands on its own as a brief tale of anxiety and anonymity.
December 2007 First up, a short story entitled 'His 'n' Hers' which uses a dual narrative technique. "I've long been interested in simultaneity, how to convey things that happen at the same time in text. Burroughs' use of the cut-up technique fascinates me, and he stated that the cut-up addressed this issue. But his points about how 'life is a cut-up' and about how someone reading, say, a newspaper, while reading down the columns is subconscuiously aware of the words on either side, that is to say, is aware of the 'narrative' that runs cross-column. I thought that this offered a valuable alternative means of presenting simultaneous dialogue. I've struggled to get any of the multiple narrative pieces I've written published to date, usually because of issues with the formatting, and I've been unable to post them on any blogs becasue, again, of the limitations of the formating options available." More content to follow, naturally. All in due course: these things take time... | |
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